“I expect them to play better and more like a D’Antoni team.”

What is a D’Antoni team? The Nuggets were a really bad D’Antoni team. His system doesn’t magically make players better. The Suns had a TON of talent.

I don’t really buy roster flux as a reason for under performance. Plenty of teams make midseason deals. The Bulls last season turned over a good portion of their roster and made a late run for the playoffs.

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As I said, I think Sheed is a heck of a defender whose presence will be missed. He’s not a very good scorer though, Villanueva is better. Gordon is a far better scorer than Iverson. So, I think it’s reasonable to expect their offense to improve. Their D was average last season. It’s definitely a transition year, but they added two talented players in the offseason and lost two aging malcontents.
On paper Stuckey, Hamilton, Gordon, Prince, Villanueva, Maxiell, Wallace/Wilcox/Brown is better than the Knicks’ rotation. And they’ve also got 3 rookies, one of whom might step up given Dumar’s hit-or-miss track record in the draft.

Who cares if Nate or Rose is better? They don’t even play the same position. (For all your reteric about how WC is young and will improve, how about giving the benefit of the doubt to the guy who won ROY as a 19 year old rookie…) Is Rose, Salmons, Hinrich better than Duhon, Hughes/Chandler, Nate??? Yes! Easily. Duhon played behind Hinrich and was worse. It’s not LeBron vs. Wilson Chandler, but they are not comparable. The Bulls also have a better (or at least more proven) SF, at least as good a frontcourt, and a better defense than the Knicks.

It’s true that the Heat are very dependent on Wade. Beasley is their #2 scoring option, but probably wasn’t their #2 player last season (definitely not my much if he was). With the rookie season he put up you would expect him to be very good, but there are some other issues to consider in his case of course.
Without Wade the Heat are still a better defensive team than the Knicks. They’re already a worse offensive team than the Knicks and would get worse… Without Wade there’s no guarantee the Heat are worse than the Knicks (sad).

Re: Pistons…Sheed, for all of his antics, is a very smart and talented–albeit aging–player. Pistons are better in the long term w/o him, but this has all the hallmarks of a transition year for them. They certainly have talent, but may take a while to gel, especially for a new coach.

Re: Bulls…Is Nate better than Rose right now? That is the critical part of the guard comparison btwn NY and CHI, and I think the statistical answer is yes, unless Rose makes a quantum leap this year and Nate stays the same. Dumars is at least comparable to Hinrich when he plays like he did 1st half of last season. Did the leag adjust to him, or did he decline solely due to overuse? We’ll see. Salmons of 2008-09 is clearly better than Hughes or Chandler of 2008-09, but not so much that Chandler can’t narrow the gap by improving somewhat.

The Heat? Wade is probably closer to #2 than #5 best player in the league, and I think comparable to LeBron right now when healthy. Is Beasley their 2nd best player? If so, that’s pretty telling. I think 43 wins is a high water mark for them, but obviously any team with a monster like Wade can dominate 4th quarters and win close games almost single-handedly (like last year vs. Knicks!) so maybe they can go as high as 50. However, if Wade misses any significant time due to injury (as he has in the past) they could easily drop down to 40 or less wins. So, I’ll concede that with him they’re better, but they are more fragile than any of the other top 8 teams.

We’ll have to see if this is an improved team, and I don’t think we’ll know in preseason. I certainly hope it is, but the level of proven talent they injected this offseason is next to zero. The factors you mention definitely may make the Knicks an improved team, but are hardly automatic. My guess is that the key to the season is largely youth: Danilo, Chandler, and Douglas. That’s where a possible talent injection may occur. I would include Hill, but my suspicion is that Curry and Jeffries will be showcased to some extent or another and crowd the frontcourt, and they might never actually get traded… but hopefully Hill is just too good not to play.

I would call Toronto and Washington as questionable as the Heat, Bulls, and Pistons based on last season. On paper I don’t see any way the Knicks are better than those three… maybe the Bulls. The Heat have one of the top 5 players on the planet (maybe top 2)… They have a solid defense around him and an x-factor in Beasley who may either improve in year 2 or implode. They bring back most of a team that won 43 games last season…
We’ll have to see how the Bulls react to losing Gordon. He was their best scorer and a decent playmaker for an off-guard. I don’t think Salmons can continue shooting the way he did for them last season. Luol Deng has to have a big comeback year and get his career back on track. Rose should get better in year 2. Pargo isn’t very good, they should have done something else to replace Gordon… but Rose, Hinrich, Salmons is a significantly stronger backcourt than the Knicks’ anyway (our starting guards may be the guys who backed those guys up). I still think they’re better on paper than the Knicks.
My big question with the Pistons is how the loss of Sheed impacts their defense, which was only 16th last season with him. Iverson was pretty miserable last season, so I think Gordon is a big upgrade. Villanueva is a better scorer than Sheed. If their D gets worse it may be offset by an improved offense.

