(Sunday, April 14, 2019 3:04:03 PM)
Kevin Knox, Mitchell Robinson and Damyean Dotson are the only current Knicks who should definitely be on the roster next season, writes Steve Popper of Newsday. Knox showed enough promise at age 19 to hold onto, Robinson was a second-round surprise who became the league’s second-best shot blocker and Dotson is a part-time starter with […]
(Monday, April 15, 2019 12:51:07 AM)
John MacLeod, the winningest coach in Suns history, died Sunday, the team announced. MacLeod, 81, also coached the Mavericks and Knicks. In the college ranks, he was the head coach at both Oklahoma and Notre Dame.
[NYTimes] Sports of the Times: Mike Budenholzer Has Come a Long Way From Bucket of Blood Street (Sunday, April 14, 2019 9:30:05 PM)
The coach of the N.B.A.-best Bucks learned basketball from his father and Native Americans while growing up amid a melting pot in the Arizona high desert.
[NYTimes] N.B.A. Photographers ‘Do It for the Gram,’ Too (Monday, April 15, 2019 12:55:05 AM)
New technology and the rise of social media have changed what it means to take pictures of the N.B.A. One new requirement: making the athletes look good on Instagram.
(Sunday, April 14, 2019 8:40:48 PM)
If Kevin Durant becomes a Knick, rookie guard Allonzo Trier will have at least one teammate who will like him. Trier admitted last week he’s “absolutely’’ hoping the Knicks can land his mentor from Oklahoma City, where the Arizona product attended two years of high school. However, according to multiple sources connected to the Knicks,…
(Sunday, April 14, 2019 11:00:04 AM)
Winter is here. With Game of Thrones set to return Sunday for its eighth and final season, New York athletes gave their predictions and talked about theories for how the saga will end.
87 replies on “Knicks Morning News (2019.04.15)”
Ugh. Of course Frank Isola used Enes Kanter’s big game to troll the Knicks, stating, “the Knicks couldn’t get anything for Enes Kanter? The guy has 20 points and 18 rebounds in a playoff game.”
Knicks Film School rightly said: “Enes Kanter is on a huge contract, so to trade him, you need to trade him into space or take back expiring contracts
Counting stats in a playoff game don’t change the trade market two months ago.”
https://twitter.com/KnickFilmSchool/status/1117554148822671361
Worth noting:
Eastern Conference seeds:
1 – Bucks –> zero top 5 picks in their rotation
2 – Raptors –> zero top 5 picks in their rotation
3 – Sixers –> 2 top 5 picks (Simmons/Embiid)
4 – Celtics –> 4 top 5 picks in rotation (Kyrie, Brown, Tatum, Horford)
5 – Pacers –> 2 top 5 picks theoretically in rotation (Oladipo and Tyreke Evans)
6 – Nets –> 1 top 5 pick in rotation (Russell)
7 – Magic –> 2 top 5 picks in rotation (Isaac, Gordon)
8 – Pistons –> 1 top 5 pick in rotation (Blake)
Of all those top 5 picks, only the Sixers, Celtics, and Magic actually drafted those players.
Western conference:
1 – Golden State –> 1 top 5 pick (Durant)
2 – Denver –> zero top 5 picks
3 – Portland –> 1 top 5 pick (Kanter, *eyeroll*)
4 – Rockets –> 2 top 5 picks (Harden, CP3)
5 – Jazz –> 2 top 5 picks (Rubio, Favors)
6 – Thunder –> 1 top 5 pick (Westbrook)
7 – Spurs –> 1 top 5 pick (LMA)
8 – Clippers –> zero top 5 picks
Of all these top 5 picks playing in the Western conference playoffs, the only player that is playing for the team that drafted him is Westbrook. (Favors did come in the Deron Williams trade, who was a top 5 pick).
Just goes to show that tanking is not the only way to get premier players or to become a contender. Smart management, value-drafting, and pouncing on stars when they become available either through FA or trade is the way most of these teams were built.
No one has ever argued against taking every draft pick extremely seriously and doing everything you can to extract the most value from every single one. This is how you can potentially wind up with Giannis, Jokic, Kawhi, Butler, Curry, etc.
Ironically, it’s actually the tanking/rebuilding advocates who call for acquiring the highest number of draft picks you possibly can via taking on salary dumps, buying picks, and whatever else you can do. This increases the chance you wind up with one of these diamonds in the rough, as we just saw with the Knicks’ decision to essentially take on Kanter’s deal to acquire the pick used on Mitch.
