I don’t know, we have such a long way to go with this team before we are even respectable that complaining about the Gallinari pick is somewhat senseless. We will probably have four more number ones in the fold before we have a winning record, (although I guess we traded one), so it’s not make or break.

If D’Antoni can achieve a change in the reputation of Crawford, Curry, and/or Randolph, enough to get them traded, they will definitely have my support 100%.

Let’s get this season started already….

It’s not relevant whether D. Nichols or Ewing Jr. turn into good pros. What is relevant is that Knick management chooses to give roster spots to Collins, Richardson, James, Rose, and Marbury– 5 players that have proven to be failures and/or have no future with the team.

The Knicks need to rebuild and it is done with holding onto young unknown entities over well-known flops.

The only potential for any excitement from this team is to play the kids and hope they do okay.

Watching another season of Randolph, Curry, and Crawford and the rest of the 2007-2008 Knicks jack up dumb shots and play no D is a waste of time. Nobody but the die hards on this site will be watching the same load of crappy players play another 82 games.

I personally would rather lose 50+ games with a team made up of Ewing Jr., Nichols, Jared Jordan, Taureen Green, Bobby Jones, Chandler, Gallinari, Robinson, and Lee than lose 50+ games with the current roster of proven losers.

I think Amare’s as much of a C as a lot of guys around the league and certainly a huey, so the Suns more or less had a C by that criteria. The Suns also managed 54 wins when Amare went down for a season, using mostly Boris Diaw at the 5. Their defense was only 16th in the league that season, but their offense was 2nd without much of anything resembling a C (Kurt Thomas for 53 games and of course 2 All-NBA players).
I’m just saying that I think the Knicks can be about average offensively with Lee (their huhe, or hopefully a muhe) and Randolph (if he can transform himself into a hume or mume) playing most of the frontcourt minutes, especially because Curry can be an effective high usage offensive center off the bench (TOs and all). Their defense will stink, but aside from transition opportunities (which the Knicks should get more of than they have been) I don’t know why the 2 are directly related (I mean 1 + 1 = wins vs. loses but you can be an above average defense and a below average offense, and in the East recently that’s usually enough to contend for the playoffs).

I think D’Antoni’s system has been overhyped and the talent he had underappreciated, but I am a believer in the motion offense. It’s just good basketball.

The offseason was ok I guess. The Balkman/Gallinari swap sent a potentially bad signal: overvaluing scoring/jump shooting and undervaluing defense/rebounding. However, there are definitely question marks about Balkman and we’ll have to see how Gallinari develops.
I hope that Walsh doesn’t give D’Antoni too much of a voice in personnel matters (you know, the whole specialization of labor thing), so that’s another bad sign.
Besides Duhon, another good sign is what didn’t happen: impatient Isiah-like moves. I mean it’s not like a GM has to bat 100% to build a contender, they just have to not be terrible.
Walsh’s absolute refusal to cut anyone with a garaunteed contract is strange and really irks me. Seems very stubborn. His love affair with Al Harrington also irks me.

I too would have loved to see the Knicks go for a more defense, efficiency “Moneyball” approach. The 2 coaching candidates I liked were first Skiles and then Avery Johnson (although they’re stubborn, overbearing personalities might have been terrible fits for the Knicks). And I certainly think it will be impossible to seriously contend on a consistent basis down-the-road without a top 10, top 5 defense.
From a team building perspective, the reason I liked the D’Antoni signing is that most of the Knicks’ (overpaid, “untradeable”) talent lies on the offensive side of the ball. By focusing on offense, they’re going to raise the trade values of everyone in the rotation. As long as Walshtoni doesn’t buy the hype, this should allow them to infuse talent relatively quickly. And the 2010 cap space can be spent on a few Childress, JR Smith, Carl Landry type bargain FAs (examples from 2008) if LeBron/Bosh/Wade don’t bite.
Dolan might also have his heart set on being the east coast Suns… remember that everyone was saying that Isiah was trying to do so (even him, wasn’t he?) when he was more trying to be a deadball 90s offense without the defense to complement it. Wonder if Isiah wasn’t paying lipservice to the notion because it’s what Dolan wanted.

RE Centers – The Knicks were 10th in offensive rebounding, thanks mostly to Lee and Randolph, but only 21st in the league in defensive rebounding. I think that is an issue. I don’t know who the centers are in the league, and who are the power forwards. I don’t really understand why Garnett for instance is a Power Forward and Perkins is a Center. Why Oberto is a center and Duncan is a PF. Why Okur is C and Boozer a PF, when Okur is the one shooting threes. Is Gasol not a center? Really? Bynum is the prototype, but I think Gasol fits the mold as well. Most of the top offensive teams had an effective high usage big man. Detroit, New Orleans, and Golden State are the exceptions. Chandler led the league in offensive rebounds. Biedrins was 8th. And they both converted what opportunities they took extremely efficiently. Detroit had the sixth best offense despite being 15th in efg and 13th in ft/fg. The strength of their offense was low turnovers (t-3rd) and offensive rebounding (6th), which definitely wasn’t coming from the perimeter.

