i’ll leave with this

Can we hold you to that?

basketball isn’t a sport where these stats matter. the elite players very easily stand out from Replacement Level Players and can be critiqued with the naked eye. you don’t need advanced stats to tell you how much better Dennis Rodman or 2004-Ben Wallace is than the 8th man off the bench or a D-League player cause its very apparent when you watch. there are no stats that show when Billups hits his threes. you look at last nite’s boxscore and you see he only hit a few 3 pters, but he hit them later in the when it mattered. heart and balls matter.

In our mothers’ basement!

HellAtlantic: yeesh, if you guys like stats so much you should watch baseball. basketball is a game of heart and balls. that doesn’t show up in your silly formulas. people are trying to have a conversation here and you guys are trying to be the next Theo Epstein’s of basketball. guess i walked into the wrong bar.  

Your forgot to tell us to go make love to our spreadsheets.

I would be thrilled if the Knicks were run by a basketball version of Theo Epstein, instead of some blustering dinosaur that chooses willful ignorance over innovation.

Brian Cronin: Because there might very well be a “deal” between these guys to try to make a point to play with each other, a la Wade, Bosh and Lebron. And since we already saw one group of players do that, it is surely not unbelievable that another group would (especially since two of them were teammates on that same 2008 Olympics team).  (Quote)

That might be true but if we are struggling to stay over .500 next year and looking mediocre then I wonder if Paul wouldn’t rethink that choice. Plus if there really was an under the table agreement then wouldn’t Melo have taken a little less money rather than forcing Paul to take a huge paycut while both he and Amare got max deals.

I don’t see how getting Melo makes aquiring Paul in 2012 any easier

Because there might very well be a “deal” between these guys to try to make a point to play with each other, a la Wade, Bosh and Lebron. And since we already saw one group of players do that, it is surely not unbelievable that another group would (especially since two of them were teammates on that same 2008 Olympics team).

I don’t see how getting Melo makes aquiring Paul in 2012 any easier and it makes the team much worse once we get him because we would have to drop everyone including Fields, our 1st this year and Douglas from our team. It would be Paul/Melo/Amare and 9 scrubs. That to me is a much worse team than Paul/Amare/Fields/Gallo/Chandler/Mozgov/etc would have been.

I know people think this trade will make Paul more likely to come here but I don’t see how a struggling team that doesn’t really get along, gets crucified by the press and has no depth really seems like a better option than a young team, that really gets along and has tons of depth would be. It’s not like getting Paul or Williams was impossible pretrade in fact we would have had more trade assets, more cap space and a better team to tempt Paul with.

HellAtlantic: yeesh, if you guys like stats so much you should watch baseball. basketball is a game of heart and balls. that doesn’t show up in your silly formulas. people are trying to have a conversation here and you guys are trying to be the next Theo Epstein’s of basketball. guess i walked into the wrong bar.  

You’re right that basketball is a game with balls.

But he has seemed to pull up from three a lot more often in delayed transition, which is the one time where a dribbler can generally get off a decent attempt.

I really do buy that ‘melo is an very good shooter. The problem is he has an appetite for these very high degree of difficulty shots.