Are we sure the Knicks took on Kanter’s salary to get a #2 pick and not to get rid of Carmelo and match salaries?
I think “tanking” is different from “smart management”.
What you’re talking about is smart management.
Tanking (selectively) might be part of smart management but you obviously don’t need a top 5 pick to become a serious contender –tanking itself seems not necessary or sufficient to build a contender.
I guess it’s kind of a semantic difference? Either way, the goal was to maximize the amount of draft picks coming back and they didn’t allow Kanter’s salary to get in the way of that. You’re not wrong that there are much better examples.
Again, have any tanking advocates ever said “I am very against smart management?” Of course if you make one of these diamond in the rough picks relatively late in the draft, that drastically changes your place on the win curve and very often it will make sense to try and accelerate your timetable. It only makes sense to do this after you make such a pick, though. If you start making win now moves before you’ve made such a pick, you’re guaranteeing that the only way you can reach contender status is by finding yourself a Giannis. I don’t need to tell you how unlikely that is, even if it’s possible. The only point tanking advocates makes is you’re much more likely to get a player of this caliber at the top of the draft.
Counting stats in a playoff game don’t change the trade market two months ago.
How much did the Knicks destroy Kanter’s trade value by how they played/didn’t play him?
Mike
Um, he didn’t have any trade value when they got him. He probably had a negative value, as they were forced to take him to match salaries in the Melo deal.
I think Isola catches too much flak in general (newsflash: there have been a lot of bad things to say about the Knicks over the past few decades), but that article is classic trolling and should be ignored. Kanter had a season and a half to build trade value with us. No one was giving up anything for him at his salary. No shit there were teams willing to take him on at the minimum.
Pretty close to zero. Kanter’s value (at that contract) was destroyed in the precise moment when Donovan uttered the “Can’t play Kanter” words. I have no doubt that if he wants to accept 4mln/year he’ll stick in the league for a while, but guys like him simply don’t have much to contribute when the other team targets him repeatedly.
@9 – Oof! I respectfully disagree… I obviously can’t objectively prove that Isola is generally inaccurate and/or a troll, but I think the Kanter tweet is very consistent with his overall pattern of reporting.
He definitely has a shtick, my only point is defaulting to “the Knicks are acting/acted stupid” has tended to make someone correct more often than not.
Tanking is purposely getting worse in the short term by trading away “current” value (productive veterans) for “future” value (draft picks). It makes perfect sense to tank when the window for your current team is closed because your veterans are getting old, they aren’t good enough to contend, AND and you don’t have cap space or assets to add what you need to get into contention now (the Grizzlies are an example of a team that should have tanked this year) .
The one and only thing I have objected to is insisting that every player be below a certain age and building almost exclusively via draft. Rebuilding via draft is going to take 6-7 years and could extend longer if you make a few mistakes. That’s not my idea of a good strategy even if it eventually works.
Veteran players that will be productive for the duration of their fair or bargain contract can help young players develop, can be used in trades later to bring in star players and also help attract star players in free agency and trades because no one wants to play on a terrible team of kids, sometimes not even the other young players (as we have seen).
None of that excludes accumulating draft picks and other young players. It just means keeping the door open to all the options available for getting better and accumulating value oriented assets of all types.
The Knicks have historically “executed” their strategies poorly by giving up more value than they received.
Isola and Bondy to a lesser extent hate NY management. IMO, that clouds their ability to think objectively on any issue concerning the Knicks. There are usually two sides to a story. They always seem to find the negative spin. That doesn’t make everything they say invalid. It just means if you want to know the WHOLE truth you better find the rare objective and balanced reporter or listen to the other side of the story from someone biased in the other direction (even if you don’t like their spin).
The answer to the question “when should we start making signings that put our team in a position to win the maximum number of games possible?” is “after you’ve drafted at least one but preferably multiple genuinely elite players.” More often than not, you won’t be able to do the latter without some form of tanking. If you are, great! It’s all a matter of likelihood. To be honest this is pretty simple stuff and I’m not sure what’s being missed.
It’s occurred to me that if you believe in synchronicity, we have a better chance of landing Zion than Dolan’s razor would seem to indicate.