My point is that I think that Walshtoni’s approach of acquiring talent that “fits” the 7SOL system is a bit misplaced. So far, just with small moves, with Balkman, Gallinari, Roberson, PEJ, etc there is a definite trend and I don’t like it. The Duhon acquisition I do like and cuts against the grain, but also confirms a perimeter orientation.

I generally don’t think systems matter as much as people think. Talent is what really matters. You could have had a top five offense with Marion, Stoudemire, Nash, and Barbosa etc running any system. People forget this, but three years before arriving in Phoenix, Nash was the point guard on the most efficient offense of all time. The Mavericks were the best offense in the league three years in a row with him a the helm. Nash has played on offenses ranked so in the past eight years, 4 1 1 1 1 2 1 2.

Personally, at this point I would trade Gallinari for Chuck Hayes or Carl Landry right now in a heartbeat. Not that the Rockets would do that trade. What can I say? I grew up in the nineties, watching the greatest defenses of all time dominate in the Garden. To me, trying to pull of the 7SOL offense when you dont have any Hueys (high usage high efficieny players), you have only one Louiey (Low usage high efficiency player), and you have a boatload of, I don’t know, Hules (high usage low efficiency player) well it’s even stranger than the acronyms I am trying to coin.

Scoring is overvalued in this league. That has the been the problem with the Knicks for the past five years. We have overvalued High Usage Low Efficiency Scorers. I think the Knicks need to go in the opposite direction. I want them to exploit scoring bias by collecting low priced, low usage talent that we can assemble around Lebron if and when he arrives. That has been my position pretty consistently.

The only thing i can see us doing for the next three years is to work to try to create a team similar to the one Philly assembled around Iverson. And then add a real superstar. You can win that way. And winning is what counts. Anyway….

I think that Danilo has the POTENTIAL to be high-volume/high-efficiency, and plan to post some stats later this week for Euroleague-to-NBA players to put him in context.
His efficiency numbers aren’t bad (55.7% TS% in Euroleague), and you have to remember that he was basically put in a Kevin Durant situation in the Euroleague: a 19 year old rookie asked to lead a bad team. One thing that really sticks out about him is his ability to get to the line. Scoring is about the only area where he has the chance to develop into a special player, of course, and his rebound and block numbers are pretty weak even for a 3. I think the Kukoc comparisons are serious overkill, but he should be a good playmaker and passer for a forward.
Anyway, I want to look at the numbers a little closer and post my thoughts later. I did some similar research around the time of the draft, focusing a lot on Pau as I remember since he was another young star. Some players that young improve their outside shooting rapidly while others never improve, I suppose the answer to why is more evident in the tape than the stats (although lower level stats would probably help).
I don’t see much about Danilo that screams PF, so maybe he is a tweener, but we’ll see how he develops I guess.

Owen,

Agree with most of what you said about the draft, except that I wouldn’t have really cared about a gapping hole. I would have taken whoever I thought was the best prospect (and obviously would have had a lot more information to make that decision were I the Knicks’ GM). I think Dorsey could play for D’Antoni and probably Speights too. If you’re a good player–and not overweight/slow as molasses–I think you should be able to play in the wide open offense, although I suppose it suites some players more than others.

I don’t know if quick shots necessarily help an offense, but I’m a big fan of motion. The Suns were a 60 win team without a center because they had 3 great players and some other good ones, but I think the Knicks can be decent without a center because they have decent players (very broadly speaking).
Defensively, they’re going to stink. But otherwise I don’t think they’ll really miss a legit center: Lee and Randolph (and maybe Chandler, if preseason’s an indication) rebound like most centers and if they’re scoring efficiently and Curry’s hanging around the edge of the rotation the Knicks could be ok if they really play like a team on offense (or we can celebrate a high lottery pick…).
I realize WOW placed a huge value on bigmen, which makes logical sense given their scarcity and potential contributions on both sides of the ball. But I’d be interested to hear more of your reasoning behind needing a center to be good. Most teams around the NBA are functioning with a PF or weak C at the 5. Of the top 10 offenses, only Orlando had a really strong “true” center (with Andrew Bynum missing half the season). The Warriors, Hornets, Celts, and Mavs have low-usage/high efficiency Cs, a lot like David Lee in that regard. Okur had the lowest eFG% of Utah’s starters, and Toronto played Bargnani and Nesterovic a combined 43 mpg for 70+ games each. Wallace/McDyess/Maxiell got the lions share of minutes at the 5 for Detroit.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not advocating a Randolph/Lee frontcourt as a long-term solution, or anything more than decent in the short-term.