The Knicks played for D’Antoni last season, so the amount of wins that playing for D’Antoni this season should add is indeed zero. Don’t understand your logic there. If somehow D’Antoni adds 5 wins to a team (which would mean his Denver teams were even worse than they were…) then this is a 27 win team.
Anyway, Del Negro got the Bulls to the playoffs last season. Spoelstra grew up around NBA basketball, is regarded as somewhat of a wunderkind, and led the 5 seed last season. John Kuester… who knows. Dumars’ coach picking record was very good until last season, and he was previously a Pistons’ assistant so Dumars has some familiarity with him.

I should have qualified this with “… when you have already pissed away your 1st round pick.”

I would also not concede that the Knicks are clearly worse than the Heat, Bulls and Pistons. They have lots of unanswered questions as well. None of their coaches impress me very much. How much is D’Antoni worth in terms of wins vs. the other 3? If the answer is zero, I would agree with you. That may be where we probably part ways, since I believe he is worth 5+ wins over any of those guys.

Anyway, we shall see soon enough, I think preseason will be telling.

For a team that finished 14th last season, I would call 10th optimistic.

Orlando
Cleveland
Boston
Atlanta
Miami
Philadelphia
Chicago
Detroit
Toronto
Washington

On paper the Knicks are clearly worse than all of those squads, which is why I say 10th is optimistic… that group puts them 11th already but at least one of those squads will probably have major injuries or a breakdown. There’s another group of teams that the Knicks are not clearly any better than:

Indiana
Charlotte
Milwaukee
New Jersey

If everything goes right for the Knicks they can make the playoffs. Only 4 things are good bets to go right, though: Lee, Robinson, Harrington, and Duhon. (And right for Duhon is mediocre.) Everything else is either a wildcard (Danilo, Curry, Hill, Douglas, maybe Chandler and Darko) or likely to go wrong (Jeffries, Hughes… arguably Darko and Curry).

As a fan I am holding out hope that guys will step up and everything will gel… but I also except that in doing so I am being optimistic.

Horry was an outstanding defender. Very smart player, also. Literally shot the ball better in the playoffs than the regular season. He was a product of his circumstances, but at the same time went out of his way to put and keep himself in those circumstances.

I think Chandler certainly can be as good, I just don’t know how apt that comparison is. Horry could guard bigs and create space offensively with his range. Over his career he played with 3 HOF bigmen (Hakeem, Shaq, and Duncan) and was a great complement to them with his defense, ok outside shot, and selflessness. Had Horry not played with those quality big guys who knows how his career would have gone (long career still, but doubt we’d call him Big Shot Bob). He was certainly smart enough to recognize his strengths and took less money at some points to stay in/go to the right situation. Would not be too surprised to see him turn up in a front office.

Chandler is more of a traditional wing than Horry. We’re talking about him maybe guarding 2s next season, not 4s. Whether Chandler can hold his own against bigmen defensively has yet to be seen, certainly there is no evidence that he can be outstanding at guarding them.
I do think Chandler’s 3 point shot can develop as well or better than Horry’s, but there’s no guarantees.
So, maybe Chandler is the next Horry and needs to find himself a HOF bigman to caddy for. I just don’t know what the probability of it is.

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You can call Chandler humble, I’ll call him soft. The fact that, given his body and athleticism, he can’t finish around the basket nearly as well as Nate Robinson and isn’t a lock down defender… That, along with his overall inefficient scoring, is why I don’t know if he’ll be in the league. Living in Spain I saw a lot of very talented American basketball players who just barely didn’t have enough for the NBA. Maybe they showed some promise on lottery teams for a few years, but never got it. At this point Chandler needs to improve if he’s not going to be one of them. I fully expect him to improve, I just wonder how much. Even in a weak draft athletic wings with similar bodies to Chandler’s like DeJuan Summers, Chase Budinger, Dante Cunningham, Sam Young, and Jonas Jerebko fall into the 2nd round… There’s a lot of comp out there.

I would not say that Chandler was the Knicks go-to scorer. I think you have a point that the green light hurt him. He took bad shots and looked lost 1/2 the time. Most NBA players–especially athletic wing scorers–would salivate for the opportunity to play for a coach like D’Antoni and have a green light. I certainly hope it was just inexperience, but I am also open to the possibility that it wasn’t.

You can’t camp him in the corner for spot up jumpers because he’s not a good shooter (and isn’t a good enough defender to warrant it anyway), you can’t get him to cut to the basket because he won’t and possibly can’t, you can’t post him up… so, this is why I ask what do you do with him? What is his role? He had the opportunity to create a role for himself last season and made himself a medium-volume/ low-efficiency scorer. The few minutes he played his rookie season he was a very low efficiency scorer… impossible to say where the trend is going, but so far it’s not good.