Back at the Garden!
Mitch is also back in the starting lineup, which Thibs says was happening even before Noel got hurt (which just makes Noel starting over Mitch make even less sense).
Burks is out tonight due to personal reasons, so Bullock is starting at the 2.
No Frank, Rivers or Noel, so we better see a heavy dose of Quickley tonight.
Let’s go, Knicks!
577 replies on “Knicks vs. Cavaliers: 3rd 2020-21 Preseason Game Thread”
No Frank hurts but…
Let’s Do it anyway!
Things I want to see tonight:
1)More Quickley, both at the 1 and the 2.
2)At least one of Spellman or Iggy gets some burn, and preferably both.
3)When Knox plays, he only plays in lineups where he’s the 4 (or even the 5).
4)Obi in lots of different kinds of lineups.
mind reader!
I wouldn’t mind a quick dose of Harper and Powell
Okay, we got Mitch in there with our semi-competent point guard, and . . . absolutely nobody who can shoot. Baby steps, I guess
I’m not even really complaining about this lineup it’s perfectly reasonable it just this team has nobody who can shoot still
Maybe Iggy will get some burn?
Maybe we should consider resting our star players tonight!
Bullock theoretically can shoot.
But yeah, it’s kind of funny how quickly he went from, “We could totally get something for Bullock” to “Uhmmm…”
I think the problem with our 3ps so far comes from the fact that they play in empty arenas without the boos that helped them in the past
We rest them every night
I wish MSG had a pre-game show for the Knicks.
Thinking we’ll see more Obi/Randle lineups than Spellman lineups
Bullock is 2/9 from 3. Sample size.
Ignas Brazdeikis should play ahead of Knox
Me too. I guess it’s just a cost thing in setting up a covid safe show?
Agreed. Heck, I was halfway expecting Randle to get the start at center.
Yeah wtf?
But they’re in studio already! They do a post-game and a halftime bit.
I love what deranged Knicks fans we are to be like “WTF no pregame show?”
The things you feel entitled to after 20 years of dreck…
Really just hoping we get a look at guys like Quickley, Iggy and Spellman. At a minimum it would be good to see Obi start to look more comfortable out on the court and getting more shots in his wheelhouse.
Wouldn’t hate some extended minutes for Mitch if Noel is still DTD. Positive was Thibbs letting him play through foul trouble, but it would be good to see him take a hold of one of these pre-season games.
No quick dose of MKG? 😀
LOL!
#I love what deranged Knicks fans we are to be like “WTF no pregame show?”#
I may skipped watching the last game of the previous Finals but i watched knicks first preseason game twice!
(Thankfully watched the 2nd game only once!)
Heart #Unfortunately# wants what it wants
CLYDE!!!
Clyde!!
Clyde!!!
clyde back and looking dapper..
clyde’s back !
Coolest Dude!!!
Gotta love that jacket!
No Nerlens tonight so maybe we’ll see some Omari
I haven’t read up on the restrictions the unions set up for studio work, could be something with that, time of exposure and cleaning or something? Or maybe the audience numbers were so low that even MSG doesn’t think preseason pre-games are worth it.
Mitch trying an offensive move followed by Drummond shooting a 3 not what I expected
I might start recording all of Robinson’s fouls and put together a mix tape.
Where was the foul? That’s some horeshit.
1st stupid foul by Mitch
Alan Hahn did a pre-game thing on Facebook the last game which got the entire crew into the show from the Green Room.
Okay, that was a legit foul. Good job by Drummond drawing the foul.
Spellman time!
The first foul was kinda dumb, he got into the shooter’s landing spot on a shot he couldn’t really contest, but the second foul was a good strong move by Drummond.
Drummond is a bad matchup for Mitch.
tells you all you need to know about mitch…he knows that he can play minutes if he stays out of foul trouble and in the first three minutes he gets two….something not going on upstairs…
Don’t like the way MSG network is using the audio.
lotta whistles
Are they freezing RJ out?
So nice to hear Breen and Clyde again.
Well, hell. I just want to see Clyde’s outfit!!
Clyde, you’re a national treasure but the reason Knick fans think Randle hogs and turns the ball over too much is because he DOES hog and turn the ball over too much.
man clyde calling out kb on randle…
Not a good start.
clyde…”knicks looking for harmony on the offense”….lol
Spellman’s gotta take it easy on the Hellman’s
spellman looks like he caught the covid 19… lbs..
Damn, Okoro’s going to be really good.
Okoro’s got 2 fouls in 5 minutes how is he going to be good?
RJ’s not even involved. It’s all Payton and Randle.
RJ!
randle…pumping up trade value
is that the washington generals out there in red..
Good move by Barrett on Cleveland’s scrubs. He’s gotta eat these dudes alive.
RJ looking like a young Melo.
It’s hilarious the lineup the Cavs have out there. Like, maybe one of these guys has any chance of being in their rotation.
Could we see Quickley, then, Thibs? The Cavs are playing their #17-20 guys out there!
knox is gonna feast on these guys…
Nice bit of a burst out of the timeout for RJ.
Rebecca!!!
What did he say?
Saying it was unfair to criticize Randle.
Reggie, you can’t just throw elbows like that. That was hilarious.
Thanks. I can’t get MSG here when I’m on my way to work
Man imagine if the rest of the Knicks looked to do what RJ did and get better at basketball over the 9 month lay off.
Ugh lost service up here in the mountains with snow coming down. What ugly stuff am I missing?
That Cav scrub was all over Smith and Smith couldn’t handle it. That was embarrassing.
totally…they just need to cut the guy and let him sort his shit out somewhere else…
So Drummond hits jump shots? When did that happen?
Watch Jerami Grant tank in a bigger role and Drummond turn into a 300 pound Paul George.
Watching MSG on my desktop and it works pretty well.
How crazy is it that one of the reasons I haven’t cut the cord all these years is MSG?
I kind of feel bad for Smith at this point.
Quickley!
DSJr has really struggled with pressure. It was traps last game and some random Cavs scrub this game? Anyone get the guy’s name?
quickley..our savior!
I mean that’s a nice ass move by Quickley there, right?
This is a perfect time to feature Quickley.
Like, DSJ was at least playing at an NBA level a couple years ago. He wasn’t good, but he was at least doing things on the court and there was hope he would continue to improve. Now he gets bottled up by random scrubs and loses the ball if someone breaths on him.
Knox couldn’t even score on the scrubs.
knox get an assist for that?
man u guys are overly harsh on dsj… he had a live ball turnover and assisted on the bucket afterwards….
Nice ball movement by the Knicks. Smith great pass to Obi. Great pass by Quickley to Smith, too.
Smith with the big steal after the Quickley brick!
Knox trying to hold that rebound was painful to watch.
Classic Mitch block.
It’d be nice if Knox could make a shot. But Mitch with the great offensive board.
If you’re an NBA PG, you’re going to get clowned for taking 17 seconds to get your team into a halfcourt offense because a random Cavs 20th man is standing in front of you.
He does have 4 asts so far which is good tho.
And then a bad Smith turnover. Blech.
That was a hilarious block by Mitch there. What the hell does that kid (Wade?) think he is doing.
Thibs must love these open threes the Cavs are getting.
Knox playing bricklayer.
Knox hit a shot! Knox hit a shot!
We clown him now, but when we get Cade Cunningham next draft Knox will be the team’s MVP.
well…quickely sure isn’t afraid to shoot…
Getting hammered by Wade
interesting article on Mitch blocking jumpers
Mitch with the brainfart on D
Yeah, pointz and all, but Kevin Knox averaged 12.8 points a game as a 19 year old. He’s just nothing close to that now.
Thibs must looooooove these open threes. That one was on Mitch, I think. Or did someone else blow the rotation there and he failed to cover in time?
i mean dsj is doing bad things out there…. but he’s also making plays… which is a lot more than what you could say about some other pg on our roster….
DJPhan – You see that other turnover by DSjr?
I am a connoisseur of bad point guard play and losing the ball on that high entry pass is something I don’t often see.
He’s doing some things yeah but….
Cheap foul call on Mitch and then they don’t call when he’s being mauled by Maker. Boo.
My God, the Knicks are losing by 11 to this collection of dreck.
Nice move by Quickley there.
Three by Quickley!
that’s my boy
How does Payton not take that shot?
When Mitch is standing under the hoop being guarded by Okoro throw him the damn ball, don’t take a contested 3
Drummond learning how to pass and maybe shoot is really a lot of development I never thought I’d see.
So I have to admit I was wrong about Toppin’s passing, he’s clearly a good passer.
DSJr just looks like he’s broken. He probably needs to play in the GLeague or something to try and fix whatever’s wrong with him.
Knox is terrible. Three years in and I don’t know what his path is to become even an average NBA player let alone a good one.
Anyone know offhand what the record is for worst team 3P%? I think we have a really good chance to set it this year.
Quickley it appears can already shoot better than everyone else on the team
our pg play is atrocious
i’m just saying… he has 2 steals 1 block and 4 assists.. it’s really not that bad a game…
just started watching the game…2 quick points:
1. fuck mike, I wanna be like be like clyde…so good to hear his voice
2. I forgot what 2 was when I was writing 1
go knicks 🙂
Why pull Quickley there? Seriously, WTF?? Why wouldn’t he just let the kid play more? Really don’t get it.
Sacrilege. No one talks shit about Mike. That’s what Wally is for.
Mitch is just so much fun to watch.
It’s like when the Knicks had Chandler and the Felton/Chandler pick and roll was the first play, like, all the time and it opened up everything for everyone else. They obviously should be doing that with Mitch.
DSJ demonstrating both why a lot of people want to give up on him and why some others can’t quite quit him.
Credit where it’s due: haven’t looked at the box score yet but Randle has been good.
Quickley certainly isn’t intimidated. So there’s that.
This is why I want Mitch starting over Noel. Haven’t seen Noel PnR enough, but I do know good things happen when Mitch rolls
I think our path to being bad but not worst in the league bad is just don’t ever play Knox or Dennis.
He doesn’t look out of place out there. That’s a good thing in and of itself.
@Owen I think geo means the big Mike (aka the owner of the Hornets). I did take offense there for a second though haha.
I genuinely admire Smith’s persistence in this game. He had just some awful turnovers a la last year and seems a little hesitant with his shot but he’s playing hard and passing well. As djphan said, he hasn’t had that bad of a game. There are some glimmers of hope there. Unlike Knox, who is just terrible.
DSJ was a minus 10 again, playing against a G League team. Shit just doesn’t function right when he’s at the point. Hasn’t now for 100 games. Blame him, don’t blame him, doesn’t really matter at this point.
Randle is playing well…ugly, but well.
Ahh right.
I don’t know what it is about Quickley. Something odd about how he moves. Doesn’t look like an NBA build. But can’t argue with the stroke so far.
Best game by him so far. Easily.
clyde…”nasty sassy stuff by Randle”…
Good steal and finish from Randle. Inspiring some pure Clyde there.
It’s hard to get just how bad this Cavs team is tonight and the Knicks are down three. It’s not good.
What was that bookie talk by the way? We were favored by 15?
Randle, to his credit, has been hustling his butt off on fast breaks. The offense is just trash in the halfcourt. As with everyone else, he’d be better with shooting on the team.
this is a bottom three team in the league…no problem…will be interesting to see how Thibs deals with this year…..going to be a lot of long nights…
be like mike…hello 🙂
I just remembered what thought 2 was…okay, on to the subject of thibs and his ill-fitting mask – if your ears are being pulled forward, the mask is too tight…
we all know this by now, no secret to it…you would think thibs would have made arrangements to cover up that alligator shaped face of his…
I don’t know, maybe his ears are just freakishly far back on his head…
life’s just a mystery at times…
Just happy to see a semi-functional offense today. Don’t need to worry about beating G-League-level teams until the 23rd (of October 2021).
16. And yeah, Walt avoided that question quickly.
Quickley might be the 2nd or 3rd best player on the team by the end of the year. lol He’s going to have to play. We should give him a good test at PG just to see what he can do because DSJr has to go. I’d like to see a little Quickley/Frank before we send Frank to the doghouse behind a slug like Rivers.
Same old Mitch. Make a great block, make a great dunk, look like you are in a coma the rest of the time.
RJ is going to be a VERY good player.
Randle is starting to look like the Randle that was pretty good player before Mills/Perry/Fizdale turned him into trash.
If Toppin can’t hit an NBA 3, this pick was pointless.
I’m a very patient guy with young players, but Knox is even testing me. He’s so bad it’s hard to find a scenario where he become good. He’s DSJr bad. Wen they are on the court together, it’s hard to watch
The Walt talk reminds me of the time that Earl Monroe was investigated for point shaving. http://legendsrevealed.com/sports/2016/08/23/did-the-nba-investigate-earl-monroe-for-point-shaving-after-he-scored-on-his-own-basket/
The NBA supplies the masks, so this is on them. It’s outrageous.
Maybe Silver cut a deal with the Chinese government where he has to give his coaches ill-fitting masks as part of a campaign of subtle humiliation so that they’ll start showing Rockets games in China again and take the bounty off Morey?
The Knicks simply can’t shoot the basketball well enough to compete even with dreck. Very similar to the Wizards’ home game last year, you kind of say “Who are these guys???” and they wind up hitting enough threes to beat the Knicks. When you can’t shoot, *really* can’t shoot 3s, and can’t defend the 3 very well, you’re going to be awful.
Mmm, I’d buy it except that it’s subtle and that’s just not CCP style.
Toppin looks alarmingly short out there to me. I don’t think he’s going to be bullying people inside and I fear that he’s not quite coordinated enough to rely on his ball handling. Worried about that pick. Quickley looks faster than I thought he would be, so that’s a good sign!
I’m sure phase II involves more overt humiliation of the capitalist pigdogs. Maybe Silver has to live stream the tide pod challenge on Chinese New Year’s.
obi has plenty of time to hit 3s later in his career….. if he can’t make buckets in the paint then he’s gonna go the way of frank and knox….
okay, crazy talk: was watching the karate kid with one of the godsons, he was talking about the scene where jackie chan has the young boy put his jacket on over and over again…
I brought up the whole john wooden teaching shoelace tieing (?) to some of the best college basketball players in the country…
the point he was trying to teach was the importance of detials and processes…
details, like your appearance, matter…
what troubles me the most is that no one around him has addressed the situation…
yo coach, what’s up what your mask…
Less dribbling Randle looks much better
I guess the hope with Toppin is that, with the cuts to the basket and shooting forming the bulk of his diet on offense, the bullyball is more a back-pocket option dependent on the matchup. If he can add 20 pounds he could also see a bit more success in the paint against your average stretch 4.
If Drummond is seeking out Mitch to get him in foul trouble, shouldn’t they put Randle on him and let Robinson just clean up in the paint?
Teams actually now play zone routinely against the Knicks. LOL.
Damyean Dotson eyetest superstar
i don’t think it’s just thibs, saw another coach with a face hugger tight mask…
I don’t know, maybe it’s on purpose…I imagine it’s kind of hard to yell- and breathe though…
Agreed. It’s the NBA. It’s absurd.
That’s what they did, one foul too late.
it makes sense, prove you can shoot and make baskets, why foul on anything not at the rim…
Why don’t they do the pick and roll with Mitch every damn time?!
Mitch!!!!
But then got his fifth foul. As Z-Man noted, they put Randle on to Drummond a foul too late. Having Mitch bang with Drummond is just a foolish use of Mitch.
Such a bad foul
This is what I was saying earlier about Mitch vs Noel. Noel is a freak athlete, but he’s not throwing down stuff like that
Knicks aren’t even competitive with the total dregs of the league.
A dark realization: to the extent this team has “success,” it will be largely dependent on Alec Burks.
And it just opens things up for everyone else once the other teams are forced to shut it down.
Cleveland might not be all that bad…
They seem more cohesive than the Knicks while playing their dregs. Bickerstaff impressing, right? It’s almost like the Cavs looking like a typical Thibs team.
Bad News: We can’t beat the zone
Good News: I’m no longer worried about Quickley getting enough minutes
Drummond seems like a different player…
With Mitch out, Bullock needed to do a bad foul in his place.
If only the Knicks could get superstars like Dotson
woof, that’s all for me tonight folks
Yeah, if they play us every week. They’re one of the worst teams in the league against real NBA competition.
That was a really nice pass from Drummond. Showing me some things tonight.
Shouldn’t the Knicks just play their #16-20 guys now?
Drummond is looking to get paid.
They’re, though, the kind of fun bad team that I wish the Knicks could be.
I might start a Picard marathon pretty soon. Got to amortize that CBS all access month I paid for to watch the end of the Champions league.
No bueno
Cleveland’s over-under is 22.5 wins. They’re missing Nance Jr., Love, Sexton, and Porter, Jr., all of whom are starters. They’re destroying the Knicks.
i don’t know why the celtics don’t try hard for a deal for drummond…. that’s really all they need….
Decent defense by Quickley.
There’s the Julius we all know and love…
Yes, Clyde, this is why the fans are irate against Randle. Bingo.
Yes. This is not good. Anything has to be better.
Frazier now conceded that Randle sometimes does stuff like, well, that. But yes, overall, Randle has been quite good tonight in the middle of some awful basketball.