12 months ago, the Giants and Jets both landed a generational talent and a potential franchise QB in the draft. And I just learned that last week the Devils and Rangers won the 1st and 2nd picks (respectively) in the NHL draft lottery in a year that has two franchise players. It seems to be the NHL’s equivalent of the Oden-Durant draft. The Devils won with an 11.5% chance, and the Rangers had a 7.5% chance.
That’s a lot of good luck going around these parts. Let’s hope it continues!
Ok. Rondo was a 21 year old PG / defensive ace with a BPM of 0.4 and a VORP of 1.1. Our version of that is Frank, whose BPM is -5.7 and has a VORP of -0.8.
If you think it’s unfair to make an apples to apples comp with Frank, fine. Kevin Knox’ status as a role player of equal caliber to Rondo doesn’t look good with his -6.0 BPM. Trier weighs in with a BPM of -4.2. Dennis Smith has the best numbers and he’s still got a BPM of -2.7, which doesn’t compare well to Rondo’s 0.4, either.
In addition to Rondo and Perkins, the Celtics also had Tony Allen (1.1 BPM, 0.6 VORP). They had three championship caliber role players on their roster to support three hall of fame basketball players. The scrubs and vet minimum guys came after that.
I love me some Mitch but let’s not put him in the hall of fame just yet. And frankly I don’t know if Kyrie is that caliber, either. He’s only a stud on one end of the court.
So there’s two parts of this
that I take great exception to.
1. The trio of Durant/Kyrie/Mitch is considerably beneath both LeBron/Wade/Bosh and Pierce/Garnett/Allen
2. The supporting pieces we have in place (Knox, Frank, Smith, Trier, Dotson, Noah Vonleh, whoever we sign with the room, our pick if it isn’t Zion) are actually scrubs. Rajon Rondo, Tony Allen, Kendrick Perkins, Mike Miller, Shane Battier, Mario Chalmers, and old Ray Allen were all legitimate championship caliber role players.
@16 – I like your positivity. But then why did we lose the ’94 Finals and why did the baseball strike hit with the Yankees in first place if the Rangers had just won the Stanley Cup? 🙂
Because Hakeem Olajuwon don’t give AF about synchronicity.
Is Durant, Kyrie and Mitch better than Lebron, Kyrie and Love? Is Durant, Kyrie, Mitch and Zion better than Lebron, Kyrie and Love?
You seem to forget that Kyrie has won a championship all ready. Yes, it was with Lebron and maybe he is just one side of the ball dominant, but Kyrie has more than proved his worth in the playoffs and in the Finals against the greatest single season team ever.
Durant is better than Love, Kyrie IS Kyrie, and Mitch is better than anyone.
The Nets were arguably in the worst position I have ever seen any NBA team be in and are rebuilding way faster than the Knicks WITHOUT lottery picks.
They are doing it by finding undervalued players further down in the draft, by signing veterans like Ed Davis for 4.4m even though he’s older (unbelievable bargain), by trading a good veteran (Lopez) and pick for a bad contract and young player they thought they could develop with patience (Russell), by winning trades for solid veterans, by taking on bad contracts for GOOD players plus a pick for a duration that won’t interrupt the long term plans, by developing reclamation projects, and by using every other conceivable thing they can come up with to both get BETTER and improve their long term position.
They will also come into the off season with cap space.
Imagine where they would be if they also had all their 1st round picks like we did.
You don’t have to accumulate stars via draft first. That WILL work eventually but it will take a very long time. You can also do what the Nets did and then use those assets and cap space to attract or roll up into the stars.
IMO, the ideal is to do both.
The one thing any strategy requires is competence. The Net have that.
Do you really think this slipped my mind? Or do you think it’s more likely I’m pointing out how important particulars of our situation don’t line up well with the situations you guys think we’ll be able to duplicate?
They got a full season of peak JR Smith (1.3 BPM in regular season, 4.3 in the playoffs!) and had Tristan Thompson (1.5 and 2.6) between the stars and scrubs.
Don’t kid yourselves. Three stars and scrubs isn’t a real thing that works. It’s always 3 stars, 2-3 vital role players, then scrubs. If you cut out those guys in the middle (like Philly is doing), you’re fucked*.
* fucked, in this sense, means capped out as a quasi-contender. If you’re happy with a second round playoff team, then maybe that approach is for you.
