Knicks Morning News (2018.03.07)

I honestly don’t remember a worse PG than Mudiay. I’m very tank happy about him playing these last 20 games, but I don’t want to see him play even a single minute for us after that.

Toney Douglas was better.
Mardy Collins was better.
D’Antoni Marbury was better.

He’s just awful all around.

Mudiay is awful and I don’t have any confidence that this coaching staff knows how to develop anyone. And meanwhile Hornacek (and Phil?) let Longstaff go to become G-league coach of the year or whatever.

Midian being on the team means no more PG minutes for Frank, effectively writing him off as a PG or wasting 20 games of development as one.

For the all the blundering this FO has done, letting Longstaff go really irks me. He could of been Horny’s replacement, keeping a good rapport with the players and keeping KP happy.

For the all the blundering this FO has done, letting Longstaff go really irks me. He could of been Horny’s replacement, keeping a good rapport with the players and keeping KP happy.

I complained about the Longstaff firing at the time, as well, and I remember the familiar refrain of “The Knicks must know something we don’t if they’re getting rid of Longstaff.”

I should have known last night when I was excited that they were finally starting Frank that it wasn’t going to go the correct way. I really don’t get why Mudiay can’t work through his shit on the bench. He’s probably never going to improve, but if he’s going to improve, he can do it while getting back-up minutes, can’t he? Frank is the clear future of this team (of the non-injured roster, that is), so just give him the keys to the offense and see what he can do!

As someone noted the other day, the inconsistency between their treatment of Mudiay and Willy is aggravating. It best not come down to simply, “Mudiay is a guy we traded for, so we have a more vested interest in seeing him work than Willy, who was Phil’s guy.”

what i don’t get is why mudiay was immediately handed the starting role…. frank and burke were absolutely more familiar with the offense…. if we’re all about culture that’s not really a culture move to promote someone without merit….

If the season post-KP injury was going to be about playing young guys no matter the result, which is the only reasonable possibility for Mudiay to get minutes, then why didn’t Willy get the same treatment? So we could bring star prospect Luke Kornet to shoot .222 on 3s in garbage time?

You don’t know what is happening in practice, though. Practice is a magical place where all of the Knicks’ bad moves are explained away.

Josh Longstaff was obviously the worst practice coach in the NBA.

At least he always has his porn career to fall back on

I think the biggest downside of Mudiay is that he’s taking PG minutes away from Frank.

The biggest downside to Mudiay is that he reveals how stupid current mgmt is. And since they just got installed, his presence portends another half decade of misery.

Mudiay is doing exactly what he was meant to do. That’s why I don’t understand why people are so upset about the trade. He was either going to keep playing like garbage and help the tank, or show some promise and be in the PG mix for next year. He’s doing the former. If he helps us move up a spot or two in the draft relative to where we’d be without him, he’s worth the loss of the 44th pick and McBuckets (who was actually a negative value for us because he might have added wins).

This strikes me as wildly optimistic. We didn’t give up a valuable 2nd round pick and move our promising PG to another position in order to tank. We did it because the front office thinks Mudiay can be a building block.

Mudiay was handed the starting job because he’s the most elite tanker at the point guard position in the league. 1-9 from the field with SIX TURNOVERS in less than 30 minutes? Name another player who can guarantee a loss like that in the NBA. You can’t. Playing Mudiay heavy minutes is going to counteract all chances of Tim Hardaway Jr’s April Extravaganza and it’s going to deliver us a higher pick than we deserved this year and RJ Barrett next year.

Trae Young would be worth experimenting with Frank as a shooting/combo guard. Emmanuel Mudiay most certainly is not, and I’m firmly in the camp that believes Frank’s value is inherently limited if he isn’t a point guard. His court vision is his best offensive attribute and we have no idea if he’ll ever become a good enough shooter to make sense as an off-ball guard. He deserves a legitimate look at point guard. But hey, when you get a chance to play Emmanuel Mudiay at the expense of players who might not suck you don’t just pass that up.

On a different note, reading the mock draft tea leaves it seems like there’s a small chance Bruce Brown might be available with our second round pick. You might recognize the name because at the beginning of the season he came up a few times as a possibility for our first rounder. Since then he’s pretty had had a lost season between shooting ineffectiveness and a foot injury, but he’d be great value with our second rounder. Nothing that made him a lottery prospect has been invalidated. I watch pretty much every Miami game and he’s an absolutely monstrous defender and a great rebounder for a wing. He’s got playmaking chops too. His free throw shooting makes me think the shot is solvable.