Bricks?! Payton is hoisting up cinderblocks out there…
That was the most Julius Randle thing I have ever seen.
I like the way Quickley moves the ball…
Agreed, he’d be really good on that team…
Well our guys are either going to learn to shoot this year or there will be a lot of Chinese League scouts watching our games this year
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a guy so scared to shoot an open corner three.
Why is Randle, like, playing this entire game?
Don. Knoxtts
clyde gives quickely his seal of approval…
In the SEC, Quickley couldn’t finish at the basket to save his life and miraculously it doesn’t look like he’ll be better in the NBA
DSJr with 2 good defensive possessions in a row
I’m just glad Quickley can get to the hoop
Smith Jr is at least trying out there…
These are our Knicks
Yeah, he looks like he can stay on the court. That’s the first burden a lot of rookies need to clear and he has done it.
That 3 is the kind of thing DSJ would do at NC State regularly! I swear!
Where can i place a bet that Alec Burks leads the league in minutes played?
“i don’t know why the celtics don’t try hard for a deal for drummond…. that’s really all they need….”
Drummond doesn’t shoot the 3 and can’t defend point guards on the perimeter. Seriously. Last year Brad Wanamaker played more for Stevens than Enes Kanter.
Mike
He didn’t really need to in the SEC. Now he needs to. He can certainly get by his man…
From what I’ve read, Quickly’s strengths are 3pt shooting, foul shooting, on-ball defense. His weaknesses were size, athleticism and he has trouble finishing in the paint.
He needs to work on the dribble penetration and develop some moves. He has a plus floater but he needs to find ways to draw fouls and get to the stripe. Still, I like him but I want to see him play point guard.
No way, unless he gets traded it’s going to be Randle.
I was honestly thinking Noel to Boston at the deadline or Spellman if he gets in shape
guys… if you notice quickley doesn’t actually get to the rim… even on his drives with a clear lane…. that’s why everything coming out of him is a floater…. and unless your floater is like parker you’re not going to shoot well from 2….
it’s the same thing as in kentucky.. there’s less desperate heaves at the rim so far but i imagine when the defenses dialup we’ll start seeing those too….
just started the second half, damn, you guys are scaring me…time is precious…
hmmmm, maybe it’s time to go back to fighting pact and dominion foes… our alliance is actually in first this campaign, which is nice for a change…
oh yeah, seems elf and julius are once again our two most impactful players…
thibs has got some serious work to do…
It might be purely because of the lack of options, but I’ll give Thibs credit for leaving Mitch in despite all the fouls. I’ve always thought that was the best way to teach him how to play defense without fouling–the guy knows he’s kicked out of the game at 6 and doesn’t want that to happen anymore than the coach.
I should re-phrase, I’m glad Quickley can get by his man at all and that I have in fact seen him near the basket.
KNOX DID A THING!!!!!!
Take a shot every time Knox does something good is a game they play at AA meetings
I like the way this unit is playing
What is happening
I was all set to compliment DSJ and then he pulled up for a dopey heat check
DSJr and Knox redeeming themselves
DS Jr. playing defense like his career is on the line. Quickly playing like he wants DS Jr’s job.
I’m not wrong when I say the second unit has outplayed the first unit this entire preseason, am I?
Agreed. They really should have taken him off of Drummond, though.
I always say give me a team that hustles and plays smart and I can live with the losses
Quickley’s shot looks worse than advertised but the rest of his game looks better than expected.
Nice to see the young guys make a run!
Right? That’s why this scrubby Cavs team is a lot of fun to watch. They’re so bad and yet they hustle and play together.
Back-to-back threes for Knox!
I think Quickley is mostly bad but am now willing to buy he has more point guard chops than he was allowed to show at Kentucky
Great call. He looks like he belongs out there, but the shot hasn’t been impressive. He looks like a real point out there, though, which would be huge.
IQ/Knox/RJ/Toppin/Mitch. This is the lineup.
Quickley currently has more assists than in any game during his college career, lol
I lol, but I did actually check and this is true
In this fourth quarter, Knox is looking the best he has for a looooong time.
Quickley has a sort of wiley cleverness with the ball I wasn’t expecting from a 3 point specialist.
Now I see why Quickley was SEC Player of the Year…leadership
It’s worth noting, though, just how bad this Cavs lineup is.
clyde is into it
don’t be a buzz kill
Between the rebound, drive down the court, and pass to Barrett I think that’s the best sequence I’ve ever seen from Kevin Knox
@BC Oh yeah for sure. Also worth noting Quickley is 3-10. I’m just a little impressed at what Quickley’s doing overall today.
Ha! I mean, it’s great to see, but wow…this is a crazy, crazy Cavs lineup.
All the more reason to just let this group play the rest of the game.
It’s like Knox’s BBIQ suddenly doubled.
Knox for the lead!
Agreed.
KNOX OUT OF THE BOX!!!
told you knox would feast on these dudes…
We got Summer League Knox for this game baby
Knox playing like he’s looking down the bench and not seeing a seat. Duck-duck-duck-GOOSE!
Holy crap
Knox’s jumper looks wet again
I can’t watch the game but Knox’s name is suddenly all over gamecast. Are they playing three on three?
RJ has been phenomenal getting out on the break
Maybe Knox just needs to play on a team with more energy? (lol, no)
@BC, I’ve been very consciously not paying attention to who is on the floor for Cavs. Also, there is no good Cavs lineup so playing at their level is still an improvement.
So, should they hurry and try to trade Knox tomorrow?
🙂
i don’t care what quickely is shooting like…we know he can do that…he can breakdown the defense off the dribble…name the last person in a knick uni who could do that on a consistent basis?
I’m very impressed with IQ’s 7 assists.
HAHAHAHAHA DRed
Nobody acknowledged it. Literally 2 more assists than he ever had in college?!?!
Ooph, Mitch, can’t foul out on a Wade drive!
the refs give mitch no respect
Good challenge by Thibs.
How is that a foul on Mitch?
Especially here, where the guy elbowed Mitch in the face and they called the foul om Mitch!
mitch looks like he’s at the orthodontist
Foul on Mitch for breaking his nose on Wade’s elbow.
mitch fouled him with his face…
There legitimately may only be 3 NBA players on both sides
how can this take so long to figure out it was an offensive foul..wtf are these guys looking at..
What the hell are these bozos looking at? That’s a flagrant
this might be our 21st century willis reed game
What a dunk by Toppin!
I’m sure the review length was just deciding flagrant
Good challenge by Thibbs. Love the intensity to even be bothered reviewing a call in a pre-season game. Fire up!!!
Whoa so looks like Knox did some actual things?
Holy shit that pass from RJ for the Obi dunk got me out of my chair!!!!
Mitch has 9-lives tonight.
Knox is surprising but this is a nice lineup.
Great dunk.
Great block.
I love you Mitch.
knox …the resurrection
Quickley/RJ/Knox/Toppin/Mitch is the kind of bad Knicks team that I would love to root for.
What happened. I had to do work and suddenly the Knicks are leading and Knox has 16 points on eight attempts???
That should be the starting lineup. I’m so done with the Payton/Randle show.
The second unit just lit the Cavs’ scrubs up and Mitch was dominant on defense.
heck yeah..run those guys out there and I will at least watch the games..
My my my. That was fun.
This bodes well for post trade deadline watchability
But who is going to trade for Randle?
So we found our point guard for now. A guard that patiently probes, but also has tons of energy and quickness … it’s a very easy decision. They should roll with it. Sorry Elfrid
This should be the starting lineup. This should be the crunch time lineup. This should be the only lineup.
And, no, I’m not wildly overreacting to the Knicks beating up on a bunch of Cleveland scrubs. Why do you ask?
We might have to endure some Randle spin move purgatory before some post-trade deadline bliss.
Sure it was against the Toledo Mud Hens but I’ll take any glimmers of hope I can get…
And to be completely fair, I think that DSjr’s relentless D got it started..
Tommy Beer:
More Quickly at PG please.
Like I’ve been saying, he kept saying he’s a natural PG that was playing out of position at Kentucky. I think we saw that he DOES have PG skills tonight, He was a little “over enthusiastic” at times, but that’s because he’s a rookie, We have ourselves a player. The shot will drop. We already he know he can shoot.
Nice to see Knox show some signs of life after I trashed his 1st half.
It was only the Cavs, but that was great stretch of defense to win the game. DEEEFENSE !!
It’s feels wrong for Knox to have this kind of 4th quarter in the preseason. It should come in the last day of the season when the top seed in the lottery is at stake.
He and Burks can be involved, too. 😉
Oh, and Noel, of course, is the perfect Mitch backup.
His last name is Quickley and his initials are I.Q. He’s destined to be a good point guard.
That was a fun 4th quarter. Knox needs to shoot like that. Let’s see how he plays on Friday.
DS Jr didn’t shoot well, but 5 steals.
Quickley gonna be rookie of the year… yup… you’ll see
His last name is Quickley and his initials are I.Q. He’s destined to be a good point guard.
Pretty good!
Just imagine when they do this against a team with real NBA players! How much fun will that be?
That was fun though….
Best Preseason Game Ever!
Thank you Thibs
When you find a guy like IQ and you’re rebuilding, what you do is you play him and you live with his inevitable ups and downs and you develop him. What you do not do when you’re rebuilding is stick him on the bench in favor of Elfrid Payton.
There’s no reason he can’t be better than someone like Devonte Graham by midseason next year. He’s got a lot of Devonte to his game and some of his skills are better.
fun game…. underrated part of the game was mitch playing 32 minutes and most of the 2nd half with 4+ fouls…. he was going to impose on the game eventually against any non-drummond big….
rj has been really hot… mostly in transition but from mid range and drives… 22/30 from 2pt territory is suffice to say really good…. but probably more importantly 7/9 on his free throws… i have spent way too much time looking at it in slowmo but it looks tight and he has consistent timing.,.. i think he could shoot over 70% this year…
ppl are going bonkers over quickley and he was ok.. but he shot horribly much like everyone else and he didn’t necessarily create shots either… so pump the brakes a tad…
and ppl like shitting on dsj but he played a solid game…. if you were just relying on the comments you wouldn’t know that he had 5 steals and 2 blocks and 4 assists….
much better game from obi…. he really just needs to chill out on the 3pt attempts… he can take them when he’s open but he’s much better off getting his offense off of everyone else and picking his spots…. he has a nice face up game which he can leverage against slower footed matchups and he’s a willing and able passer… that’s going to be good for him but forcing things is going to torpedo his whole game….
I think that ending lineup can be super active on defense and on offense. Important that they all stay moving on offense though. I think they could make up for individual shortcomings by being relentless with the movement. Get the easy shots. They better get in shape.
The difference between playing against starters and playing against scrubs.
That’s why I was so irked at them trading the #33 pick. They need more shots at the brass ring, not less.
Credit to Thibs running him out there with 5 fouls and backing Mitch up with the challenge on what would have been his 6th foul.
The sad thing, of course, is that the Cav starters (outside of Drummond) are pretty bad, too.
Quickley just looks like he has no fear out there, pretty impressive for a guy in his 2nd NBA game.
I just felt that when quickly had the ball, there was a sense of purpose to whatever he was doing. Early or late in shot clock. I don’t get that with the other guards. I sense aimlessness or desperation … RJ has Looked like an excellent Swiss army knife of a player thus far.
Smith Jr. really had 5 steals? Pretty impressive
The Knicks won and Mitch didn’t foul out? I’m shocked.
All those people on BucksBlogger are like, DAMN!
IQ is in his name!
The real star of this game is Thibs and the coaching staff. The game was won because of defense. You can tell that he’s a rough and tough coach that demands certain things of his players. He was also smart enough to put a lineup that we like on the floor at the end of the game. Smart coach!
well… i give thibs partial credit on the mitch decision since i’m pretty sure he took a look at spellman… who looked like he smoked a pack of marlboro reds and downed some krispy kremes before the game… and couldn’t bring himself to put him back out there…..
If we get rid of DSjr and Rivers (who serves no purpose on this team) you could almost feel pretty good about the team going forward even though it’s a several year trip from where we are now to actually being good given how young these guys are and how much improvement will be necessary. What would really make me feel better is Toppin hitting some 3s. It was a useless pick unless he stretches the floor more than Randle and does everything else as well or better given he’s expected to be a minus defender.
Quickly, Frank, and RJ on the court together would a very interesting look.
scrubs or not a 25pts turnaround ain’t so easy.
Very satisfied with the effort and the mentality of our puppies!
djphan, I think Spellman almost certainly cost himself a chance at surviving the cut when MKG inevitably gets signed to the main roster. And since I’m for some dumb reason Team Iggy, I’m okay with that.
Were we watching the same game? I feel like DSJ’s contributions are being wildly underrated while Quickley’s are being blown out of proportion.
Thank you.
DEEFENSE and team ball wins games.
They will only go so far with this talent, but Thibs will get he most out of them because they are going to play basketball the right way with the right combinations of players om the court!
When Quickly was running the offense and they were playing hard as a team on DEEFENSE, it changed everything. It opened things up and the ball started moving. Sharing is caring. Thibs!
The Quikley hive is born tonight!
23.6% on 3s
Upgrading this percentage is obviously the Top Priority here if we want to have any chance against decent nba teams
This is why relegation wouldn’t be so bad in the NBA. We just posted an improbable comeback against a total scrub team’s backups and look how happy we all are (me included!)!
IQ looked more like a modern NBA point guard than DSJ has probably ever and led a team of young guys to a 4th quarter comeback in his first game in a way DSJ hasn’t probably ever. I’m not entirely down on DSJ, but let’s be real here. DSJ’s hopeless at organizing an offense and initiating; IQ looked like a total natural at those things one game into his NBA career. IQ’s a threat from deep which opens the floor; DSJ is not. Etc.
and what was IQ doing exactly?
DSJ and Knox showed clear signs of life
Not dead yet
They both had very good overall games. One would think there would naturally be more excitement about a #25 pick that was not well-received by many notable KB pundits.
Let’s see what happens Friday when Cleveland plays their starters more.
I’m not thinking about tonight’s stats.
I’ve seen enough of DSjr game. I’m hoping he looks good enough so we can trade him.
I’ll be pretty surprised if IQ doesn’t become a good basketball player. We already know he can shoot. Now we know he can handle, penetrate and pass fine and also has no fear. The kid’s a player. I’m more enthusiastic about him than I am about Toppin after what I saw tonight. Thibs will decide when he’s ready, but IMO he should be the backup PG playing ahead of DSjr now and hopefully take over from Payton in the not so distant future.
IQ’s point guard play wasn’t exactly CP3like but it was clearly the most energized one among his,Elf’s and DSJ’s one. The team was moving more and better and looked to have better spacing. The fact that the opponents at that time were not exactly Allnbaers tho should not also be overlooked
Yes. Most were upset because we moved up to make sure we got him even though the kid was absolutely outstanding working his way off the bench to become SEC player of the year and the “go to” player on a very good team in a conference with a few players that got drafted way ahead of him, He was killer down the stretch of that season. I even posted an article with the stats. You never want to get too far ahead of yourself, but to me it looked like the worst case was we were getting a very good shooter and the best case was we were getting a very good player. The odds shifted a little tonight. He has some other skills. For one night I don’t care what anyone says. I’m going to bed feeling good about that pick.
Game Recap:
Cleveland came out hot from 3. We didn’t
Drummond’s game has mysteriously expanded. So has Omari Spellman’s waistline.
Mitch got two fouls in 3 minutes vs. Big Drum, committed #4 early in the 3rd, and survived to play 32 mitchnutes.
Payton bricked his way to the bench
Bullock was blech
Randle played mostly well, including at the 5 when Mitch and Omari fouled/ate their way to the bench
DSjr became a whirling dervish on D.
Quickley grabbed the reins and stabilized the offense
Knox crashed the boards and exploded on O
RJ blended in seamlessly
Obi mostly lurked and played smart if unspectacular save for a coupla late jams
Our young’uns destroyed a good G-league team in the 4th
That is all
Frank should not benched
Randle should not dribble
Payton should not shoot
Knox should not drive
Mitch should not foul
DSJ should not think
and we’ll be fine!
There is 0% chance that the Knicks “moved up” to get Quickley. They traded up to get his teammate, Tyrese Maxey, and then traded down once Maxey was taken.
The issue with Quickley is that the Knicks likely could have got him at #33 and picked up another good player at #25. Quickly shared the “SEC Player of the Year.” The other guy who won it went #57. I have no beef with Quickley in and of itself. It’s just about opportunity cost. And then they traded away the #33 pick! Man, I did not like those moves.
I think he meant took him at #25 rather than at #33. And technically they did move up from #27. It will be interesting to see who becomes the better player, Maxey of Quickley…
I really don’t get why people have a problem with this, especially now. Even if there was a 90% chance that he’d be available, if they wanted him enough to not take the 10% risk, why quibble about it? If he’s #24 on your board, who gives a fuck where he is on other people’s board? Why not say “hey, they could have drafted him at #23 but traded down 2 spots and still got him plus a future asset? To me, it’s nitpicking to the nth degree. And cal me crazy, but the coach’s pick for SEC POTY is simply a different forum…it’s the one that the SEC recognizes. He didn’t share that particular award.