I’ll say it again; Marks has undeniably done a good job given the situation handed to him, but the Nets position is not all that desirable when viewed in a vacuum.
They had a 41 win pythagorean record this year and unless they want to renounce DAR’s cap hold they don’t have a single 7-9 year max slot (if they denounce everyone except DAR they’ll have around $27M). If they renounce DAR then sure, they have a max slot and a nice chunk of change, but they also likely won’t have DAR/Davis so they’ll be starting from a significantly worse core than 41 wins. They have the 17th and 27th picks in this draft, so it’s not very likely they’ll get a huge boost there.
Marks did a fantastic job putting together an entertaining team from what was likely the worst situation any GM has ever taken over, but unless the above scenario sounds desirable to you there’s not much to glean from it.
@2 there’s a degree of confirmation bias here. It’s true that a lot of these teams don’t have top 5 picks. But it’s also true that a lot of them are built through the draft. If the question is ‘which of these teams is primarily centred around guys they drafted’ then the picture is different.
No one is arguing you can’t draft franchise guys later in the draft, but the chances of doing so are much smaller. Every year people point out the Jokic or Green ‘draft misses’ after the fact but the reality is that a 17 pick turns into a bust much more than it becomes Giannis. The argument for tanking – as part of a strategy at the right point of the curve – is that the odds of drafting great players are way higher at the top. One-off greats from lower spots don’t disprove that.
Where it really matters is at the margin – if you’re already bad, better to be really bad. Our sequence of 8-picks when we were out-tanked by others at the end of the season is the proof point.
Like others say, obviously try and draft well at all times. But sometimes drafting high helps that enormously.
Also – Milwaukee whiffed on a 2-pick in the recent past. It’s not like they weren’t bad before they were good, ya know? Golden state had two 7-picks and a 6-pick within three years. This to me just further confirms that a) drafting well is key to winning, b) drafting well is pretty luck-based and c) this is truer the further down the draft you go. That’s not a clear-cut argument against tanking as part of a.m broader plan.
@22 – He was no Billy King, but Jax (and Mills with the THJ signing) put us pretty far up shit’s creek too.
This is extremely obvious and true but, just warning you, will not be responded to kindly by the person to whom you directed it.
Pointing at Philly as an example of why tanking doesn’t work ignores that they fired the guy doing the tanking and then did a bunch of dumb shit.
+1
Putting aside the specific case of Fultz, I think there’s no chance Hinkie would’ve traded such tremendous perceived value to move up two slots in a draft where there wasn’t a clear consensus on the #1 pick (and to the extent there was, it wasn’t supported by the numbers).
the anti-tanking narrative is fucking idiotic, we don’t need to do this another 100 times
also it’s perpetuated by the same cast of characters who have been habitually wrong about the Knicks for about ten years now
Whoa! Hold on, DRed. I didn’t do that.
I’m only talking about how after Simmons and Embiid developed into studs, they chose to go all in on stars and scrubs instead of building quality depth to support the guys Hinkie handed them. That’s it. Please don’t twist it into something that no one said.
Jesus, here comes the cavalry.
It’s the same shit with you guys.
A bunch of people are saying “X, Y, and Z.”
Someone comes on and says “I can’t believe you said A, B, and C”. Meanwhile, literally no one said “A” “B” or “C”.
And then the Jowles comes on to work through his personal issues by insulting other posters and bragging about how much smarter he is than everyone. And all the acolytes like tnfh jump in with their +1s. All while the rest of us just roll our eyes and wonder why otherwise intelligent posters seem to have such terrible reading comprehension.
I mean, yes, it is the same shit.
What’s crazy to me is how few of those players actually end up playing for the team that drafted them when they are actually starting to win.
Even Lebron didn’t win in Cleveland until he came back of his own accord in free agency.
Basically what it seems like is that you have to be a pretty incompetent organization to be put in a position where you’re trying to tank. Good organizations don’t put themselves in that position because they’re too good to be really bad, with the major exception in the last 20 years being the Tim Duncan draft after David Robinson got hurt.
Hubert, DRed wasn’t responding to you specifically. Pointing to Philly as a cautionary tale is very common here (the MBunge guy who signs all of his posts does it all the time).
Perhaps do better when it comes to reading comprehension 😉
It’s actually something completely different that you and Dred twisted into the same shit.