Ah who am I kidding, we’ll take Grayson Allen.

Being a UNC alum IDK if I’d be able to emotionally handle having Grayson Allen on the Knicks

I love Trae Young and my biggest fear is another team taking him one pick ahead of us because our tank was blown up by Tim Hardaway Jr

I think we all know that the pick that the Pistons traded for Blake Griffin will end up being #1 somehow, which would, in turn, bump the Knicks to #10. 🙂

There’s no evidence that they think Mudiay is a building block. They gave up the 44th pick to get him. That’s not exactly mortgaging the future. What they were probably doing was taking a flyer on a 21-year old former top prospect in hopes that he would discover something and become a useful player. It’s the kind of low-risk gamble that bad teams should take.

I don’t believe that they saw it as a stealth tank move. But many fans anticipated that possibility. And sure enough, that’s what Mudiay is doing. Which is great.

Agree with this. The idea that they traded for Mudiay specifically for the tank is crazy. If all they wanted to do was make a trade to get worse there are a lot of ways they could have done it without giving up any assets at all. Moving O’Quinn and Lee for the best available picks and promoting Frank to the starting PG job and Dotson to starting SG would probably have achieved the same tank-ish ends and netted us a couple extra picks in the process.

That said, low-cost young players are almost all bad, and Mudiay is notably bad even among them. That’s why all tanking teams take this kind of shot on high upside young players, because it’s a no downside situation. When they stink you’re fine with that. If 1 in 5 makes real strides and becomes an NBA player, fantastic. We know that Mudiay stinks now – I don’t think anybody thought that just sticking him in the famously excellent Knicks environment was going to make him go from bad to good overnight. The question is whether they can develop him at all. Most likely answer is no of course, but perceptions of the trade shouldn’t have shifted at all so far. He’s been exactly what we knew he was and we can afford to give him some time. We’re going to be extremely, irredeemably bad for like the next 10-12 months.

Yeah again its comical that people are freaking out about him sucking. Development takes more than a trade to a new team and two weeks of games. We will not have a real feel for if Mudiay is worth trying to keep until at least the beginning of next year. Let him and Frank spend the summer together in a gym working out, practicing their shots and working with our coaches and then we can make a better assessment next year. We have time with Frank as we have him under contract for 3 more years after this one. Burke is a great find for us but his ceiling is a bench back up PG/spark plug. Mudiay has a very very small chance of maybe being a starting PG and his size alone makes him and Frank and intriguing pairing. For me, I honestly do not care who the eventual starting PG is or who the eventual starting SG is. Hell, frank puts on some muscle and grows another inch or two he might be our starting SF. Its just way too early to pigeonhole frank as the inevitable starting PG. And he’s not being hurt developmentally by not playing PG for the last 20 games of a lost season his rookie year. That idea is ludicrous. He’s still getting plenty of PT and experience.

@33

After we all tried to talk ourselves into the whole “but he shot kinda well in Atlanta!”, this is so depressing. The way he plays he only really adds value if he’s shooting well. Oh well, 3 more years of this, thanks Mills!

“Mudiay has a very very small chance of maybe being a starting PG” =/= “Mudiay is an amazing prospect and a great risk for us to take.”

Mudiay is awful and I don’t have any confidence that this coaching staff knows how to develop anyone. And meanwhile Hornacek (and Phil?) let Longstaff go to become G-league coach of the year or whatever

+1
To kinda piggyback off what you said Frank- I still think Mudiay can develop, but like you said- not with this staff. Even if we somehow hired a competent developmental staff, his ceiling is looking more and more like combo guard off the bench. Boy, did that Longstaff decision hurt. He was really good with KP- who knows what kinda growth he would have had this season with Longstaff. Ntilikina as well.

Right now, I am just trying to figure where Mudiay sits on the probability of becoming a good player matrix relative to the historical benchmarks provided by Eddy Curry and Andrea Bargnani.

I wonder what’s gonna happen with TJ Warren with Jackson’s emergence & pedigree? Would he be expendable and would his poison pill deal be a huge deterrent to the Knicks trade for him? Hypothetically, what would it take to add him?

Yeah again its comical that people are freaking out about him sucking. We will not have a real feel for if Mudiay is worth trying to keep until at least the beginning of next year.