Not to be argumentative, but is there any evidence that they traded up specifically for Maxey? They did so long before he dropped, and most mocks had him going well before that…in fact a bunch had him going in the lottery.
Just that they worked him out, most mocks had him going around #20, and then they traded back as soon as he was picked (and, of course, the fact that he’s from Kentucky and looked like a pretty good prospect). I actually doubt that they traded up to #23 to specifically get Maxey, as I’m sure there were other guys they would have been happy with had they lasted to #23 (like Josh Green), but he was the last one of that group that they were hoping for at #23.
I’m not exactly a draft guru but i see Celtics picking a PG who also seems good at 3s right after Quickley at number 26. Two other teams also pick pgs till number 33.
Who says that IQ would still be available at 33?
The mock drafts or the tarrot gypsy woman?
1st team: IQ, RJ, Knox, Obi-1, Mitch
2nd team: Elfrid, Rivers, Burks, Randle, Noel
3rd team: DS Jr, Frank, Bullock, MKG, Spellman
G-League: Powell, Harper, Pinson, Iggy, Young.
We just saw the 1st team. I want to see them against a real team. At least they run, hustle and play fast. And we should be invested in them. If IQ is a point guard capable of running an offense, let’s develop him. His 7 assists were real. A point guard that is also an elite 3pt shooter? Another thing seemed clear, RJ, Toppin and Knox play better with a point guard on the floor. Mitch played 32 minutes – amazing.
This is veteran group. AKA, most likely to be traded. Before that happens, Payton can keep feeding Randle the ball and Randle can spin away. Burks can stretch the floor and Noel protects the paint. Whether they start or come off the bench, I like these 5 playing together.
The 3rd team looks like a good defensive lineup as long as Spellman doesn’t collapse from exhaustion.
I definitely want to see Quickley play point against legit defense but he looked as comfortable in the PNR as either Smith Jr. or Frank do at the moment. If he can actually play point that pick looks so much more defensible. He does have to knock down those threes though.
Can you imagine what fans would be saying if the Knicks had a rookie point guard who just had the two preseason games that Malachi Flynn just had?
I have no problems with the Knicks wanting Quickley, but the good process move would have been to take Flynn or Desmond Bane (top ten in NCAA in three point shooting) and then hope for Quickley at #33 (again, as noted before, Quickley’s co-SEC player of the year went #57, so it would be a pretty good bet), and if he wasn’t there, there were plenty of other decent players available. Just taking Quickley and then dumping the #33 pick was bad process (plus, if the Knicks supposedly had some deep insight into Quickley that no one else had, wouldn’t that be more reason to take him at #33? Since no other team had the same insight as them!).
And this isn’t a shot at Quickley. I’m totally cool with Quickley. I will root the shit out of Quickley. It’s just that think about how happy we are about Quickley looking decent. Imagine if the Knicks had another young prospect roughly as good as Quickley! They need to start building a roster of good young players. Punting your high second round pick to 2023 (where who knows were it will even be, by the way) isn’t the way to go about that.
How are they not just doing pick and roll drills over and over? How can they not have that down? They have a guy who should be a dominant roll man and they don’t seem to be prioritizing it at all.
The good process move according to whom?
How many teams/gms say after years that they were ready to grab X player but a team picked him right before them ?
I’m not saying that IQ would definitely have a better career than the pgs picked after him but saying also that the other pgs would all be better choices than him due to their potential seems like a bet too. Not a sure thing.
DoNot like IQ in 25? Ok
Dumb move in general?
Let’s wait a few years to find it out
To be clear, Quickley played adequately but most his assists were players just hitting 3pters they had missed all game. Literally all Quickley did on most plays was swing the ball for the assist. Otherwise, Mitch and Obi were basically undefended on 2 dunks more than Quickley doing anything special. Quickley still can’t finish at the rim. All the players on the court for the Cavs will be cut from the 2nd worst NBA team.
Honestly though, that may be enough given the other PG options.
The run did have more to do with DSJr’s shutdown defense, & I mean absolutely wrecking the other team possession after possession, and Knox lighting the other team up with his shooting, passing, and rebounding.
Everyone here knows what Knox & DSJr are skill-wise. Just remember that’s the level of competition Quickley faced.
you don’t need to wait a few years to know that there was a bad process… you can judge decisions at the time it was made…. nobody can tell the future…. but we all knew that that deal for hardway for the pick that would end up being jerian grant was a good deal… it wound up being a bad pick but it was a good deal….
and saying quickley will turn out better than every single one of the guys he was picked ahead of? that’s pretty arrogant because even if you thought he was better than all of them it was very likely that he wouldn’t have gotten picked until much later… and if he wasn’t? PICK SOMEONE ELSE!
they basically said that quickley was one of the last useful players in the draft… that’s the arrogant part… that they punted on the 33rd pick and didn’t even get equivalent value that other teams picking later got more for? that’s even worse!
it’s certainly possible that quickley has some sort of career… just like frank or knox has a shot… but it’s indicative of bad process… it’s indicative of a process where you’re laser focused on one or two guys… which is great when they work out… you can say you planted your flag on this dude and they made it….
but what happens when they don’t? what does that say about your process when you basically go all-in on a dude who winds up doing jack shit? what do you think of the ppl who picked frank and knox? that type of stuff was super obvious then…. why did we need 3 years to know that the people who made those picks were idiots?
not only does quickley have to work out…. he has to outperform all these dudes picked behind him in order for it to make sense…. that’s indicative of a team who does not have a handle on the draft…. and that’s exactly what it was…
Draft is all about predicting the future through your info, your talent evaluation and your basketball knowledge/experience.
Anyone can put numbers in line.
Not anyone tho can pick the best/most promising talents of each draft class or assemble a balanced team that will contend for a chip.
A Process without good results is a bad one.
You can judge anything at the time it was made.
That doesn’t mean much tho. Its Just an opinion or a guess.
Can you pick (by trading up or down) the player of the draft with the brightest future or a player that will make your team better either through his game or with his value as a trade asset?
That’s the process imo
And its good or bad according to the future results.
Quickly just has to be a useful NBA player to be considered a successful pick at number 25. It’s certainly true there could be other useful players drafted after him, but the draft is such a crapshoot at that point it’s fair to take the person you are most sure of. If he’s an NBA role player or better, you are happy all the way to the bank.
It’s a separate question if the Knicks screwed up trading pick 33 instead of using it. With the potential for little or no G league this year, it’s not necessarily bad to bank the pick for later. That said, they may just not have done the work necessary to pick from whoever was left. That wouldn’t be good and maybe they missed getting another usable player.
If you think that some of the guys picked after Quickley is better than him, then I find it ok to criticize picking him at #25, but just saying he would have been there at #33 does not make it for me. The outcome for the latter part of the draft is very variable, there are few prospects that are going to make it. If you think you have identified one of them, you pick him and dont care too much whether you could have drafted down.
Perhaps chicago could have drafted Jimmy Butler at #43 instead of at #30 (btw, he was projected there in this mock draft https://bleacherreport.com/articles/740747-2011-nba-mock-draft-projecting-all-1st-and-2nd-round-picks). Do you think that whatever you get by doing that is worth the risk of losing Butler to any other team? The difference in value between both picks is so slim, that it is not worth losing a real contributor to your team. If you thought that Malachi Flynn is going to be much better than Quickley and therefore should have been picked at #25 then it is fair, but debating whether we could have had Quickley at #33 is pointless. (Trading away #33 for the sake of trading it away is another matter).
It’s really hard to judge their process because this year was so unusual with the shorter season and especially limited workouts. I’ll be much more concerned if we’re similarly scratching our heads next year.
Can Farfa recap the fourth quarter of this game?
A’s across the board.
I admit to not knowing every player in the draft. Raise your hand if you studied film on 60+ players. I had no idea Quickly was a point guard until he got drafted and I looked into his career in more depth. I’m sure most of us thought he was a shooting guard. Drafting him still doesn’t explain giving away pick #33. (Who thinks that 2nd we got will be higher than 33?)
And good as Quickley looked against the Cavs’ third stringers, Malachi Flynn has still had the more impressive preseason, so it’s not like Rose and company can be absolved quite yet. But it’s clear this kid should be in the rotation immediately, as the shooting threat he poses (even on nights when his shot isn’t going in) really changes how the defense reacts to the whole team.
@Alan, I think that lineup we saw was inspirational. It worked. It had chemistry. IQ made Knox and RJ better. The ball moved and the defense couldn’t collapse/run zone.
It the consensus is that if any serious poster on this blog was running the draft, we wouldn’t have Quickley and we’d have a 3rd rookie. That doesn’t mean that what the Knicks did is wrong or indicative of a bad process. Once you get outside of the “consensus pick zone” the proof is in the pudding. This is not comparable to picking Knox or Ntilikina, where there were clearly better options. At #25, and far more so at #33, the odds of drafting a rotation-level player are low, like 20% or less. If you hit at all on one of those two picks, you’ve done well. As to kicking the can down the road, you have a sure-fire asset in a future trade rather than an 80% chance of a valueless scrub. Twisting that reality into some kind of a hyper-dysfunctional process is a gross exaggeration.
As to Quickley, what I see in him thus far is a guy that a) can shoot b) makes the right play and c) is a leader. He’s an unspectacular player, and has some limitations for now. Maybe it’s all an illusion vs. scrubs, but he looked like he made the correct play nearly every time, and it looked like he inspired the team without even scoring,. On D he stays in front of his man and hedges correctly. No steals or blocks, just good positional defense.
Obviously there is a prerequisite skill level and I’m not sure he has that yet. But he absolutely, certainly has it in between the ears and in the chest. He’s a born leader and a born winner. Anyone who doesn’t see that is blind.
Malachi Flynn might wind up being better than LaMelo, Hayes, Hali, Lewis Jr., Maxey AND Quickley. If so, were those all bad processes?
Its ridiculous to criticize The Knicks for picking Quickley with the 25th pick. This wasn’t picking Knox with the 8th pick. Give me a break.
He was SEC Player of the Year and shot over 40 percent from 3 and went to the top college basketball program in the country. To act like he was a reach at 25 because he wasn’t mocked there is absurd. What is the point of even having GM’s and scouts if all you’re going to do is pick the players that are mocked in a certain range.
We also have no idea where Quickley would have been mocked if the NCAA season had continued through the tournament. But I’m pretty sure a guy who shoots over 40 percent from 3 and is a starter for a top 10 team that would have gone to at least the sweet 16 in the tournament probably would have seen his stock rise considerably in the draft if it was a normal year.
What lies between a player’s ears and in their chest is just as important as their physical skills. Cue the score from Rudy please!
Jamal Murray and Tyler Hero are two examples of UK players who have shown more PG ability in the NBA than they showed at UK because they played off ball there.
Sorry for the triple post.
Also, I bring this up every year but could we please have player grades come back?
This blog says statistics and humor. The grades are what initially drew me into this blog and this year we have so many young players who are going to get minutes…it seems logical to bring back the grades!
And no, I can’t do it. I would if I could but I don’t even get to watch most of the games in real time.
you certainly need good results to maintain a job in the nba but you dont’ need necessarily good results to prove that you had a good process…
phil jackson drafted kp…. did that prove that he was in charge of some genius front office that knew something more than anyone else? obviously not judging by the rest of the draft picks and basically every other transaction they made…. and you can thinslice his tenure early on based on the noah deals…
quickley could be an nba player… but him just being an nba player isn’t enough… it’s picking him at 25… and relinquishing the 33…. it’s not a bad process because they didn’t optimize 100%… it’s a bad process because they made a big bet on quickley…. and no matter how good you think quickley was he was certainly not that far and away better than everyone else picked behind him at the very least… and that’s what that pick said about what the knicks thought about the rest of the draft…..
To a degree, yes. As we talk about here a lot, the draft process often overvalues things like measurables, potential, and action away from the game — say, a certain giraffe on roller skates dominating a 3-on-3 scrimmage — over what players have already done in game action. We took Quickley at least in part because Payne and the scouts believe he can play point guard more regularly than he did at Kentucky. But Flynn already showed he could play the position at a high level, and shoot pretty well, in college. LaMelo got taken so highly because of his uncanny court vision, even though he can’t shoot and his defense is theoretical, Lewis got taken because scouts assumed his speed would be a big weapon in the pro game, etc.
Now, some of those guys were taken so highly out of the hope that they can become stars, which Flynn likely won’t. Charlotte taking Flynn at 3 would, indeed, have been a bad process, because they could have traded down, gathered assets, and gotten him later. But once you get out of the single digits, any team with a point guard need would have been entirely reasonable in taking him.
The Knicks desperately needed playmaking at the 1, and they desperately needed outside shooting. Quickley showed in college that he could provide the latter, and Payne believed he could provide some of the former. I’ll be very happy if he becomes yet another Kentucky guy who’s better in the pros than in college. But no one would have had a reason to complain if we’d taken Flynn at 25, and a very convincing argument could be made that a pure PG was a much bigger need than a sweet-shooting combo guard who can run the offense in spurts.
IQ has a quick first step and that “shiftiness” that’s so hard to quantify. Some guys just seem to always be half a step ahead of their man and so far it looks like he has that (level of the opposition obviously noted). In both games he has broken through the first level of defense into the paint pretty much at will. I’m a little nervous about what happens once he gets there, last night he had some nice breaks: the Cavs left the lob man absolutely wide open a couple times, he missed a layup that came right back to him for a follow, he threw up a wild floater that went in. Once the scouting report is to stay home on the lob and force him to finish against a contest he may struggle, and the jumper looks pretty ugly given my expectations but he can clearly hang and that’s step one. It’s not exactly a murderer’s row at PG (and man was Elfrid bad last night) so the opportunity is there if he can grasp it.
The rest of the youngsters there was good and bad. Knox still tantalizes when the shot falls but looks completely out of his depth the rest of the time. DSJ was frequently tragic on offense in this game but has been legitimately scrappy on defense all preseason – if you make lazy passes near him he will take the ball. I was ready to strangle Mitch after the two quick fouls but in the second half he proved conclusively that he is in fact better than DWade (that’s Dean by the way lest we lose track of who the opposition was here). Obi still struggled to get involved in the regular flow of the offense but at least got a few impressive dunks. Still a little worried about how he fits in. Spellman may make the team just to have 3rd big body but Thibs did not seem like he was itching to find him minutes. Iggy getting zero burn in this one shows he’s pretty firmly on the outside looking in.
Okay swifty, here are player grades:
Starters:
Mitch: B
Went from a train wreck of early fouls to the Mitch we drool over in the 4th Q. Took a hard elbow to the schnozz by a CLE deep bench scrub that was originally foul #6 but becale a flagrant 1, sealing the win. Tickytack fouls still very much a problem but he contested a shot down the stretch just using his length without jumping, which is what Thibs has been harping on…baby steps.
Randle: A-
Julius continued to play smarter and looks great when he makes quick decisions and goes straignt downhill. Did have one hilarious spin-flail to remind us of why we hated him last year. But without him, there’s no 4th q comeback, he kept us in the zip code. Passing continues to be a plus.
Elfrid: D-
Got outplayed by Garland and other scrubs. None of his four 3PA threatened the interior of the rim. Barf.
Bullock: D
When he’s not hitting 3’s and the other team is, bad things happen. Kept hitting the front rim on wide-open looks. Basically had nothing.
RJ: B+
Didn’t force anything, let the game come to him. 3-3 from the line is encouraging, but still can’t get going from 3. I like this RJ though.
Also, re: Knox, his game last night reminded me of what I pointed out a few times last season: on the nights when he is playing with energy and enthusiasm, his length alone makes him a passable rotation player, even if his shot isn’t falling from outside. The problem is that on so many nights he’s hesitant, or just moving slowly, or in so many other ways not being the Energizer bunny we saw when he was a Summer League rookie. There are still plenty of technical things Payne, Bryant, and company need to fix about his game, but if they can coax that effort level out of him every night, he’s already not a lost cause.
no because every reasonable person would’ve picked most of those guys ahead of him… probably not maxey and quickley though….. but when you make the kind of call like this you have a very narrow chance of success based on quickley’s profile…
just take the cam johnson pick last year… the suns are a rebuilding team.. they need a whole lot of pieces and they took a 3p specialist at NUMBER 11……. and cam johnson had a pretty decent year… but guess what? they passed up on tyler herro and brandon clarke also…. and i’m sure there’s more than a few guys picked afterwards that will turn out better….. cam johnson did pretty well… but don’t you think they would be so much better with someone else?
is that indicative of a great process when you basically say that there’s nothing left in the draft where you gotta take a specialist at that point? or is that indicative of how much they value 3p specialists? both aren’t great conclusions… this is the same front office that treated deandre ayton as tim duncan and didn’t so much as learn to pronounce luka doncic’s name…..
you can look at it a number of ways… and it could work out… but that still indicates bad process and we don’t need results to make that judgement….
Quickley — A
Knox — A-minus
DSJ — B-minus
Toppin — B
Spellman — Dunkin Donuts without the dunks
Play. The. Kids.