There are two conversations going on:
– one largely between Frank, tnfh, and Strat in which they’re all largely saying the same thing (i.e. we support smart management) but for some reason are arguing about it because they use different words to describe. No one mentioned Philadelphia in this conversation about tanking.
– a convo between me and Early bird that others have jumped into about the likelihood that the Knicks will be able to replicate the championship teams that were built in Boston, Miami, and Cleveland without any quality role players. Philadelphia was cited as an example by me of a team that will struggle because it traded away all its depth in pursuit of a stars and scrubs setup.
Somehow, you, DRed, and TNFH conflated these two conversations and created a third, imaginary conversation in which Philadelphia was cited as an example of tanking not being effective. That’s on you guys, not the rest of us.
Building a championship team is a very difficult thing to do, and that is true even when you have Kevin Durant, James Harden, Serge Ibaka, and Russell Westbrook. It’s true when you have Jimmy Butler, Ben Simmons, Joel Embiid, and Tobias Harris. It’s also true when you have Steph Curry, Klay Thompson, Draymond Green, and Andre Iguodala.
I’m not sure Philly missed on role players when you consider they have McConnell, Reddish, Amir Johnson, and Zhaire Smith waiting in the wings. I think what’s happening is Ben Simmons, the guy they’re building their team around, isn’t all that great as yet. Luckily for Philly they have a good 5-6 years to figure it out, and Simmons won’t be getting worse any time soon.
I am the only person in this thread to mention Philadelphia. If he wasn’t responding to me, then he was dredging up something from god knows when that no one was talking about.
You mentioned Philadelphia in such an insignificant way that I had to re-read the thread multiple times to even find it. I don’t think anyone was responding to you specifically (I certainly wasn’t). He was saying that the primary example used to criticize tanking serves as a more accurate criticism of Big Collar Brand.
Strat thinks it’s good to sign Courtney Lee after you win 32 games so we’re really not in agreement about much of anything when it comes to team building
Yeah I wasn’t responding to anything you wrote Hubert.
Philadelphia is failing to crush a mediocre team like the Nets because they don’t have one of the top players in the league. They have the Team of Very Good.
When you have players like James Harden putting up 11.7 BPM or Giannis with his .300 WS48, having a few guys who hover around 3-4 BPM is not going to make a Finals favorite. It’s really not about their role player; it’s about, for one, trading for Tobias Harris and finding out that (surprise) he’s not a star player, which anyone with access to BBRef could have told you in October. He scores points and plays decent D, but he’s exactly the kind of guy that fans and pundits inflate: an efficient 20 PPG scorer who could only stand to become more efficient playing next to a fantastic passing PG, a hyper-skilled, double-teamed C, and one of the best wings 2015 had to offer. (But surprise, his shooting efficiency has dropped to league-average since he joined the Sixers.)
But all of this fatalism is on the back of a sample size of one game. The Sixers (11th in SRS) lost one game to the 15th-ranked SRS team in the league. Did we really learn something about their roster from one poor game, in which, according to the regular season stats, they should have been favored by maybe 2 or 3 points? There’s no reason to point at them and go, “Hey look, look at those underachievers!” We know why they’re not the Bucks or Warriors or Rockets — they don’t have a 99th percentile superstar, which is all but required to go deep in the playoffs. This is not the Bucks getting trounced by the Pistons, here.
Then who were talking about when you said “Pointing at Philly as an example of why tanking doesn’t work”? I feel like I’ve read this thread fairly carefully, but if I missed it, mea culpa.
Okay I accept Hubert’s explanation, which supersedes and corrects my earlier post. Mea culpa.
Frankly I wouldn’t like their chances to progress past the second round if they won game 1 by 40. My opinion of them is based on all the games they’ve played with this core (admittedly a small sample), and the limited roster flexibility they project to have if they’re paying Butler and Harris $65mm+ next season and beyond.
I wasn’t talking about anyone in particular. I quote people when I’m responding to a particular person’s comment.
good “whatever time it might be where you are at right now”, and, a very happy monday to ya…
https://assets.rbl.ms/13596191/980x.gif
I think it’s good that we all have our own “unique” styles…I imagine after a decade or so, some of those styles though may wear some folks thin…
happy for the blazers (and enes) to pick up the win…sure, probably not sustainable, but, kanter with the +15 was good to see…
no surprise that the kings went after walton – fast…it’ll be interesting to see if it’s monty williams or lue who replaces him…
Wow, simultaneous “mea culpas” from me and jowles. Synchronicity, baby. Get ready for Zion.