That only makes sense if you believe that his career statistics won’t be posted to the internet until the beginning of next year.

And he’s not being hurt developmentally by not playing PG for the last 20 games of a lost season his rookie year. That idea is ludicrous.

That’s both a ludicrous, and disingenuous (because you threw in ’20 games), statement. Frank should have been getting starter’s minutes the instant KP went down, which would have been about half a season’s worth of on the job training. It’s the same nonsense as the Giants playing Geno Smith over Davis Webb last season.

Mudiay has played 4000+ minutes in the NBA and he is currently playing the worst ball of his career. He has shown absolutely zero growth since he has been in the league. He’s a replacement player, you can find guys like him on the scrap heap and they don’t cost you a second round pick. His high draft position is the only reason he is still in the NBA. He doesn’t deserve to ever see the floor.

Sure, he’s good at tankball. Great. So are dozens of guys in the G league.

In his second year with the Knicks Timmy was one of the 4-5 worst players in the NBA. He’s okay now. So what I’m saying is we should send Mudiay to Atlanta or hire budes

Once he gets some time under this great developmental organization, I’m sure the sky is the limit for him… the Fraport Skyliners of Frankfurt seems like a good landing place, maybe, if he can beat the immortal Philip Scrubb or Isaac Bonga for the job.

I think the hope is that when a player is younger than a certain age, there is still the potential for upside improvement.

The problem is:

1. Hardaway is not that young anymore. If he was going to break out, it probably would have happened this year. It did not.

2. Mudiay is sooo bad, assuming he does improve, that will only make him a decent backup.

For either to Hardaway or Mudiay to become a high level starter, they would have to do something that is getting increasingly unlikely.

I’ve basically written Hardaway off as a solid but overpaid 6th man masquerading as a starter because, well, the Knicks suck and are dumb. He’s not good enough, consistent enough, and doesn’t have a high enough basketball IQ to be a key trusted member of the starting unit. He does one or more atrociously stupid things and takes several terrible shots every night. But he can occasionally get hot and really light it up. That’s what you want from your 6th man making around half as much. Putting him into the Rose cap space at that price for that long wasn’t as bad as the Noah deal, but it was foolish and hurt the rebuild.

The Mudiay trade was a total waste of 2nd rounder and McBuckets. Worse, it’s hurting Frank. We already had Frank and Burke at PG and we are unlikely to ever get anything for back for Mudiay. On the flip side, if we should happen to get the 8th seed or better (with Mudiay’s help of course), there’s some very small chance it will help us select the better player out of the draft. But getting the 8th seed and then being smart enough to use it correctly seems like more luck than skill, especially with this management.

I was willing to blame Hardaway and Baker on Mills, but Perry was in charge for Hernangomez and Mudiay. Neither is catastrophic, but neither is encouraging.

you ever wonder if maybe at some time or another you did something bad – and, now your punishment is to be a knick fan…

little to nothing that this team does is positive…i mean there are a few enjoyable moments throughout a season – which usually occur very early on…and, i did enjoy watching frank get his first start last night…

there are a few players whom come through the team that i really enjoy rooting for…by an large though – the majority of every knick season for almost the last two decades is spent questioning our talent level both on and off the court…

trying to make sense of what’s happening, and, find some small glimmer of hope in the team’s future…

i think it was strat’s: “it’s tough being us” that’s really got me thinking about this…i mean rooting for a team is supposed to be enjoyable – right?

what exactly is this shit???

Melo deal also got them a fairly high second rounder.

By the way, I love the idea of “Eh, they only lost a #45 pick for Mudiay, who cares?” mixed with “They got the #38 pick in the Melo trade. What a valuable pick-up!”

There you go. That’s it in a nutshell.

“Being a four, I got to wait for people to get me involved and things like that,’’ Beasley said. “So that’s tough. But I do it.’’

Now we know why he hates being a four, despite him clearly being better suited to be a four than a three.

Trust me, we’re not gonna see better players than Mudiay with what would have amounted to a mid to late 40’s pick.

Mudiay is the worst guard in the NBA. You could find that with the 45th pick, but you’d have to draft a player who was actually good in college, instead of a player whose team made it to, say, the Final Four.

The Kentucky Wildcats, e.g., currently have 26 former players active in 2017-18, which accounts for over a quarter of Kentucky’s all-time NBA players. (This is an incredible stat, btw.) Of those 26, twenty-five were drafted.