Picking Wiggins or Jabari over a wounded Jojo gives you “The Bad Process Award”. Same with Bowie and MJ and hundreds of other decisions. If the scouts, doctors, bball people on your team can’t foresee the next 15yrs your process is flawed.
You’re not competing for the Rookie of the year award. You’re trying to find the most valuable assets. Its not about tendencies or hypes or safe choices.
Its about finding the way to get the best for your team Against 29 other teams.
Through interviews, videos, stats, psychologists, doctors, coaches, inside info…
Bench:
Spellman: F
Hart to believe he would report to camp that out of shape. Looks to be going the way of the late Tractor Traylor and Mike Sweetney. Surely on the chopping block.
Obi: B
Efficient, picked his spots, still struggling on D but rebounding fairly well. I like that he moves the ball and isn’t trying to do too much. Hit his first shot at MSG and ad two slams down the stretch, including a massive Statue of Liberty dunk from the left baseline. Much better than last game.
Knox: B
The Kevin Knox of the 4th quarter is an NBA player…rebounded in traffic, ran the break, made a gorgeous outlet pass to RJ, splashed 3 beautiful 3’s. The other 3 quarters were, well, not as good.
DSjr: A-
Not really an A-, but he worked his ass off on D and was the most responsible for getting things turned around. Probably had 5 deflections along with his 5 steals and 2 blocks. Hit 2 long 3’s. Much better effort on both ends, but still a shaky performance as a decision-maker. Looked like a legit NBA player at least.
IQ: A-
See commentary in thread.
Coach Thibs: A-
Nice job of trusting Mitch and moving him off of Drummond. Let the kids play in the 4th. Defensive mindset is showing signs of sticking. Very matter of fact in post-game comments, no Fizdale-style fluff. So far, so good. Would have liked to have seen some Iggy.
Clyde, Breen and Rebecca: A++++++++
Welcome back! Clyde’s get-up was a classic!
I know we’re all basking in the glow a little this morning but come now, let us be reasonable people. Last night was the kind of night where Knox bit on a guys pump fake, got blown by, tried to close him down from behind, bit on another pump fake, and the Cavs player (don’t remember who it was but probably not an NBA player just by the odds) shuffled his feet right before Knox could commit the shooting foul. Clyde: “Knox with more scrappy defense”. My point is sometimes things go your way, but two rebounds in traffic against g-league competition and one nice outlet pass do not a good floor game make. When Knox goes 3-5 from outside and attempts zero long 2s he’s playable. But the shooting is make or break with him. Confusedly running around with long arms on your shoulders is not going to get it done when the real games start.
I was probably the biggest Flynn stan here, but I think you can make a case for taking Quickley over him.
Quickley is taller, longer, a year younger, and shot better from the line and from three. And if he was forced to play off-ball despite having very good PG skills, maybe he ends up becoming the better player?
Also, you can’t knock the Knicks for passing on the older Flynn AND knock them for taking Obi because he’s too old. Just sayin.
We can dismiss this comeback win as a win against G-league scrubs but the fact is the NBA is a league where a bunch of no name players can beat anyone on any given night depending on HOW THEY PLAY.
The comeback last night was promising because it was A) On the backs of the youngsters and B) they were playing the right way…working hard on defense, sharing the ball and taking good shots.
It wasn’t hero ball or some player just going off randomly. It was a team effort. It could have been against some Cavs bench players or The Celtics starters. If they’re playing that way, they will give themselves a chance to win games and we should be encouraged by it and not dismiss it.
The kids in the 4th looked like an actual NBA offense and it just never, ever looks that way with the Payton/Randle playing patty cake lineups. I don’t mean in terms of production, although they were more productive, I mean in terms of structure, instinct, spacing, cohesion, ball movement, sets, actions.
If by good process we mean safe and reasonable choices according to a few mock drafts then you give Wally 100$ more a year and tell him to pick the player he likes most. You don’t need any other stuff! Just Wally and the predraft standings.
-Wally close your eyes and pick a number!
yea i mean we would’ve done a lot better if we did that instead of picking frank and knox too.. if the bar is relying on knicks management is not any different than the average knick fan anyway….
No risk No gain they say.
Just be ready to take the praise or the L of your risky pick or play it safe and remain ScottPerrish forever
OK. Grades for yesterday only.
Payton: C+ (He simply was exposed for who he is. Someone that can’t shoot)
RJ: A- (Let’s see if he can be consistent. )
Bullock: F (Was invisible)
Knox: B- (He was a C- before the 4th qtr)
Mitch: C+ (Drummond ate him up.)
Toppin: B (Solid)
IQ: B+ (Didn’t hit his jumpers but gave Knickerbloggers hope)
DSJr: C (He gets that for his defense. 5 steals, 2 blocks)
Spellman: F (Looked like the Pillsbury dough boy. We need a real backup PF/C. Taj or Kaminsky)
Every single player picked at #25 and after had a very narrow chance of success based on their profile. Period. I don’t get why you or anyone else is comparing the process there to the process in the lottery. The odds dropp off a cliff between #s 8-14 and #s 23-30.
I think there’s a pretty good chance Frank is either out of the rotation or is going to get traded eventually. Regardless of how you want to use him, he’s behind Payton now and soon to be behind Quickley at PG. IMO, they are trying to work with DSJr to eventually trade him. But they may still think they can fix him. Either way, Thibs is already playing him ahead of Frank at PG anyway.
If you play Frank off the ball, he’s behind guys like RJ, Burkes, and Rivers. To me, Rivers serves no purpose and should be flipped for an asset later. So maybe Frank will rot on the bench for awhile unless there is an injury or someone like DSjr or Rivers is flipped, but barring injury I don’t see Frank in the rotation much.
He’s a tough guy to find a role for in conventional basketball lineups even though you want his defense, secondary playmaking and ball movement out there as long as he can hit a 3 a bit.
He belongs on a team with a point forward or point center like Dallas, the 76ers, Denver, or a team like the Spurs that adapts better to the skills of the players. He role is to defend the better opposing PGs and SGs, disrupt their offense, make some plays, and do just enough on offense to not be a huge liability. That has to be on a team that doesn’t need a high level traditional PG or SG because they are getting those skills in less conventional ways. You are trying to turn him into a longer more switchable Beverley. We’ll see. I still love what he brings to the table and would love to see him in a lineup with Quickley and RJ, but you need Toppin to become a legit stretch PF (so far not so good) and you need more consistent outside shooting from one of either Frank or RJ (preferably both) for that to work.
I think if you were evaluating Quickley off his seasonal stats or without due consideration for his actual skills as a player that were not visible due to his role you were destined to underrate him badly. Fortunately, we did not because we have people on the coaching staff that understood how much better he got during the season and knew his full skillset was not on display because of his role.
I guess Kenny Payne knew.
strat… how many games did it take for you to come to the determination that quickley is more than the stats indicate?
was it more than 1?
quickley doesn’t look like a pg to me. he is much more of a lurcher than a shifter. he is willing to pass and has at least enough vision to see the first obvious pass once he’s in motion but probably not much beyond that. he tends to make his first burst, then either make the obvious good pass, release the floater, or jump and hope a bailout pass is available. and even as a 2 guard he doesn’t seem to have enough functional strength or inside touch to become a really good finisher.
the good news is his lurches are long and quick and aren’t directionally bigoted. if anything he seems to be a flash quicker going left. since it seems fairly likely his shot is for real, even modest bonus playmaking features like a threatening first step and being a decent first level passing threat could easily be enough to make him more useful than just another shooter. on defense he looked a little disappointing to me, letting a guy like mooney get by him easily a couple of times, but he’s a try-hard at least with long arms. his very small frame is obviously going to be a challenge in some defensive matchups. hard to say much really from a handful of minutes against the canton charge but it’s hard not to gawk at a new player when the cupboard is so bare.
Sample size of 1 works for me!
IQ is an all star!!!!
We all need a little helium in our lives.
I mean, do we even need Cade?
I agree with your assessment that he looked a little jumpy but I’m hopeful that the game will slow down for him a little bit as he gets some more experience. It’s not uncommon for young guys to have that “going full bore at all times” thing and take a little bit to figure out how to slow down when the situation calls for it, e.g. once you penetrate the first line of defense, slow down, get your defender on your hip and force the defense to react rather than sprinting straight ahead to the rim or feeling the need to make an shot or pass. Goes doubly for IQ arguably given that he wasn’t getting a lot of PG reps last year at the college level either. But I agree with you that everyone plugging him as the opening night starting PG are probably getting ahead of themselves just a tad.
Very difficult to make anything out of 3 games. Comparing outcomes between Quickley and Malachi Flynn (who played 3 years of college, not 2) in just a few games is not useful. (i would have been very happy to draft Malachi).
All we can really say is that in a game against other (mostly) NBA players, Quickley looked like he belonged on the floor. He played good defense, made the passes that were needed, 7:2 AST/TO ratio. He didn’t shoot well from 3, but presumably that will turn around. Honestly, he easily could’ve shot 11 3 pointers as he was open a fair amount and did the “pump fake and drive with no specific plan” instead of just letting it go. Someone needs to tell him that if he’s as good a shooter as they say he is, if he has 4 feet of space he needs to shoot that thing.
In terms of the process of the Quickley pick – every team needs to do their own scouting and “big board” setup. Matters not at all what the “mock drafts” say. I mean, caris Levert was mocked #30 in the 2016 draft – I think the Nets are pretty happy they picked him at 22 or whatever. There are 1000000 examples of this.
by the way – Andre Drummond is so much better now than he was 5 years ago. It’s really quite impressive – he’s increased his assist% by 3-4x, increased his FT shooting from 35-40% (!) to ~60%, and is now experimenting with shooting 3’s. Pretty nice to see.
He absolutely beat on Mitch last night. It wasn’t even a contest.
You’re comparing taking a reach in the top 10 of the draft with picking someone late in the first round and acting like they’re the same thing when they are not.
A top ten pick has a relatively large salary. A late first round pick makes next to nothing. In fact, you could argue that if you see someone that is mocked early in the secound round that you really like, taking them late in the first is a smart move because you have that team controlled rookie contract.
I mean, Donovan Mitchell wasn’t mocked as a top 10 pick but if we had picked him instead of Frank would we call that bad process because he wasn’t mocked there?
You’re also lumping in different regimes. I get that we default to The Knicks are incompetent but these are completely different people making these draft choices.
The likelihood the #1 player left on our board just happened to go to Knicks U & was vastly underrated by everyone except the Knicks strikes me as pretty low.
There’s not much else that needs to be said
pt, I suppose the issue with Quickley (and with most later draft picks) is whether he has the capacity to improve glaring weaknesses. Can he become more of a shifter than a lurcher? Can he learn to finish better? Can he make more than the simple but smart second level pass? (I disagree with with your characterization of his passes as “first level” as to me, those are passes that Frank tends to make…the simple lateral swing, the drop-off to the post…whereas we are talking about the pass post PnR to a cutter or perimeter shooter.) He clearly doesn’t get to the third level (the rim) to drop off when the defense collapses on him…can that be learned?
I ask that because he doesn’t need to learn the absolute most difficult things for PGs to learn…shooting, dribbling and reading the floor. He doesn’t seem slow or short or uncoordinated or earth-bound or dumb or timid. Shump never learned to finish, Frank looks like he’s not learning either, but neither of those guys could shoot or dribble both ways and that makes it harder to finish when you don’t force guys to overplay you or go over screens.
He doesn’t have to become Derrick Rose at the rim to be a very effective player, just better than he is right now. And clearly, he didn’t need to rely on finishing to be successful in college…as strat pointed out, he became the go-to closer on his team despite having the more highly touted Maxey in the backcourt with him.
because it’s the same process whether you pick #1 or #59….the objective is to maximize your opportunities.. in the draft.. in free agency.. in life… whatever it may be to field a better team…. the good teams maximize every pick… every opportunity.. every roster spot they have… we apparently use them to make friends….
so yes picking deandre ayton over luka doncic is just indicative of a process that netted you cam johnson… and deandre ayton and cam johnson aren’t terrible players either but it was still a shitty process that they are paying for….
I literally have no idea who Matt Mooney, Levi Randolph, Lamar Stephens, Marques Bolden or Dean Wade are.
I don’t know every player in the league but pretty sure most these guys are not NBA players.
A lot of good points have been made re: Quickley so I’ll just add that it would be a mistake to assume the 3PT shot will simply come along. It very well may, but Quickley wouldn’t be the first player with a sky high NCAA 3PT% who couldn’t get off quality looks in the NBA because teams didn’t have to respect his drive. See Monk, Malik or Fredette, Jimmer.
I think a lot of the 3PT shots he took last night were perfectly good looks and to be clear I think he should have the greenest of lights. My only point is it’s a mistake to include him being a weapon from three in your analysis of him before he, well, hits a lot of threes.
Echoing ptmilo, the lobs were fun and he can clearly handle the ball in a pinch but I didn’t see him making any particularly advanced reads. Anything he can give us from a playmaking perspective is sorely needed but declaring we’ve solved our problem at point guard is premature to say the least, and based on some of the comments in this thread I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to say people are in fact doing that.
Regardless, he should play a lot both on the merits and from an asset management perspective. Right now I still think the process behind drafting him sucked, but unlike most bad process decisions I’m actually willing to let the eventual outcome affect my opinion on that because of the uncertainty you’re dealing with that late in the draft. So I will in fact happily eat my words if he’s one of the better players who was available.
early bird gets the negative worm.
Kid played well last night. Its a good sign hopefully. Its one pre-season game so too early to tell anything but ill take it as an encouraging sign and wake up today with a smile.
This is your second time calling me out on this, specifically about Quickley, and I’m pretty sure also your second post this week.
Quickley played really well and he doesn’t get to choose the opposing players. But I watched the game, I’ve watched clips of all but 1 of his assists. I’m encouraged by his play so far and he’s done a number of things well. I feel better about him now than I did before last night. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to ignore the context of these games or the evidence we have from college.
Here is a better question. In a 5 man lineup with RJ Barrett, does it really matter if Quickley isn’t a “pure PG”?
Couldn’t they share playmaking/PG duties?
Its ok for us to be excited about our rookies. That is what the preseason is for. People don’t need to throw out the caveats of sample size or the opposition. We’re all smart people who know that stuff. We’re also fans of The Knicks, who haven’t had a good point guard in ages. Let us have this moment!
but dj…you’re the one making the judgement call that picking Quickley at 25 is not maximizing your opportunities. Why? because he wasn’t “mocked” there?
The team needed shooting, defense and playmaking and Quickley projects to possibly give us all of that. He’s the number 25th pick in the draft, not the 8th pick. Its ludicrous to act like the SEC Player of the year who shot above 40 percent on 3 is somehow a reach at 25.
You’re connecting the 25th pick of Quickley with the trading of the 33rd pick for a future second rounder when they are two separate actions. Do you have inside information that they were dead set on trading the 33rd pick once they picked Quickley or maybe they made that decision after some of the other players picked bwtn Quickley and the 33rd pick were gone?
They are two separate actions.
This shtick is so annoying dude. We’re all here because the commentary is light years more intelligent than what you see just about everywhere else. No one is forcing you to read objective analysis of Immanuel Quickley’s basketball ability. Hop on over to r/nyknicks if you want upvote parties.
by the way – Andre Drummond is so much better now than he was 5 years ago. It’s really quite impressive – he’s increased his assist% by 3-4x, increased his FT shooting from 35-40% (!) to ~60%, and is now experimenting with shooting 3’s. Pretty nice to see.
drummond did play well last night but he actually hasn’t improved much. i used to keep a turnover stat that at the time was more useful than the popular TOV% type stuff. it isn’t complicated. it basically allocated ~2/3 shot creation credit (only with respect to turnover risk, this is separate from efficiency) to assists and 1/3 to assisted FGs (unassisted FGs get 100% credit and FTs are a little complicated). it still runs automatically and drummond last year had one of the worst turnover to shot creation risk-rewards in history. the difference between drummond and, say, vucevic, on that that metric alone was worth of 4 pts per 100. SVG tried to play through him a lot and his assists went up, and he makes some really nice passes for such a massive human being. but he make way too many terrible decisions to make them even break even.
on defense he is an absolute joke. he gets a lot of stats like whiteside but he is actually worse than whiteside in my opinion when it comes to periods of no effort or making glaring mistakes, and that’s really saying something. he did draw 3 charges. but that’s 17-18, 18-19 and 19-20 combined.
One pre-season game against a depleted horrible team. Yeah, it’s too early to crown IQ in any way. I’m curious though. So I went back and watched/read some pre-draft scouting reports. We saw some of the good. 43% 3pt shooting is elite. He can create his own. His inside move is the floater, also elite, but he’s not physical or athletic. He doesn’t battle with the big boys down low. He’s an energetic on-ball defender but is known to lose his man. He doesn’t have an advanced point guard game because he didn’t see the floor a lot as a freshman and Maxey ran point for KU. He makes bad passes and doesn’t have an elite handle.
So there’s a lot of good and bad. Based on what we saw last night, he’s good enough to be worthy of a shot.
Also, about everyone else, maybe Thibs can fix Dennis, Frank and Knox? How much time has he had to do that? Let’s see the coaches develop those players.