Hubert, please don’t court the jinx. You are better than that. He’s not ending up here and everyone should prepare themselves for that outcome. And if he does he will blow out his knee in Summer League landing on Kevin Knox’s foot.
The Nets aren’t hobbled by long-term “market value” contracts to mediocre veterans, that is the trap they have avoided. They do have one more year of Alan Crabbe’s shitty contract but that’s about it. They haven’t invested at all in players headed into their decline phase, and have instead spread money around to players with upside.
Still, their path to any kind of legit contention is going to be… signing a superstar to a max contract. They have lots of nice “nuts and bolts” players, not so many “chrome and leather” players.
I’m a Law of Attraction guy, Owen. Don’t believe in jinxes.
Just hopping in to say that I’ve accepted an offer of from University of Illinois–Chicago’s Philosophy PhD program. If any KBers are in Chicago, we should meet up sometime!
Also tanking is the optimal strategy for truly bad teams, but being an optimal strategy does not entail that it works all of the time, or even that much greater than chance. It’s just the best among all available alternatives.
Congrats, Silky! Great town.
another prime example that fandom and intelligence have little to no correlation…
good luck silky…don’t fall in to that fake style pizza trap…it’s just lasagna, without the noodles, and with a crust on the bottom…
if a slice can’t be folded over and devoured – it’s not really pizza…
So Trump is going to give Tiger Woods the Presidential Medal of Freedom?
I was curious what the qualifications are, and came up with this: “The Presidential Medal of Freedom is given to individuals who have made especially meritorious contributions to the security or national interests of the United States, to world peace, or to cultural or other significant public or private endeavors.”
Yup, Tiger definitely checks all those boxes. I think Trump likes him because he played golf with him.
Silky! Congrats. And remember, deep dish is not pizza.
Philly is a 50 win team, despite what the Colangelos did to the franchise which should never get bundled together with the Hinkie plan, and they have Embiid and Simmons who still can improve, specially Simmons.
This is a league of mega stars and Embiid is the closest thing Philly has, but he’s not quite there. When people like me say they want a team with multiple superstars, I mean Durant, Lebron, Giannis, a top 5 guy in the league has to be a part of it. If you simply replaced Lebron on those Heat teams with a player at Embiid’s level, the result would have probably been very different, simply because there’s a larger than people think gap between the superstars and the absolute top end superstars like the guys I mentioned.
A team can win a title following what the Sixers are trying to do, as we’ve seen with Boston (arguable is KG was one of those transcendent guys or not) and the Lakers to some extent (with Kobe, who was not a top 5 player in the league in 2010), but the roster has to be properly constructed and Philly’s is still not.
This is a lot of emotion for one loss.
I remember the very first athlete who I would want to watch whenever they performed:
muhammad ali – something about the way he carried himself and spoke mesmerized me as a kid…
after ali it was pele, and, just how easy he made the game seem…
during her olympic run it was jackie joyner kersee and her magic at the olympics…
for a while lance armstrong had me enthralled ever time he got on a bike to compete in the tour de france…sad I had to take down his “what am I on” poster off the wall and stick in a closet…
around that same time tiger became must see tv…
yesterday’s masters was one of the coolest sporting events I’ve watched in a while…
trump is simply the ultimate douchebro…
Thanks everyone!
The first thing I did upon accepting my offer was Google “best ny pizza Chicago” and I wasn’t horrified by the results, so at least it’ll be better than Atlanta on that score.
Congrats Silky!
Since they used him how he likes to play and that generated fucktons of “why the hell are we playing Kanter?!” posts I’m gonna go out on a limb and say not even a little bit. Billy Donovan destroyed Kanter’s trade value. I think he actually improved a little bit on defense while here.
Neil Olshey destroyed Enes Kanter’s trade value when he offered him 70 million over 4 years.
I’ll say it again: the one loss had literally nothing to do with it. I was using Philly as a negative example of stars & scrubs weeks ago. If they won game 1 by 40 points, I would still think they fucked themselves up by going all in on Butler and Harris instead of building depth around Embiid and Simmons.
The argument that their stars are not quite the level of LeBron/Giannis/etc is valid, though, and I agree that might be the bigger reason their upside is limited.