Let’s not kid ourselves into thinking that all 25 were viable NBA prospects — many were role players on national-TV-friendly teams that made a bunch of deep NCAA tournament runs. There’s no way that 6 Kentucky players get drafted in 2012 if Anthony Davis doesn’t lead the team to a championship. Doron Lamb, Marquis Teague, and Darius Miller were scrubs and MKG was a bust at #2 overall. Yet there they were, drafted like they were viable NBAers.

Pick the BPA and you can find yourself a Jokic with the 40th pick. Pick an “upside” “pedigree” player and end up with Emmanuel “Tony Wroten 2.0” Mudiay 2.0.

As of now, we’re going into next season with, if you’re optimistic or neutral about Timmy, one legit nba starter. And we’ll be lucky to get the 8th pick.
The only situations that I see that are more depressing than ours are Memphis and the sad sack Nets.
I leave out Atl because Doncic, Prince, Collins and Schoeder’s hair might be fun to watch.
Next season will be all about developing Frank and this year’s #1 while tanking like hell.

We’re gonna be the worst team in the league if KOQ leaves next season.

Good. Porzingis is not a superstar and we have almost nothing of value on the roster. The only path to true rebuild is to hit a pair of homers in consecutive drafts and then fill out the roster with solid, cheap talent. The Knicks need to lose to win. There’s no other way.

I think the Mudiay deal was dumb, and that was when it looked at first like a pick swap. But saying that it’s bad because “it hurts Frank” is nonsense. The only thing hurting Frank right now is Frank. At this time, he sucks at basketball, and playing him 40 mpg is not going to make him better right now; if anything, it could further damage his confidence. Frank should have been in the G-League for much of this year, and the smart move would have been to send him down when Burke was brought up.

That said, if Frank looked even remotely like a PG for a reasonable stretch this year, the Mudiay deal probably doesn’t get done. Rightly or wrongly, Perry and Mills (and maybe Hornacek) have clearly given up all but the faintest glimmer of hope of Frank ever evolving into a reasonably good PG (forget great, that ship has sailed.)

Damn. Bit of a depressing read this morning,

That’s what I thought when I saw Mudiay’s stat line.

The only path to true rebuild is to hit a pair of homers in consecutive drafts and then fill out the roster with solid, cheap talent. The Knicks need to lose to win. There’s no other way.

If we get Mikal Bridges (or anyone who is a legit NBA starter) this year and let Mudiay drive the tank next year and luck into an actual superstar in the next draft to go with Porzingis, Bridges, Ntilikina, we could have a nice core for 2019-20.

So we’ve got that going for us.

But we’ll still have Mills and Perry and they will screw it up.

@70

The Knicks did not want to tank this year and they certainly don’t want to tank next year. They want to get BETTER. They’ve said their job is to add players and use their picks so when KP comes back he comes back to a better team.

The reason they’ve been trying to add PGs is that they know Frank is probably still a couple of years away from being a legitimate starter on a good team no matter which position he plays. That means they still need a starting PG for next year. It could be Burke. They were hoping it would be Mudiay. They may wind up adding someone else like Jack as a filler. But they have NOT given up on Frank being the long term PG. The other day Hornacek said Frank could be the starting PG next season depending on how he comes back.

I’d way rather have Frank taking his lumps at PG right now than playing off the ball with Mudiay. Maybe he’s not cut out to be a PG and will never get there, but he’s not a scorer either. At least at PG he can learn the position better and make some plays to go along with his defense.

@60

Brian, I get what you’re saying. But the comparison has some flaws.

When the Melo trade was made, the Chicago pick looked like it would be closer to #30 than #38. Getting anything of value for Melo and his megamax deal looked like an acceptable return. Today it looks like a steal.

Though Melo is better than Mudiay, he comes with huge downside risk that Mudiay doesn’t. Mudiay’s worst case scenario is that he continues to suck and helps us lose games. Meanwhile, as much as people hate on Mudiay, it wasn’t crazy for Perry to think that a change of scenery/coach/scheme and a year of development would give him a 20% chance of becoming a rotation player. Giving up the 44th pick for a 20% chance at a rotation player seems reasonable. That’s why I’m not crying over the loss of that pick.