Since the discussion today is all about the kids and drafting, the Ringer has a take (and very specifically on the Knicks as an example):
https://www.theringer.com/2020/12/17/22179125/nba-teams-can-no-longer-tank-their-way-to-the-top
This kind of nonsense line by Marc “The Hack” Berman in the post is what sets insane expectations:
Subtext:
Woo-wee! Knicks fandom all over the blogosphere is simping hard for IQ as our starting PG of the future.
Was his game that good?
No.
But he can also potentially shoot the ball, which none of our other point guards — whether real (Elf) or imaginary (DSJ, Frank) — can, so why the hell not try him there more?
Figures.
he displayed an elevated heart rate and an ability to beat a defender off the dribble…given those traits have not been displayed by a knick backcourt person in the last decade…you can understand the greenspanian irrational exuberance…
and I am on the bandwagon…
in relevant draft news.. the gleague ignite team(home to top prospects jalen green (#5) and jonathan kuminga (#9) and now apparently jeremy lin)… played a scrimmage…
https://gleague.nba.com/news/nba-g-league-ignite-first-december-scrimmage/
first… the comp wasn’t that great… dj hogg and tarique owens were soso college guys with zero nba prospects and basically gleague filler types… the rest of the folks are unrecognizable and might even be a slight step above local ymca level… there’s not that much footage out there afaik either… this was hopefully a warmup so hopefully they step up in comp….
second.. kuminga and green did ok in the box score but we obviously need a bigger sample…
it does seem like the nba is showcasing this in partnership with Overtime which is a production company that produces basketball content that targets gen z.. it’s an interesting experiment and green and kuminga could be shepharding in a new way for high schoolers to forgo college to come into the draft… especially if the nba can leverage this into media coverage that they can leverage….
The argument for starting IQ at PG, in my opinion, has nothing to do with his PG ability. It has to do with his ability to beat the zone defense, which has completely nullified our offense up to this point.
If IQ can force defenses out of the zone, then he’d be worth starting. After that all he has to do is throw an entry pass to Randle.
The other issue is who runs the PnR with Mitch/Noel? I’m not convinced IQ, Burks, or RJ can do it. That said, I’d love to see them get the opportunity in the near future.
I have a strange thought but what if we let 18 year olds go straight to the NBA instead of serving an apprenticeship for a year in the G-League?
NOT trying to troll here, just wanted to throw it out there. Probably totes crazy.
(But seriously, why are they doing this?)
Everyone has to dream….just as long as they don’t become Randians.
That Ringer piece is a little biased (and unfair, comparing a new GM to one of the top-two GMs in the league).
I also think it’s a little early to presume that RJ will never improve his outside shooting, although he makes a good point about Toppin’s role.
That is my biggest worry with Toppin. Does he have to become a completely different player? Can he?
Scarily, he’s maybe not that different from Randle in the end: an undersized, offense-only center. Yes, he offers more rim protection and outside shooting but how much more? He seems like a great kid so I hope he makes the transition.
And regardless of Quickley’s ceiling, I do, at least, think he could be a very good fit next to RJ (maybe what we were hoping Frank would eventually become).
This is a nice clip of an assist Quickley had last night. Perfectly good assist. But the defense is pretty bizarre. Is that a 1-3-1 with Toppin just left wide open on the block?
Happy to get excited about Quickley, got no beef with him other than the fact we could have taken him at 33 by all accounts. But the fourth quarter d was complete shite.
https://twitter.com/JeffreyBellone/status/1339575829085433856
agree…already looking to get my NY Jets Trevor Lawrence jersey!
Knox & DSJr were really the stars of that stretch for me.
Knox starting raining 3s and had the gorgeous rebound & outlet to RJ.
DSJr had 3 steals over the course of 4 CLE possessions spanning about ~1:30 seconds (no, really it’s in ESPN’s play-by-play; I also recall him drawing an offensive foul which may have been the 4th possession in there).
Quickley did what he needed to do but he wasn’t exactly Chris Paul out there.
ESPN.com’s game highlights show 6 of Quickley’s assists:
– 2 swing passes to Knox for a 3 after PnR gets shutdown
– Fastbreak, flips ball to DSJr for 3
– 2-on-1 fastbreak, alley-oop to Knox
– PnR, alley-oop to Mitch who is left completely alone
– alley-oop to Toppin who was just left alone by the defense
Again, he made the right reads and put the pass on the money, plays I’m not convinced DSJr or Frank make, but he didn’t really get by a defender on any of these plays. Sometimes that’s all you have to do as a PG is feed the hot hand or take advantage of mistakes by the defense. I’m encouraged by the game and think more of his PG abilities, the alley-oops were gorgeously executed, but if he’s the full-time PG he needs to breakdown the defense and it’s not clear teams need to send help on the PnR against him.
This is why we own all 30 2nd round draft picks in 2023. HS basketball players, baby!!
Those synergy numbers are scary:
He won’t post-up at all or get many transition buckets in the NBA. That’s 42.8% of his offense. As a PF, he won’t be the rollman very often either. That totals 58.0% of his college offense. He’s shown some other skills so far but he’ll have to rely on them a lot more in the NBA than he did in college.
I am definitely not high on Knox and DSJ, but a few things from last night-
1 – Knox is a load in transition. He is just very athletic. Re: the outlet he threw to RJ – that must be something they’re working on in practice as he barely even looked up. Either way, that is much faster processing speed than he’s shown in the past. Can’t help but be hopeful about that.
2 – DSJ – hopefully lost on offense but really did a nice job on defense. I don’t think he has a chance at sticking in the league as a lead guard, but it’s nice that he’s really giving defensive effort. HE prob knows he is close to the end here unless he shows something that a team will want.
3 – Re Quickley – I am not really a basketball x’s and o’s guy and of course they were playing against a bench unit (being charitable!), but there is something to be said for the ball just moving more crisply when he was in the game. Payton and Randle really have a habit of just pounding the ball and not doing anything specific. In the 4th quarter last night, everyone was moving all the time.
In other words, they should commit to Ed Weiland’s process that led to ranking 5 total busts in the first 11 picks of the 2016 draft, i.e worse than any ham-and-egger in the mock draft business did, and hasn’t been heard from since. Right, that’s the ticket to maximizing opportunities…in life…in friends…well he did predict that Chriss was wildly overrated, so there’s that!
I liked Quickly’s game. He made those 3 ally hoop assists seem easy, and he created them by going past his man and moving towards the basket without hesitation as if it was nothing for him. I love players who make things look easy – even if it’s just one or two skills. He’s also very confident in a happy-go-lucky way, which is great on a dreary, heavy, depressed team like the Knicks.
I think this would be a relatively fun team to watch. They’ll lose a lot but they won’t be boring.
I agree with @Early Bird about the heroes of the game. I rewatched the game, paying particular attention to the 3rd and 4th quarters. Payton was definitely the culprit in the 3rd with a hearty assist from Randle. Payton’s shooting was half the problem. The real issue was defense as he let Garland (+20) run wild. Randle did his whirling dervish into triple team turn over act after he got frustrated by a string of missed 3’s by everyone. Bullock had three open looks and clanged all of them.
In the 4th quarter it all started around the 10 minute mark with IQ’s assist for a Mitch slam. Quickly was animated and woke everyone up but really it was DS Jr first, with his defense and then Knox. I don’t know what set Knox’s hair on fire but that was not the Kevin Knox I recognize. If Knox plays like that all the time, good things will happen. And it wasn’t just the 3’s, it was the passing, the rebounds, the hustle on defense.
While like @Pepper, I am looking forward to the Jets tank. I am looking forward to improved play by the quartet of young Knicks: Knox, DS Jr, Frank and RJ plus Tobbin and Quickly.
nobody said that… i don’t know why you keep harping on someone’s shortcomings… he posted his results and is open to critique… he shows his work.. you know his process…. i do the same….
what exactly have you offered in the way of alternatives? if it’s garbage then show us what’s better and why… i’ve been asking for this multiple times from you but you keep avoiding this… you go through the 2013 nba draft and it’s a freakshow for nba gm’s…
do you have results we can critique? do you want to use someone else as a proxy? do you even have a methodology?
z…. i’m trying to be respectful here.. and i’ll give you every opportunity to prove me wrong… but it seems to me that you’re building an ivory tower here… so if you’d like to lampoon someone else’s work based off of a handful of results then you should offer something in return…. anything it doesn’t have to be yours….
that’s only fair right?
As I noted last night, I really don’t get why they don’t concentrate more on the pick and roll. Between Mitch and Noel, they could run it all game.
I’ve been chalking it up to the zone defense, but it’s definitely concerning. If that’s the game plan, we need to fire Thibs. I don’t recall seeing much of it in game 1.
We saw more of the PnR with IQ in the 4th which makes me think we want to run it if we can force the defense out of the zone.
My conclusion is basically that Payton & RJ are unplayable together unless they or Randle start hitting 3s. It was extra ugly last night because Bullock couldn’t shoot either. We were 3/25 at one point (if we managed last year’s league worst team 3p% of .333 we would have been down 1 instead of 16). I’d expect RJ & Elf to both shoot better than they have in preseason , but it’s not like they’re strong shooters.
Anyways, that’s a lot of words to say we should stagger RJ & Payton. One of them needs to play with the bench unit.
I remember back in 2010 when we got Stat and Felton, before the Melo trade. Remember that team kind of started out slowly before STAT went into beast mode and then they won like 10 games in a row and found their groove?
I remember a big thing before that streak was they weren’t running the Felton/STAT pick and roll. People were so confused about it. You got a decent PG and the best roll man in the game. Why aren’t they doing it?
Then they tried to run it a few times but the timing was off.
Then it clicked and that became a huge staple for the offense.
The point is….the pick and roll might be the most basic offensive play in basketball but it still takes practice between the players to get the timing down. Thibs has said they haven’t focused as much on the offense. I think we just gotta be patient and its coming.
noble…come on, bro. We can be smart while not always being sticks in the mud or wet blankets.
We all know about sample size. We all know its the preseason against the cavs. People are going to be excited after a comeback win led by the kids where our rookie guard does well in his first dose of real minutes. Immediately posting about sample size and how its a bunch of scrubs they won against is unnecessary. We can temper our expectations and still be excited as well.
IQ is the new Frank. KB’s new polarizing topic. IQ argument is multidimensional:
1. Is he going to be good or not?
2. Is he a reach at 25?
So polarizing that if he makes the HOF, some folks will still say there were better choices at 25.
My issues were with the following passages:
His rookie year didn’t expose anything. He was a dreadful shooter in college (.308 3PT%) with ho-hum 2PT shooting (ranked 20th in the ACC) for an “elite” prospect.
While the author is right that he’s playing next to too many non-shooters, you could say the same about his teammates, needing to play around Barrett’s noted, and long-standing, poor shooting. And why should there not be room for him to run the PNR? If he could play the point, he would. But he can’t, so he won’t. It’s a reflection of his poor playmaking (4 AST per 100 possessions) more than it is some kind of schematic or systemic failure.
That outlet pass to RJ was the quickest processing I’ve ever see from Knox. So quick in fact that I couldn’t quite believe it was Knox at first. And boy does that stroke look good when it’s going in. There’s a path for him to be a good player- a quality stretch four- but it’s still more likely he’s playing in China in three years than here.
And on Quickley- yes the defense was awful but his timing on the pnr’s was excellent. And he got into those sets really confidently- he knew where he wanted Mitch to set the screen and came off under control and found space to make the pass or an open 15 footer had the defense collapsed. My question is can he get into those sets under real ball pressure and does he see both corners and can he make those passes. Frank can’t do any of those things. DSJ actually makes the corner pass pretty well but that’s the only thing he does well in the pnr. Obviously there’s more to playing point than running pnr’s but it’s a very good start.
Why remove agency from Barrett, here? And yes, his stock was higher coming out of Duke because pundits, as well as the Knicks’ FO, ignored the red flags, namely in his FT and 3PT shooting and his meager assist totals.
He is exactly who the bearish among us though he was. Acting like he was done dirty by the Knicks is pure silliness; it’s the faulty belief that pre-draft reputation is somehow objective enough that if a player can’t “get it together,” his team must have fucked up his development. Great players can be held back by shitty coaches via limited playing time or touches, but a coach isn’t going to make a guy a terrible shooter when he’s open in the corner. Steph Curry was a nasty shooter before Mark Jackson got the boot. James Harden was an incredibly efficient scorer in his final year with OKC, despite not being allowed to run the solipsist offense he would become infamous, and filthy rich, for pioneering.
This doesn’t absolve the front office or coaching staff. Frankly, they should have identified Barrett as having major bust potential based on his lackluster college performance. But they are not responsible for him having been a terrible offensive player in his first year. That is baked way the fuck in.
There’s a prior comment in moderation for some reason, if the above post appears in medias res.
you’re sinister captain b, pretty funny too…i say this as someone whom is most likely worthy of being mocked daily…i’d say at this point early bird’s best play is to completely ignore your existence…
don’t stop though, if anything broaden your scope a bit…
Agreed. It really stood out.
hooooooold up…. where is this ‘ho-hum 2pt shooting’ coming from? that he was ranked 20th in the acc? why would you mix a ranking amongst all players that includes pf/c’s and act like that’s a knock against him?
i’m not sure if you’re being hyperbolic for the sake of making a point.. but what is this even based on? lackluster college performance? was every other sf coming out of the draft also similarly terrible?
please someone answer one of my questions!
and also every draft model basically had rj no lower than 5th….
so yes … rj’s prowess in college is pretty much universally recognized despite being 20th in the acc in 2pt fg %…. somehow lebron james is recognized as a good player despite being 24th in the whole measley nba in 2pt fg% too…
Hah, you actually think that being ranked 20th within a single conference (even the ACC) is the sign of an elite player? That’s some funny shit, man. And yeah, Cam Johnson, Anthony Lawrence, Terence Mann, Nickeil Alexander-Walker and CJ Bryce, all with a higher conversion rate, were all PF/Cs. Right. (None of them played off the otherworldly gravity of Zion Williamson, either.)
Imagine being so deluded by your own draft-prospecting ego that you think R.J. Barrett had a good freshman year. Hilarious, man. Barrett earned the “Duke” pedigree off his H.S. scouting reports and rode it to a top-3 lottery selection. If you think he earned it during his freshman year, you are really on a different planet.
In how many games did he take 3 3PA and miss every one of them, again? Eight? I personally liked when he had 7 turnovers and missed half his scant FTA against MSU in the Big Dance. Cam Reddish did his best to help out, I admit, but hey, you think maybe the Dukies might not have lost by 1 had Barrett not coughed the ball up so much?
You’ve gone full ruruland. You never go full ruruland. At least let the guy have a single decent season before you put your whole credibility on the line over him. So far, he’s 0 for 2 and you’re doubling down. It’s unbecoming.
why would i put my whole credibility on the line over rj? i’m not making any bold claims… ppl here have been claiming that rj is a lost cause…. that is obviously patently false based on his pedigree.. which is yes based on outsized PRODUCTION in college….
that is a bold claim based on not much evidence….. in fact we have a lot of evidence of young perimeter players not shooting well but eventually getting better…..
like i don’t know if you even looked into any of this… what is it about 2pt % within a conference is predictive? what was jayson tatum’s 2p fg%? what was jaylen browns? what was brandon ingrams? when did 3pa become predictive?
like you hang onto this one or two opinions about the draft that you must be right on or something because you don’t ever stop talking about any of it…. it’s not me who’s staking my reputation on anything…. i do a lot of work on the draft and i show my work and it’s open to critque… i literally don’t know what you base your opinion on other than pure emotion which is what it seems to be based on because everything else is very nonsensical and not really based on reality….
i am asking you some questions… please answer if you wish to continue…
5 players all 22 and under, all drafted by the Knicks, led a 34-13 comeback in the 4th quarter. Yeah I’m gonna be a homer today. Not apologizing!
djphan,
The thing you don’t seem to get is that I’m not really defending their process or critiquing yours per se. You are the one smugly trashing the process, when in fact your own process, as well as the work on which it is based, has produced results just as mixed as most draft boards. You asked for evidence, and I provided it in Weiland’s most recent results. If you can’t demonstrate that your Weiland-based system invariably leads to picking studs and avoiding busts (and you can’t, so don’t bother posting your/his greatest hits) then what authority do you have to trash what the Knicks did at #25 because it didn’t jibe with your process? You would think you’d have at least some humility.
As to me, you must know by now that I look at draft rankings, scour lots of scouting reports from noted analysts like Schmitz, Perlman, etc., look at stats, and form a judgment of where a player grades out as a prospect in a given Knicks’ draft spot. I made it quite clear that I liked Terry and Bane with our non-lottery pick. Since they picked Quickley, I took a much closer look, and saw some things I found interesting, like his Synergy stats and strat’s article. And now I have seen him play a bit at the NBA-level. I factor in intangibles and situational stats, like virtually every other serious scout/analyst, while you believe everything you need to know is in the standard box score and things you can’t quantify it, e.g leadership ability, b-ball IQ, are trivial.