Also a significant factor.
I’m waiting for the obligatory Jowles post about Boban.
Was that our old friend Pablo Prigioni as an assistant coach for the Nets?
Congrats man, im just finishing up my Masters, but PHD damn man awesome! I am contemplating it.
Congrats, Silky!
silky that’s great. schedule not ideal now but if you’re in atlanta for a few more months maybe i can buy you a beer before you go.
Congrats Silk!!
Silky, congratulations on getting into a grad program. I know how stressful the whole process can be for someone waiting to know where they are going to live and study. Best wishes!
Congrats Silky!
I like Embiid, but that was dirty as hell. Could’ve been much worse, not cool at all.
it’s amazing allen wasn’t hurt, that was a legit ufc spinning elbow
Thanks again everyone, this community really is one of the best on the internet.
@67
I plan on moving in early August, so I have until then. I’d be more than happy to grab a drink–just let me know if/when your schedule permits!
Congrats, Alecto!
That’s huge Silky! Congrats!
Every time I watch Philly, I can’t help but wonder why Simmons can’t take advantage of his size more. Is it the plays run or has he just not developed parts of his game that would take better advantage of his size? Magic, much like Simmons, wasn’t a great shooter. But part of what made Magic so dangerous was he could post and pass well out of the post. Magic had a full game. Simmons doesn’t necessarily have to develop a great jump shot, but he could stand to develop other parts of his game. I know Philly has Embiid, but Magic had Kareem so spacing shouldn’t be that much of a problem.
Just wondering..
Congrats Silky. I remember Grad School. I learned a lot and had fun too
Congrats Silky! I always wanted my PhD to be in philosophy but life ended up taking me to social studies, wish you all the best!
bUT cAN hE dO iT aGAINST tHE pLAYOFFS???
aNYONE cAN bE gREAT aGAINST tHIRD sTRINGERS
bOBAN dOESN’T pASS tHE bILL sIMMONS rUN tEST
Silky, congrats. I can think of nothing better than five-plus years of guided, funded study in a field one loves. (And I say this as a MA-terminal philistine/hedonist who loves my bonus checks as much as I do bookstore binges.) IIRC you’re from Minnesota or went to school there (?) so you need no prepping for the unrelenting Chicago winters — which I consider a boon to one’s indoor time, and therefore reading volume. I remember considering The New School for the last two years of my BA, and realizing that paying to live in NYC (especially during the cold-weather months) just to read and write 40+ hours a week was a silly proposition. Grad school, however, is ideal for it, and Chicago is a hell of a lot cheaper.
Re: Chicago — Beauty Bar, The Map Room, Hoosier Mama Pies, and Art of Pizza are my favorites on the west side, near where I lived for a summer. And I think there are two Shake Shacks in the Loop so jfc I am fucking envious as all hell
the rooster is looking mighty clean with that new do…
hopefully the clips can stay in this game for awhile…
@77 Thank you.
Though joking aside, the Spurs let him go, so…they aren’t infallible?
If I recall the story correctly, the Pistons simply made a huge offer the Spurs were not willing to pay that much for a backup, and Pop told Boban to go get the money. It was talked at the time that Pop really liked him, but they were unwilling to commit big money to a backup because they were contenders at the time. Pretty much the same thing that happened with Jonathan Simmons.
@78
Thanks for the recs. I lived in Minnesota with an ex who went to U of M for her M.A. (I’m a NY native, grew up on LI–Suffolk county–and lived in the city for a bit as well). Chicago’s winters are going to be child’s play in comparison (and I love the cold already!). I am very excited about the Shake Shacks and Chicago’s great food scene more generally, and, of course, graduate school!
I don’t give a shit about the knicks, but I’m jealous as hell of Silky.
wow, golden state and the clips have gotten interesting…
Damn, that was a sweet comeback, Lou Williams and Harrell played so damn well.
I think the Warriors seem to be pacing themselves more than usual, probably because they see the Rockets second round matchup around the corner, but that was a fun game to watch.
That was astounding. What a job by the Clippers!
And yeah, the Warriors seemed like they half-assed it once they were up big (it is hard to play with as much energy when you’re up 30, ya know?) and got burned by it in the end.
Harrell is a Monstrezl.
Remember Z-man endorsing him before the draft.
I thought it was a Z-thing at the time.