Hope everybody is watching future knick Trae on espnu

I don’t think we would take Young with a top 3 pick if we got lucky and there’s no way he falls to 9 in my opinion.

This is true. They’ll hopefully be forced to accidentally tank next year, but yes, there’s no way that they’re going to try to tank next year.

I think they’ve won 2 games this year without KP in the lineup. Unless Frank improves a lot and they draft a stud, I can’t see them winning many games next year before he returns. Even if we assume KP comes back at the beginning of January (and I see no reason to rush him given they will be near the bottom of the standings at that point), he’ll be under a minutes restriction and will probably take a month or so to clear his head and regain his form assuming all goes well. It’s going to be like this year. They will be trying to win but not good enough to do so.

It’s sad but the hidden benefit of KP’s injury is that we may have been close to a 35 win team if KP and Hardaway were healthy most of the season and we didn’t go into Mudiay mode. We are going to get a better draft pick this year and next than the quality of our team warrants. That’s an offset to the debacle of KP getting hurt.

We can still turn this ship around if we draft well and don’t do anything else dumb.

He’s having an excellent rookie season.

Hmmn, the latest news on Mark Cuban makes me think either someone is out to get him or he’s a real sleazeball.

Mitchell looks like McCollum to me, and looking up their numbers, they’re virtually identical (except that Mitchell is 21 and has three years of cost-controlled production ahead of him). I think McCollum is terribly overrated, and that opinion is as popular as sheltering the homeless out here, but I’d love to have Mitchell as the future PG of my team.

you know – if everything falls together just right – we should be looking at a really competitive team just around – never…

ugh, a sorely need another november run…

“Too bad the Knicks weren’t in position to draft Donovan Mitchell…..”
+1
Let’s hope they don’t miss on the next 2 first rounders

I know it makes sense to tank next year, but the idea of going into next season rooting for the Knicks to lose every game starting with opening night is pretty fucking depressing

I know it makes sense to tank next year, but the idea of going into next season rooting for the Knicks to lose every game starting with opening night is pretty fucking depressing

This all could have been avoided if the Knicks hadn’t traded all their draft picks for scrubs, traded away or failed to re-sign literally ALL of their draftees since Charlie Ward, signed mediocre-to-awful players to outrageous contracts and hired the least-competent front office and coaching staffs that professional basketball has to offer.

This is really no different than any year: Knicks’ season fucked, capped out next year, punt the ball, hope it bounces right, knowing it’ll never bounce right.

Teams like Houston, Toronto and Boston are exceptionally well-run and still need a lot of luck to even advance past the conference semis every year. The Knicks will never be good so long as James Dolan calls the shots. Never.

Donovan Mitchell feels like fool’s gold to me in terms of his projections as a go-to kind of player. He’s a two way Eric Gordon, and that’s what I thought he would be coming out of Louisville. I’d take him on the Knicks of course, but I doubt his ability to lead a successful team as its leader in usage rate. The Jazz have the right idea, though. Having guys like Gobert, Crowder, and Rubio to put around him certainly makes his job easier. At the end of the day, he’s an undersized scoring threat that people key in on because he’s not an elite ball handler. Or I could be wrong and he could actually be the next D Wade.

As far as the Knicks go, I think we need to do something bold like go get Brandon Ingram from the Lakers for the price of absorbing Luol Deng’s contract (either into the void Kanter leaves behind or in a deal straight up for Kanter’s expiring contract). Nobody is signing in New York, so we have to build through trades and the draft. If LAL wants to land PG and LeBron, they won’t have any PT for all of Ingram, Kuzma, PG, and LeBron. Ingram is closer to his extension, so I could see the Lakers trading him to get more cap space to either use this summer to retain a guy like IT or Brook Lopez. Taking on Deng (and not stretch-waiving Noah) punts our cap space down a year to 2020, and at that point all of Noah, Deng, Thomas, and Lee would be coming off the books. We’d have Brandon Ingram, Kristaps Porzingis, Tim Hardaway, Frank Ntilikina, and three more first round picks to build around that year. I’d be pretty excited about a team with Trae Young, Frank Ntilikina, RJ Barrett, Brandon Ingram, Kristaps Porzingis, and whoever is available for us in the 2020 draft. It would have made the losing worth it.

@101 Sign of the Apocalypse

@100

I like the idea at first but it doesn’t seem realistic and i don’t think mgmt would ever punt on the next two seasons by taking deng.