Some other things:
1) the Knicks clearly wanted Quickley after Maxey was taken at #21, yet rather than lazily taking him with the #23 pick, they traded down two spots and got the #33 pick as a return. To do that, they had to be scouring the other 29 teams for trade possibility. That’s a good process, isn’t it?
2) since (1) implies that they were working the trade wire, they likely had a player like Carey Jr. targeted at #33. When he was taken at #32, it makes sense that they worked the trade wire and felt that the Detroit 2023 2nd rounder was the best deal they were offered. They felt that they would rather have a future asset potentially for a trade package than pick a player (or 2) now that has a 90% chance of being a valueless scrub or bust.
Neither of these things are what I would have done, but the certainty and cynicism with which critics of these moves argue is simply not warranted. It’s splitting hairs at best, and total conjecture based on one’s own questionable assumptions at worst.
Jowles, Barrett’s 2PT% was legitimately impressive for an NCAA wing. Especially when you consider his figure at the rim specifically was 64.1%. You can compare the volume and conversion rate to just about any other similarly situated prospect and Barrett’s numbers will be at least competitive (e.g. higher volume and efficiency than Tatum, Kawhi, and Paul George).
You can chalk this up to the weakness of the draft, but Barrett was in the top-5 of most models I saw. Here are a few examples.
His freshman year was uneven in many ways to be sure, but he excelled in multiple crucial areas. I think he was pretty clearly the most logical choice at #3, but the better question is would a trade down have been a better use of the asset? Right now the answer is looking like yes, but I wouldn’t rule out Barrett changing that.
I think RJ will be a decent NBA player in the end. I just think he will be grossly overpaid for whatever moderate level of production he finally hits.
The Melo comp is a good one although I don’t think RJ gets to that level .
tmz is claiming we promised bobby portis’ great uncle second rows seats to a jd and straight shots show to help reel him in last year
Harden action heating up. Houston reportedly opening up the search beyond Brooklyn and Philly, while Woj and Shams both say Philly has offered Simmons up in certain packages, even if talks aren’t close yet.
Bobby Portis. Someone mentioned recently they’d like to see us pick him up for cheap and I threw up a little in my mouth. He’s the poster boy for the phrase “You can find a million of those on the NBA scrapheap.” If you squint, you can see a tall guy.
Speaking of such, here’s a fun game. We are constantly spouting, “He just needs to improve his shooting” or “he just needs to rebound” or “he just needs to learn to pass” or “he just needs to learn to shoot from 3”. What’s the list of players on the Knicks who actually DID learn to do something they couldn’t/didn’t before? Kidd doesn’t count, he started with a shot that made Rubio look like a Splash Brother, but he got good at three before he came to the Knicks. Lin doesn’t count as he was clearly slapped in the head by the Right Hand of God until he went down to Miami and Pat Ryan, playing Al Pacino in Devil’s Advocate (we ever seen any of those three in the same room together?) took his powers away. Who’s demonstrably gotten better while on the Knicks? I’m honestly drawing a blank. There must be someone.
sounds a little like houston trying to see if they can skim a little more from philly before pulling the trigger
Mudiay. He stopped falling down out of bounds EVERY TIME he tried to make a layup. So there’s that….
it didn’t all happen while they were knicks but a few answers to raven above
1. kurt thomas learned how to play positional defense. pundits always think this is more likely than it is but he did.
2. anthony mason learned how to use his strangely awesome per pound handle to run plays as an nba point guard
3. galloway learned how to shoot running around a screen
4. oakley seemed to get better at shooting long twos, for all the good it did us
5. starks learned to balance his defensive energy with a bit less mindless aggression. prediction: dsj will never do this.
6. frank ntilikina learned to accept his destiny as the knickerblogger white whale
Paul Pierce might be a potential comp. look at their age 18 college numbers.
What is this then?
so where’s your board? where’s their board? your criticizing someone else’s work and saying these guys are better… where are their results? where are your results?
show your work … please…
All together now: Fuck Paul Pierce!
noble… it’s a lot more than two i posted further up… it was 14 models which comprises basically every reputable nba draft model out there….
https://www.tothemean.com/2019/06/16/nba-draft-2019.html
rj is no lower than 5th on every single one…. that’s as much of a consensus as there is…. i have no clue where this narrative that it was super obvious that he was going to be a bust and that he was skating by on hs pedigree…
that is a COMPLETE fabrication…. i’m sorry… there’s zero evidence of this and i’m calling bullshit….
I don’t think it takes that much squinting at RJ Barrett to see a decent basketball player. He’s a pretty well-rounded player really. He’s just bad at throwing the ball in the basket, which is, uh, a pretty important part of the sport.
He’s good at getting to the cup, not great at finishing. He’s athletic enough to get open, but when he shoots the open shots they don’t often go in. He’s strong and quick enough to draw fouls, but doesn’t convert the free throws. He seems to have good court vision and passing ability for a wing, and he’s also a nice rebounder for a wing. He’s not a zero on defense either.
I know “if he learns to shoot he’ll be good” is a huge cliche, but it seems very true in RJ’s case. The rest of his game is NBA caliber. So far this preseason he’s doing a little better at converting gimme shots and he’s making his free throws. I’m not ready to call him a bust. I’m cautiously optimistic that he might make a nice leap as a second year player.
so morey is outright saying they are not trading simmons.
It’s a fascinating situation to have Morey calling the shots on the other side.
There was an article floating around somewhere about how Westbrook was shocked with how casual Rockets culture was and dismayed by Harden’s unlimited leash.
Probably part of what Morey is thinking. On paper it seems fairly reasonable.
Obviously you don’t understand why I finished that sentence with per se…
I don’t need to have a board to critique your work. I just have to know how divergent your picks are from actual outcomes, which is wildly divergent. As such, I can safely say that your shitty results make your holier-than-thou arguments about process pretty laughable. Tell you what, why don’t you go through Weiland’s 2016 board and explain why his rankings were no better than any of the other boards out there, especially in the lottery. Heres what the great Ed Weiland said: “Here is my final top60. Prospects are listed in the order I would draft them all other things being equal.”
Tell me why he would have drafted Skal Labissiere, Chinanu Onuaku, Dragen Bender, and Zhou Qi, not to mention Kris Dunn over Jamal Murray. Explain why Weiland ranked Gary Payton II at #15 over Poetl, Lavert, Siakam, Dejounte, Brogdan, etc. when he went undrafted and had an espresso-sized cup of coffee in the NBA. Explain why Malcolm Brogdan was not on his board (and of course, if the Knicks had picked him at #25 or even at #33 you’d be bitching about the process and saying that he was probably going to go undrafted.)
When you are done with that, tell me who he had picked higher than most draft boards (or in the actual draft order by actual GMs) and who turned out to be a crazy find. Cheick Diallo at #14? Nope. Diamond Stone at #18? Nope. Daniel Ochefu at #19? Nope. Jameel Warney at #25? Nope…
Based on that draft at the height of his powers, his work should be burned and never referred to again by any serious analyst, except in an historic sense. No wonder he doesn’t create draft boards any more.
RJ is a prototypical “if he ever learns to shoot, he’ll be great” guy, but I’d gladly take a guy like that at #3 in most NBA drafts. Sometimes they don’t work out, but when they do, you have an All-Star. There are occasional NBA drafts where there are better guys at #3, so that was a shame, but whatever, RJ was a fine pick at #3. Knox had to improve on everything, Frank had to learn to shoot and be able to play the point. Obi has to learn to play defense. RJ, though, just needs to shoot. His other skills are all there. I’m very much pro-RJ.
He just, you know, might never learn to shoot, which would suck. But it was worth a shot at #3 in that draft/
Obi Toppin better be good because Devin Vassell is looking like an ideal 3-and-D guy right off the bat, and he won’t be able to legally drink for another 9 months.
I agree, but some of that is the lack of competition at #3, there really wasn’t a prospect to consider above him at that spot. Trading down is a different story, but much more nebulous to figure as it’s hard to say in retrospect what trades might have been available.
Desmond Bane doing what Desmond Bane do…
Tim Hardaway has 16 points on 7 shots
Cole Anthony putting up a few numbers…
Yeah, agreed that if it was a better list of options for #3, it’d be another story. But the options were bleak at #3-10 last year, so I think he was the easy choice once they decided to stay at #3.
Speaking of iffy draft decisions, why in the world did the Celtics trade Bane?
By the way, presuming (and I think it is fair to presume this) that Ben Simmons is off the table, how can any contending team possibly beat Tyler Herro as a trade option for Harden? Isn’t that just too perfect for Houston?
And why did the Pistons let Wood go? He has 27 points and ten rebounds on 18 attempts tonight.
The Pistons’ offseason made no sense. I could understand not wanting to pay big money for Wood for a rebuilding team, but they ended up spending more money on worse players who all basically play Wood’s position! And Jerami Grant is not a modern NBA 3! It was bonkers.
It’s like I was saying the other day, the Detroit roster as a whole is confounding. There’s no even realistic upside for most of their moves. They traded their best asset for Bey, which was a reasonable move, but then signed Grant for three years/$60 million to play out of position at the 3 and basically block Bey. What were they thinking?
RJ really is a polarizing figure. I want to believe in the pedigree, the intangibles, the hype, but if I didn’t know he was a highly touted #3 pick, it would be hard to get excited about his prospects. But that said, he is looking a bit better than last year thus far. and he just turned 20 in June. But yeah, the fear is that even if he gets good, he will get paid more than he is worth.
No answer for that, he was a perfect late first round pick.
I have to think Wood told them he was leaving no matter what. It just doesn’t make sense otherwise.
You know who he worryingly reminds me of? Big Dog Robinson. Completely different styles of play, but that general type of player. The guy who gets drafted high because, if he puts it all together, he would be a superstar and then he never really put it together, but got treated (and paid) like a star anyways (makes a few All Star teams due to pointz) and it always sort of limited those otherwise good Milwaukee teams, as they were built around him. That sort of “Not a star, but close enough to one where you still build around him and pay him like one” player.
Again, though, RJ already does some stuff that Big Dog never could, so I’m certainly hoping for more from RJ than we saw from Big Dog, but that sort of player is my fear for RJ.
because what you’re doing is building an ivory tower… every model is not perfect… nobody can perfectly tell the future… if you’re saying something sucks you need a relative comparison to judge it against….
and you offer nothing… you’re sitting in your golden throne saying weiland’s model suck.. but your analysis is… better? someone else is better? what does it compare to? are you even looking at more than one year? if it sucks it sucks relative to something right? so what is it?
and no one ever claimed that it was perfect either.. .there’s plenty of models out there…. i posted 14 of them just before… weiland’s is just the easiest to understand and for others to follow… you realize that right? the best model out there that had the best performance was layne vashro… but the best model was actually a mix of all the models… yes consensus drafts matter….
nobody claims perfect clairvoyance but it’s informative for the purposes of discussion…. and when you say it sucks you need a point of comparison… and no.. your word alone doesn’t mean anything here… not when you’re not showing your work and asking people to trust your word and your word alone….
because you put in zero work.. you offer no evidence…. there is no point of comparison for anyone to make a similar judgement off of you… or any effort to even try to understand it…. have you even asked one question throughout this whole argument? you’re so caught up in the results and you have no clue what it’s even based on….
until you do … you should be quiet….
and yes since you’re so curious on why ed weiland stopped publishing his work in 2017 it’s because he got hired by a team in the nba…. so did layne vashro….
https://hoopsanalyst.com/?p=1704
you really need to stop talking about shit before you understand it… you’re all about learning right? so why not just take some time to read on the subject before commenting?
Obviously you have no answers to the questions I asked, so you’re taking the easy way out…. So I’m left to give your opinions about draft process the credibility that it is due…which is zero. I’ll stick with The Stepien, or The Ringer, or any analysts that take synergy based stats and intangibles into account over your antiquated box-score-limited tripe and the bullshit it spits out.
PS I wonder which team was brilliant enough to hire a guy who would have talked their team into drafting all-time greats Skal Labissiere, Chinanu Onuaku, Dragen Bender, and Zhou Qi in the lottery….
The draft predicting models of today remind me of “eyetest meteorologists” who can tell you the weather by watching the birds, the antilopes and the clouds or can bring the rain and by sacrificing a goat.
Till they find the way and the tools to become as accurate in finding the future talents as Meteorology on weather forecasting I’d propose to treat those models as interesting knowledgeable guesses but not as the ultimate truth.
why would anyone answer any questions when you haven’t even attempted to answer mine…
if weiland is so terrible then put up or shutup…. you have no room in this argument if you don’t put up your results…
it’s not a hard ask…. you talk a lot of shit and you don’t back it up…. you’d rather shit on something for no apparent reason… like why? what interest do you have in shitting on someone else’s work that’s widely recognized in a community that you only have a cursory understanding of? what part of it offends you that you get so uptight over something so inconsequential….
if you dont’ understand it.. just ask.. this is what discussions are for…. this is not the first time i’ve been critical of knicks picks… i’ve been doing this for 6 years on this board.. and it hasn’t changed much… why are you just picking on this stuff now?
and nobody calls it the truth… forecasting is not a crystall ball… it’s not in basketball .. baseball.. football.. soccer… election modeling…. or business…. nobody in this line of work will ever tell you they have some sort of clairvoyant machine….
that should tell you that you’re not really understanding this…. and maybe you’re comfortable with that… but if you try to… you’ll understand where people are coming from….
I understand that “the process is good but the draft pick finally turned out to be a bust” reminds me a lot of “the operation was successful but the patient died”
https://twitter.com/stevejones20/status/1339617240132571136?s=20 Quickley gets some plaudits.
Re: Knicks that added to their skillset, I think of David Lee. He started as an efficient hustle/rebound/garbage collector guy, then every summer he added another facet to his game. He added a jumper and stretched it out to the midrange. He also added playmaking.
I was curious about this, so I looked up Caris LeVert’s big board rankings from 2016. He was drafted #20. I didn’t know which Big Board was most authoritative, so I jotted down four. On those four Big Boards, LeVert was ranked #22 once, #30 twice, and #42 once.
Genuine question: Was drafting Caris LeVert at #20 poor process?
If they had the #28 pick in that draft, as well, then probably. Reaching with a pick isn’t the issue so much as it is reaching with a pick when you have another pick eight picks later.
You are just being obtuse because the outcomes based on your model are laughably indefensible. Come on, you apparently spend lots of time on this stuff. Even in retrospect you can’t tell me where the model went absurdly wrong for like 10 of the top 20 picks it predicted in 2016? Is there a flaw that was corrected for? Which part of the model did Skal underperform vs. Onuaku, Bender or Qi? What about Payton II, Diallo, Ochefu or Stone? Which part of the model did Murray, Dejounte, Siakam, Brogdan, etc. overperform? Was a post-mortem of this utter catastrophe of a draft board ever done? Isn’t that part of the scientific process? Or was it just assumed that the ghastly errors were all outliers and the model didn’t need tweaking? Did you try adding selective non-box-score information to it like Sebastian Pycior did? If you can’t (or won’t) answer those questions, you’re like the lazy doctor who keeps true to last decade’s treatments and shuns advancements while also ignoring shifts in demographics, consumption habits, environmental factors, etc. despite an alarming morbidity rate associated with his oldfangled methods.
Your explanation? “It’s not intended to be a crystal ball.”
This is nothing new here at KB. I recall how Berri’s most ardent disciples clung to his WP48 model even as its deep flaws flushed it into the annals of history. Some ruthlessly dismissed Hollinger’s process (who btw was also hired by an NBA team, like that absolves Weiland lol) even though new (and improved?) models like BPM and VORP align far more closely with the “fatally flawed” PER metric than with WP and WS.
levert was pretty highly regarded ever since his soph/junior year… the thing that held him back was that he broke his foot something like 3 or 4 times including being injured at the time he was drafted….
supposedly the nets had inside info that he would recover well.. at least that was the story from one of the reporters on the telecast at the time…. at that point in the draft there were some intriguing names but no real standouts and levert was in the neighborhood with guys like bembry and beasley and certainly over guys like malachi richardson…. if he was healthy…. and that’s largely been the story in the pro’s…
his stock was all over the place because of the injury but if you instead assume he had a clean bill of health he was definitely solidly in the first round and probably in that 15-30 range…
A notable Knick example was taking Balkman at #20 in 2006 with Rajon Rondo, Marcus Williams, Sergio Rodriguez and Kyle Lowry on the board and the Knicks also having the #29 pick and wanting to get a point guard. Everyone knocked the process at the time, because you could probably have gotten Balkman at #29 and had him and Rondo (I mention the other guys, but Rondo was really the guy at the time).
And I loved Balkman (my love for Balkman was an inside joke between me and Mike for years), but even I had to concede that the process was a bit iffy.
Granted, Rondo would have probably sucked as a Knick, but still.
I was thinking about him as well. He also improved his FT shooting.
why are you caught up in where it went wrong? you understand everyone else gets it wrong too right?
this is why i’m asking for results… who do you depend on? what are their results for comparisons sake? what are yours? if it sucks…. it sucks relative to something right? what is that something?
please… present… your…. case….
yes his model does very poorly on international prospects and he does a poor job for adjusting for age…. these are benchmarks and if you understand how it works then you’d understand the limitations… he never put up a benchmark system for every international league out there… he says so himself…. it’s informative in how you view the box score and it’s shorthand to judge prospects without using vashro’s model….. that’s it….
that’s the purpose for me discussing and using it here.. i don’t rely on it 100% either… but there are aspects that are valuable… just like jesse fischer’s site and aggregation of models is highly informative also…. do you want to shit on his work too?
tothemean.com
again… please show your work… i’m sure many people are now curious since you made yourself an authority on this subject on what non-shitty draft board you can create…..
for posterity please…
Why are you all fighting about the 2016 draft? I scrolled up a bit and can’t figure it out. That draft sucked, lots of teams using presumably a variety of different approaches picked shitty players.
on to things that matter, to me at least…so, finally got around to watching Parasite, which for some crazy reason I thought had zombies…
I don’t know, I thought I heard that at one time about the movie…
enjoyed the movie but – I’m not quite understanding the whole movie of the year thing…it was interesting and clever, well acted, good story, i got the humorous social/class commentary and all, but i just don’t really see what distinguished it to that level…
I got to be honest, I was a little disappointed about the no zombie thing…
I considered awarding Parasite as awarding the director’s long time achievement and a recognition for Korean cinema. The movie was fine, I liked several other movies more last year, but the award bodies seems to do it’s someone’s turn thing a lot.
Somewhere, the The Departed‘s ears are burning.
According to Berman of the Post, Noel, Burks, and Frank out again tonight. More burn for IQ Quintet.
Leveret was just the first example that came to my head for whatever reason – but of course it wasn’t a poor process — they had intelligence on him in terms of him being able to recover fully, and liked the player a lot, and didn’t like the players after him enough to not pick him. I mean, isn’t that the point of having intelligence that other people don’t have? To use it to help inform your decision-making process?
Anyway, the way I think about the draft now is that there are usually a few (like 2-3) players per draft class that are “can’t miss” prospects – you can do whatever you want to them and they’ll still be great. Pretty much everyone else is dependent on coaching and development, which is why the best teams always seem to have “good drafts” and the worst teams always have bad drafts. I mean, is there any chance that Bam Adebayo would be the player he is now if he were drafted by the Knicks? Or that Dinwiddie and Levert would be the players they are now if it weren’t for Kenny Atkinson (who I still think should’ve been our coach, although I am fine with Thibs)?
I really hope that Johnny Bryant and Kenny Payne are as good as advertised…
Because according to djphan’s model largely based on Ed Weiland’s work, there is virtually no chance that a player with a NCAA box score stat profile like Quickley carves out a niche in the NBA because his 2pt%, steals and blocks numbers in college were too low. His model won’t consider Synergy-based stats or more generally non-box score info that goes into many modern scouting models and that look at Quickley more favorably. I pointed out how any purely box-score based model was full of gaping holes, and that dismissing Synergy info, measurements, intangibles out of hand was overly rigid. Weiland’s 2016 draft board was low-hanging fruit. I also posted an example of a guy who in 2018 incorporated a non-box score metric (Wingspan Differential) to Weiland’s model to try to patch up one of those holes. Clearly Quickley would benefit from that, as he has a plus wingspan for his position.
I don’t see the draft as particularly controversial.
It’s a market in which 30 teams that employ very smart and experienced statisticians, scouts, basketball minds, coaches, doctors etc.. get to look at all the same physical data, game film, and get to interview the players.
So guess what?
The market is relatively efficient. Players that turn out to be huge bargains or mistakes after the fact are typically just random noise. Pointing out the times you were right or wrong is mostly just pointing out the same random noise that would not hold up long term.
I’m not saying there are no inefficiencies or mistakes made, but they aren’t typically huge or plentiful. To find them requires very unique and specialized insights that others don’t have or haven’t caught on to yet.
In fact, you could probably argue that NY is in a special situation with some Kentucky players. For example, NY may have been the only team in the NBA that knew Quickley could play PG because NY had access to information that reveled itself in KY practices that no one else got to see except the KY coaches we are friends with. He played off ball in games. That may have been an inefficiency we exploited.
Even all the whining I’ve done about taking Knox over Bridges is half nonsense. Knox could easily have turned out to be a much better player than Bridges. In fact, maybe he still will. The probabilities were simply such that Knox had a higher potential ceiling and a great probability for being a bust. If he busts, that was just one possible outcome, The main reason I wanted Bridges despite understanding those probabilities was that he was a lock to be good defender and that’s my personal preference, but it sure didn’t have to turn out the way it did and may still change.
We’re essentially arguing about whether taking Quickley at #25 confirms a bad player evaluation process in drafting by the new regime. I say the jury is out, its way too early to draw firm conclusions based on how the Quickley pick aligns with djphan’s draft model.
I do not agree with this. I think ‘mistakes’ are plentiful, and that draft order hardly looks like any production metric (minutes played/VORP/etc.) in hindsight. Maybe it is impossible to know better, since player progression is difficult to gauge. But in any case, you cant state that the draft is a known thing.
this is what you’re not understanding…. i never said virtually no chance… there are guys with higher chances of success because the have a much mroe well-rounded game that is SHOWN and DEMONSTRATED through the box score….
quickley does have a low chance of success based on precedent… how low? we don’t know but I can’t find a player with a 41% 2p rate over two college seasons having any kind of success at all… if you can find it then go ahead… let’s talk about that…. there have been players with below 50% 2p rate that have succeeded tho and even excelled…. they’re littered all over the nba…. but that doesn’t mean weiland’s model is garbage… it’s a guideline that has limitations… just like with anything…. but as long as you understand the limitations you can talk about the useful things that it contributes…
the quickley pick has nothing to do with my draft model….. yes i rated him low but so did 14 other models that show that he was a deep 2nd rd player by consensus…. just because i talk about 2p% doesn’t mean i’m beholden to the numbers… it’s representative…. i talk about what it represents….
z… you really need to start reading…. you’ve been misinterpreting a lot of things that i’ve said and it’s causing you to lose your cool multiple times… i don’t know why it would even get to that point but you should stop yourself…
I agree with Iserp. For one, this board routinely picks out players who are clearly undervalued in the draft with a fairly overwhelming consensus.
Clarke, Kawhi, Faried, Luka “EuroLeague MVP” Doncic (seriously how do you miss this?)
There’s some others but that’s just off the top of the head.
Then there’s clear misses and head scratchers that still get drafted: Knox, last game notwithstanding.
This board isn’t perfect, but these are some pretty obvious mistakes by NBA franchises.
No, it doesn’t. Like all these kind of things memories linger over the successes and gloss over the misses. And a lot of things deemed successes aren’t proven successes yet.
Strat’s essentially right. There are very, very few GMs out there who can “beat the market” on a consistent basis. Baseline — the S&P 500 equivalent — would just be something like just rotely taking the mock draft consensus at your slot — very few GMs, if any, can systematically outperform this “index.” Some GMs have fanboy contingents and they too linger over the “successes” and gloss over the failures.
There are certainly on the other end, bad GMs who sytematically underperform the index.
Every draft model makes mistakes, and if you line them all up year by year many of the best ones will sometimes look like Weiland’s–that’s just the nature of this beast. Prognosticating the most productive players in an NBA draft is never going to be a sure thing. I think it’s unfair to treat Weiland’s model in an historically awful draft as indicative of its lack of merit tout court. It feels a bit like cherry-picking to me. I also think the analogy to WP isn’t really helpful. NBA productivity metrics, whatever their flaws, are way more predictive of player performance in the NBA than the models used by draft analysts that attempt to forecast NBA productivity. WP was rightly thrown into the dustbin of history both for its nonsense positional adjustments (a case of bad theory) and its record of serious and systematic mistakes in player evaluation (bad descriptions of what’s going on). But the latter can only be harped on because other models like BPM and WS/48 (which are both *very* flawed) did a *better job* than WP and were fairly representative of who was contributing on the offensive side of the ball.
Note how we don’t have all that in the case of draft forecasting. Some models are better than others, but not by much at the “top level” of modeling; and we don’t know how these contributions captured by the stats translate. What we have there is a much more difficult and controversial endeavor, with some genuine points of agreement: the correlation between stocks and NBA performance, the same with 2pt%, the poor correlations of 3pt%, etc. But these correlations aren’t the kind of thing you can build a whole draft model with–they’re just sanity checks (if your draft model highly values NCAA three point percentage for some reason, well, you had better explain why given its poor correlation to NBA productivity). There’s still a ton of judgment calls and subjectivity in the form of priors getting put into the model, and still a lot of disagreement over draft ordering beyond obvious #1s like Simmons and Zion. I think that’s all relevant to consider before unloading on some guy’s 2016 draft order.
This board has been wrong about players, but there’s clearly a certain type of player that NBA GMs gloss over that’s represented by Kawhi, Clarke, & Faried. This board loved these guys a hell of a lot more than other players whose names we may have happened to throw out there.
There is a bias to remembering successes, but some of the notable failures were also beloved by GMs, such as Cauley-Stein who went 6 and Okafor who went 3. This board isn’t infallible but I certainly wouldn’t call picking 3 fairly similar players noise.
Also, 3 GMs passed over Luka Doncic. That’s 10% of the league right there.
geo…you might be confusing it with “Kingdom” which is a korean netflix series and has zombies…I watched both seasons…it’s pretty good…there are some slow parts but aside from the zombies…the costumes and cinematography are quality…
LOL at the idea that Brandon Clarke and Kawhi Leonard are the same archetype or that “hitting on” Brandon Clarke is comparable to hitting on Kawhi Leonard. Come on now. Let’s be serious.
Regarding taking IQ at #25: We can pretend that we can definitively determine whether taking IQ with the 25th pick is or is not bad process. But we don’t really know. Let’s assume that most teams valued him at his mock position–i.e., somewhere around 40-50 in this draft. For whatever reason, the Knicks thought he was more of a 25-35 pick than a 40-50 pick. Because of this, they took him at #25.
Now the natural thing to say here is that they should have traded down and netted a further asset, but this needs a ceteris paribus rider attached to it. If it’s the case that the Knicks had intel that, say, Dallas had interest–or literally any other team in the late first or early second–then it would behoove them to take their guy now rather than risking him being gone after that. And that’s an open possibility, since mock draft position becomes very unreliable past the mid first. So they may have had intel here indicating that some team was interested and jumped on him. If that’s true and they had some reason to believe that IQ was undervalued or whatever (bespoke analytics, inside baseball from Payne, whatever), that’s good process. If that’s not true–if they tunnel-visioned on two guys in the 2nd–then that’s bad process, irrespective of the reasons undergirding it. But notice that we don’t have all the relevant information, certainly not enough to license a strong inference regarding our FO’s competence or lack thereof–it’s actually totally unclear whether or not it’s bad process without access to the reasons the Knicks FO made their decision and the internal information they had at the time. That said, I think there’d have to be good information and strong reasons available, and I’m skeptical the Knicks FO met that bar. But still, we don’t have that info.
So, I wouldn’t update too much on our FO one way or the other by the IQ pick–it’s not an obvious blunder in the way that, say, that Noah contract was. We’ll simply have to wait and see.
One more thing to add to the draft model post: Draft models often have huge misses, but I’d be willing to bet good money that they beat out the average NBA GM over the course of several drafts. Partly because NBA GMs overvalue “toolsiness” and undervalue guys like Brandon Clarke, partly for other reasons.
Believe it or not, you can have a good player even if they don’t turn into Kawhi Leonard.
And it took Kawhi 4 years to put up better numbers than Clarke did in his rookie season, and we could probably debate whether Kawhi’s year 4 was as good as Clarke’s rookie year. But yeah, sure that’s an easy and dismissive answer. Does that mean Clarke is going to be anywhere near as good as Kawhi? The answer is he doesn’t have to be and that clearly wasn’t my claim.
i think in recent years the player with the most similar statistical profile in college to quickley who was picked and is still in the league is gary trent jr.
I think the most common difference between consensus here and what teams do it this board tends to value “sure things” more – guys with already well established baselines of production. Certainly most publicly available models are based around some kind of average or median projection for players which is a similar logic that prefers guys with higher likely outcomes. It’s not actually obvious to me that this is a “better” way to draft though. Talent curves in the NBA are exponential – the difference in championship value added between the 5th best player in the league and the 10th best is significaly more than between the 10th best and the 15th best. Knowing that, it’s almost inarguably correct to place higher value on players with true top-level upside provided you accept that players have different variance in their outcomes.
Doing that correctly is really hard though – correctly figuring out which players will be better on average is something nobody is getting right consistently as is; adding in another wrinkle to modeling it only makes it harder. Take Kenneth Faried as a perfect example. People here correctly identified that he was likely to have a productive NBA career based on his college production. And so he did, but if NBA teams didn’t pick him because they didn’t see much upside, they were also right – in his 8 years he averaged a 0.5 BPM. Obviously in a redraft he would go higher above a bunch of busts, but if I told you his career in advance, but every other prospect was a high variance black box, how high would you pick that player, a slightly above-average NBA player with a short career?
Z-Man, it’s weak to take one model from one year that looks bad in hindsight and use it to bludgeon the whole process of statistically modeling the NBA draft. If you really think the whole process is bunk, compare the model consensus to a baseline of your choice (your big boards, Chad Ford’s big boards, the actual results, etc.) and make the case your baseline did a better job of predicting future performance.
Furthermore, djphan isn’t even pointing to a particular model in making the point that Quickley doesn’t project well. He’s making the unimpeachable point that prospects with his statistical profile historically have not become good NBA players. This does not mean Quickley himself is doomed. Like every projection based rule, there are exceptions. If you want an optimistic one for Quickley, Devonte Graham comes to mind (he showed more playmaking chops than Quickley in college but had a similarly woeful 2PT%).
Since Quickley will need to fall into an exception in order to be productive, it wasn’t wise to pick him at #25 with players on the board who will need no such exception. The Knicks think they saw something the models missed, which is fine, but the burden of proof is on them/Quickley to prove it. Until that happens the presumption should be that the process was bad, and made worse by the fact that they probably could’ve rolled the dice on him 8 picks later. I don’t see why any of this is controversial.
Yeah, for the reasons you described I think the best approach is to presume the process was bad but allow for an outcome-based revision. It differs from the Noah contract etc. for me in that the outcome could prove the process wasn’t bad, whereas even if Noah somehow was good fo 4 years (lol) the process still would’ve been bad.
I think that makes sense, but I’d point to Kawhi Leonard as a player few people saw having the ceiling he turned out to have and suggest those players aren’t as low ceiling as GM’s suspect. Moreover, all 3 guys are extraordinary athletes even compared to other NBA players. I’m not sure they’re less likely to develop a 3pt shot or improve their handle than a guy like Knox or whomever.
thanks noble… sillky… much more eloquent than i can put it….
and to add to this… the best model out there isn’t one model…. it’s actually the consensus of all the models which fischer found… this is the same thing with poll aggregation and election forecasts… and actually a lot of other things people are discovering… it’s pretty interesting stuff!
what does that tell us? it’s more important to have a diverse set of viewpoints with a variety of predictive factors because just one viewpoint is likely only taking a narrow view and missing something… that’s why when you look at one model it looks crazy off… you look at nba gm’s and it’s crazy off too…which is why taking the time to understand and keeping an open mind to have a dialogue on these things is to everyone’s benefit…
not only does it lead to better decisions… it strengthens our own understanding of things… and that’s how the human race has moved forward…. basketball is no different than anything else….
Yeah I agree that there’s still plenty of room to criticize NBA teams – as I said I think modeling average outcomes for players has proven to be extremely difficult, and modeling variance is probably harder. I’m not saying NBA teams are necessarily getting it right when they pick the tools-y high upside prospect over the “safe” player with a good record of college production, I suspect they’re getting it wrong a lot.
I’m just saying that the variance merits consideration and that just looking at how often such players bust and concluding NBA teams don’t know what they’re doing is probably wrong. Just to take a stylized and overly simplistic example, if we have two players, one with a 100% chance of being Kenneth Faried, and one with a 99% chance of busting and a 1% chance of being Lebron James, there’s a very good argument for picking tools-y player #2 even though his average outcome is obviously much worse.
not only does it lead to better decisions… it strengthens our own understanding of things… and that’s how the human race has moved forward…. basketball is no different than anything else….
how did you get the planetarium musak and the neal degrasse tyson voiceover to play
I do agree and I do think we overvalue it a little too much, but there’s cases like Knox and Mikal Bridges where it seems so obvious the tool guy, Knox, is nowhere near good enough that it probably isn’t worth the risk. Moreover, Knox’s ceiling doesn’t appear anywhere near superstar. But Knox is a special case because he’s just been so unapologetically bad at every stop along the way.
So yes I agree, we probably overvalue those players and their valuation was in part based on WP, which no one uses anymore. But I suspect there’s a number of players drafted ahead of these guys who’s ceiling was so improbable or not quite high enough that Faried or Clarke deserved going above them.
What’s more, I’ve never seen someone release a model and a big board that are identical. Everyone knows that models, both at the individual level and systemically, have blindspots and try to use subjective factors to correct for them.
Pointing out that a purely model driven system wouldn’t produce great results (though you can use tothemean to compare how that approach did to the actual results, and in almost all years it beats it when using NBA win shares as a baseline) isn’t some novel insight, it’s something that model producers themselves will gladly tell you.
If a prospect statistically profiles poorly, that should come with the presumption you shouldn’t pick them over someone who profiles well. That presumption can be overcome! As an example I don’t think it was crazy for the Magic to roll the dice on Cole Anthony, given his EYBL numbers, UNC’s situation, etc. I have not seen any similar explanation for Quickley’s poor numbers. It looks like he was just bad.
Yup I generally agree and Knox certainly I’m 100% in agreement – my personal evaluation from basically as soon as I got to see him play regularly was that “high upside” claims were pretty much bogus; his upside always seemed like (generously) Tobias Harris rather than Kevin Durant. I just think things are generally more complicated than “LOL NBA GMs so dumb” most of the time – clearly there are exceptions though; sometimes teams are just really dumb.
Leonard was ranked in the top 3 by a number of draft models and had a decent chance of going in the top 8 or so, but fell way down to 15 because apparently his actual pre-draft assessment was a “3&D role player.” Go back and look at the scouting reports. You’ll see stuff like “Shawn Marion” and “Gerald Wallace” for his likely outcomes. You won’t find the most obvious player comp — Michael Jordan of the pace & space era — because that comp did not exist until several years into his career, when he made it a reality.
I loved Leonard as a prospect (he even reinvented his outside shooting mechanics at San Jose State, although Clarke wouldn’t change his form until he left SJSU), wanted him badly on the Knicks and was disappointed he went a few slots before we picked NBA Champion Iman Shumpert, but from his excellent by role-player-ish rookie year alone, no one could have reasonably guessed that he would become a multiple FMVP, a guy who finishes in the top slots of the MVP every year, and a perennial 1st-team All-Defensive player. I personally hoped he would be Gerald Wallace, and a Knick.
Might want to wait for the jury to come back on Clarke before you laugh the comparison out of the room. Or at least familiarize yourself with the assessment of Kawhi before he became the best player on two different championship teams. I don’t think Clarke will ever be as good as Kawhi, but he is likely to have a solid career with a lot of Ws under his belt, just like Kawhi does.
If a player tops all of these benchmarks, he’s a decent prospect. If he falls below in any one category, that’s a red flag. The further below the number he falls, the less of a prospect he is. That’s just the starting point, though — I’m flexible in cases like that of a young player who has improved during the year, or a player who has been better in past seasons. The benchmarks aren’t a strict line, but more of a guideline. I try to look at the whole picture.
-Ed Weiland
If you look at Quickley’s record at Kentucky, his awful 2pt% shooting percentage sticks out. He was good at a bunch of stuff, but he shot terribly from inside the arc. He finished poorly at the rim, and his self created 2 point attempts didn’t go in very much. Seems reasonable to take that into account when evaluating him as a prospect.
OMG Ja Morant. But I’d also be ecstatic to have this on the Knicks and during his rookie season stats be damned.
Maybe Morant took a big leap from last year, but it’s always jarring to see highlights like that, wherein he looks like prime Rose but with better control in the paint (as opposed to the crazy midair yoga shit that Rose did) and then remember that, per last year’s stats, he was a very good rookie but just an above-average player overall (which is a great thing to be as a rookie). Makes you wonder how people can look at certain guards who show no real court vision or dribbling or shooting skills and think they might be a viable playoff-team starter someday. Morant is one of the better PG prospects over the last fifteen years or so but there’s no telling if he ends up being Dame Lillard with a two-handed poster dunk special — or, I dunno, a tryhard De’Aaron Fox. The league is damn competitive.
Everyone experiences biases in their thinking based on their successful calls. I experience it endlessly in horse racing myself and among horse racing people I know that I’d consider brilliant. It’s much easier to remember your successes than your failures and we all tend to assume our successes can be attributed to our own superior insights than just random good or bad runs.
It isn’t until you test your thinking against a database covering many years that you start learning whether you really have profitable insights or not. And what makes matter worse is that even if you do, they typically only last a short period of time because other people are also studying the data and results and learning. That takes edges away.
For example, the Spurs probably had an edge overseas at one point, but they don’t anymore.
Maybe at one time length and being able to switch defensively was underrated, but it isn’t anymore.
It takes some really special insights to have a edge in the draft or any other market and you aren’t going to find it in some silly stat that is wrong half the time anyway.
A low 2P% seems to be reasonably common amongst small guards early in their college career, many of which who have done very well in the pros. Just a quick list just from the ACC (%, year of college)
ACC
Donovan Mitchell (46% Soph)
Malcolm Brogdon (43% Soph)
JJ Redick (43.9% Fr)
Raymond Felton (44% Fr)
Chris Paul (44% Soph)
Jeff Teague (44.8% Fr)
Brandon Ingram (not a small – 46% Fr)
Others of note just on a very quick look:
Chauncey Billups (42.5% Soph)
Allen Iverson (45.5% Fr)
Kemba Walker (43% Soph)
Spencer Dinwiddie (38% Fr)
Klay Thompson (42.7% Fr)
Clearly you’d rather have a higher shooting percentage but it’s not necessarily a death knell.
I am essentially agreeing with Silky. I am not saying “the 2016 model was woefully wrong therefore all draft models are useless.” I’m saying that box-score models could likely be refined by importing select synergy stats, physical measurements, situational factors, and other microdata. I believe this because even the “consensus” model data is at best a blunt instrument. The variance between each of these models separately, or in consensus, and draft projections by GMs, while real, is marginal at best and subject to outliers, whether for individual players or for entire draft years. And I believe that there are major improvements lurking out there that will considerably improve the reliability and accuracy of these models in the future.
As to Quickley, my hunch is that the changes in the NBA ecosystem to a shorter, quicker, less 2pt-dependent, less rim-protected one is likely not accounted for fully in box-score-based models. I am merely questioning the reliability of the steals-blocks-2pt% trifecta in his particular case, and expressing the same guarded opinion about drafting him at #25 that Silky described above.
Quickly was not highly regarded for several reasons.
1. He’s a little older than some of the other players in the draft. The assumption being he’s ahead of some of them in his development.
2. He played off the ball in Kentucky. Therefore the assumption was that he is a SG. But he’s kind of small for a SG and the historical record is littered with solid but undersized college SGs without PG skills that couldn’t defend the SG position in the NBA. So they wound up disappointing badly. That’s why even Donovan Mitchell dropped.
That’s why I’m suggesting if NY KNEW (and I mean really KNEW) that Quickley did have PG skills because the KY coaching staff that saw him play in PRACTICE all the time saw it and knew it, but used him at SG because that’s what they needed, then he was a steal at #25. That goes double if some people didn’t dig deeply enough to see how his stats improved sharply over the course of the season (but I’m assuming they were smart enough to at least know that.)
Watching some of the Knox highlights from the other night – you can totally see how you could fall in love with him in 3-on-3. Big/fast/athletic, beautiful jumper. It’s just when there are, you know, the required # of people on the court that everything breaks down.
thank you for bringing them up… so how many of them had much higher 2p% earlier or later in their college career?
that’s basically all of them correct? you noticed that too right?
so what do we have with quickley? we have his first two seasons where he was at 41% combined and didn’t even crack it in each of his years… are we really comparing quickley to these guys?
and this isn’t really all that common amongst nba guards… you’re talking about single college seasons that you picked out of 20 years worth of guards in the nba and out of all the nba guards you found 12 with ONE college season… yet had career 2p% close to or over 50%….
shouldn’t that tell you something?
The other factor we’re not taking into consideration is that Immanuel is a basketball guard with the last name Quickley and the initials IQ.
I’m pretty sure that guarantees he’ll be good NBA guard. Its destiny.
Immanuel Quickley gonna do what Immanuel Quickley do.
538 has put out their projections for the season.
Knicks coming in 28th at 23-49.
Well this is not really a fair comparison – you’re saying how many of these guys in their junior or senior year had better 2p% when of course Quickley never had the opportunity to play in junior or senior year. For all we know, Quickley might have had a 53% 2p% in a mythical senior year, at which point you wouldn’t have had any problem with it.
And let’s be clear – I found these players after looking on sports-reference for 5 seconds. It’s not like I’ve been searching for years.
Look, I generally agree with your point – it’s better to have a higher 2p% than a worse one, and statistically speaking, people with a higher 2p% will likely have a higher ceiling than someone with a lower one. If everything were equal between two prospects then sure, I’d rather have the guy with a high 2p% than one with low 2p%. It’s not even worth arguing at this point — Knicks FO knew this guy very well and wanted to take him at pick 25. Sure maybe they could’ve drafted him at 33 (the disposition of that pick is the most confusing thing to me – I wish one of the beat writers would ask Rose/Perry/Aller that), but if you love the player, take the player. All it takes is the team with pick 32 to love him also and you’ve missed the guy you really like.
That #33 pick is such a mystery – -literally the only thing since Rose came on that feels unexplainable.
Def gonna be a dog fight for the bottom in the East. Owen, I think this is at least part of the answer to your question earlier. The league desperately wants an effective development/minor league and one of the several reasons is they want it to be a place where kids do develop NBA level skills so that teams like the Knicks will play vets over Kevin Knox and will stop giving minutes to projects like DSj. If they can effectively compete against college programs that will be huge for those aspirations.
I think Rose punted the pick for the reasons Z-man has outlined – he thinks it’ll be a useful chip in a trade at some point and/or preferred to kick the can down the road. I don’t agree with that being the right call in our particular talent-bereft situation, especially since we seem determined to give MKG a pity roster spot that could have gone to another young prospect and that there were other guys on the board probably worth taking. Still, I think there is a logic behind the move, even if the decision may not have been optimal for our situation.
That works for me (and Cade/Suggs)! 🙂
Re: Quickley, i think we can all agree if he plays like the last game, he’s the best PG we got for now, right? So let him play and by half season we’ll know if he is a new Devonte Graham or a new DSJ.
i keep wanting to call him DJ Quikly…tonite…
Ham is in the bedroom rollin’ up a stencil
Fatter than a pinky and the length of a pencil
Freakie lit it up and hit it one two three
Shabby took a hit and then they pass it to me
It’s the bomb!
Yo I can feel my senses Get numb!
Yo fuck the forty ounce I need some rum!
I’m chillin’ like a villain Here I come!
And yet we’re only 2 games out of the 10 team playoffs!! (Bottom of the east sucks, lol)
NY Post’s hack writers are gonna love it
Today Marc Berman writes about “Tom Thibodeau’s big challenge in deciding Knicks’ final roster spot”. Well for what we saw of Spellman in the last game, i think the decision is easy.
I missed the first few minutes. Did he look that bad/fat?
The guy who wrote Freakanomics would agree that Quickley’s last name will make it more likely he’s a good NBA player.
He looked really thick, and not in a “Jowles’ glutes mid-squats” sort of way. Looks like quarantine has been tough on him. I don’t think it’s the kind of thing that will just go away with regular play, either. There are some articles out there about his caloric struggles at Villanova. The Knicks will have to reprogram his brain if he’s as addicted to soda as it appears.
Questions of quirky Quickley’s quickness cue quick look to know quixotic Quickley’s quicks quickly and go from quickening to qualifying playoff berth with a low payroll in quickbooks while quilted by quarantine.
Immanuel with the handle, quickly over to Randle, over the top in transition to Toppin, Jesus Gilchrist, what a play!
Quiet! Quit quacking, quivering ‘querboquer quail!
it’s not really everyone tho.. chris paul had a good freshman year and shot poorly his sophmore year… iverson was the inverse… felton had alternating years but … kemba was actually declining….
the point is that outside a few cases… most players establish competency at an early age…
that does not mean you cannot improve in that area… we’ve seen that happen so it can…. it’s just not all that common…. and really it’s hard to separate whether or not it’s a true skill deficiency or bad shooting luck… we’ve only really seen truly bad performance in 2p territory a few times from competent nba players but even then they had established much more diverse skill sets at an early age which gave them the opportunity to overcome that…
we don’t have that with IQ… and so that makes the case for him pretty suspect…. that doesn’t mean he’s definitely going to suck but if he’s going to succeed that 2p% has got to be fixed pretty soon if he wants any shot…. that’s just what the preponderance of the evidence says…
holy shit, Early Bird, yes
Those LaMelo highlights are very impressive. Dude can ball.
Yeah, I agree but man do I miss seeing sparks of brilliance and creativity. We’re in an era when a boring as hell strategy like Harden’s is winning basketball, and an amazing pass to a cutter is always going to be a 2ptr which is less than a step back 3. I’m tired of that. Give me a wow to get me out of my chair.
I think this is a perfectly reasonable and accurate statement, with the caveat that both the NCAA and NBA of today is not the same NCAA and NBA that those guys played in. Shooting the 3-ball well at relatively high volume makes up for a lot of sins. But sure, he needs to work on it and I would guess that he will.
Early Bird, I’m thinking a Dr. Seuss like parody book with the Quickley Quintet as the main characters.
It’s not a knock on Morant so much as a reminder that our eyes can only be trusted so much. If I only watched Morant highlights, I’d assume he was one of the best PGs in the league. His best work is really, really good.
For sure, I’m not overestimating the eye test as a method for determining winning ball.
Just a personal preference at this point, that I’ll take amazing passes even if they come with 4 for 17 like I’m sure many of Lonzo’s games will be. If they come like Morant’s with average plus, or better stats I’d give everything to have him on my team.
Did you see Harden’s between his legs pass to a rolling Christian Wood for a dunk from yesterday? That was pretty cool
Yeah, I hear you. I think any of us would like to see the Knicks win, but if it looked like the 2014 Spurs or 2016 Warriors, that’d be much better than the 2018 Rockets.
hard to imagine the pelicans wanting to hold on to bledsoe, lewis jr and ball…let’s make a deal…
ball’s shooting is concerning (it’s worse than watching patrick beverley play point, who i actually like as a player…especially after the elf experiment, because elf is actually dribbling around a bunch with the ball – with the entire other team rooting for him to shoot from outside…
i’d prefer bledsoe or lewis jr…but, unlikely the pels keep all 3?
let’s go rose, make that deal…
the jazz got mitchell and clarkson to handle the ball and initiate the offense, mud backing them up – grab conley…
quickley is a serious breath of fresh air, but, if we want to be anything more than the 9th or 10th seed we need a decent veteran point guard – or ja morant or luka – yeah, that would work too 🙂
Just wait till IQ gets the rona, the Post…
“Quickley is sickly!”
I saw all those Lamelo highlights and yeah, definitely checking my priors.
Quants quickly question Quickley Quintent, quarrel with qualitative quacks’s quizzical query of Quick’s college quotient quality & quip quixotically conflating Quick’s quicks quirks with Cal quotes conjoined with Kentucky quid pro quo.
See, guys? Quickley was the highest quality pickley of all time!
Beautiful. Thanks for mentioning it.
For sure, and out of these two I’ll take the 2014 Spurs.
Other Q-themed tangentially related to basketball content courtesy of White Men Can’t Jump
This was from 2016 you troll
For you mobile RPG/arena players, it’s like when you cop two or more of the same armor set and you get a stat boost. Pairing Knox with Quickley = UKentucky Armor Boost.
We’re not that far off from being able to field a full item set of Kentucky players – I wonder what the bonus is for a full set?
beat me to it, but I was angling for Diablo 2
But seriously… I’ve been thinking about this whole Kentucky connection convo and one thought that came to me was you guys having a discussion a while back on utilizing market inefficiencies in unearthing unheralded potential players. Here’s my theory:
Schools like Kentucky get more than their fair share of top talent (and that’s an understatement). So much that sometimes Calipari has to play certain guys out of their preferred position, or ask guys to utilize different portions of their skills in-game. So by having a deep, direct pipeline to UK hoops, staff can get inside info on guys whose subjugated roles won’t afford them the limelight to be seen as a lottery pick or fringe lottery prospect BUT can still play/provide value to us. Now you have a more targeted pool for late 1st/early 2nd rounders – provided Coach Cal continues to recruit the cream of the crop and can ask super-talented kids to take a back seat to whoever is in front of them.
Long story short: if I’m cozying up to a college program to dig for late 1st round talent that can offer more than what meets the eye, Kentucky is at least Top-3 on that list.
A perennial 50+ win team. Hopefully
This will happen, but only because the league expands the season to 200 games. Dolan’s razor = monkey’s paw.
The harden clip is at 510 of the third quarter.
Has some all star game flavor.
https://youtu.be/Lcvsa1jqXcQ
DSJ, Payton, and Frank all out tonight. So, uh, we should have more Immanuel Quickley material to discuss!
The Quickley era begins! He is starting tonight.
New thread time Brian!
I have a feeling Clyde will give us all the possible Quickley puns by the end of the second quarter.
One last “bomb” for the end!
If you can still find stars, superstars and generational talents all over the draft board can we all agree that the draft models/mock drafts are still in Neanderthal mode?
And have more faith in “bad process”?
http://knickerblogger.net/immanuel-quickley-and-the-knicks-vs-cavaliers-4th-2020-21-preseason-game-thread/
You’re adorable.
This one is not bad either 🙂