(Wednesday, May 16, 2018 10:44:47 PM)
CHICAGO — Villanova guard Donte DiVincenzo was the red-headed hero of the NCAA Championship game last month, but he believes his teammate Mikal Bridges can become the hero of New York. That is, if Bridges drops to No. 9. “I think he’s top five, personally — as a character person and what he brings to…
(Wednesday, May 16, 2018 6:51:47 PM)
CHICAGO — David Fizdale may retain at least one of Jeff Hornacek’s assistants — Howard Eisley. Eisley is part of the Knicks’ contingent in Chicago at the draft combine. Eisley also was on the list of top African-American assistant coaches that Fizdale compiled for The Undefeated. Eisley was a teammate of Hornacek’s with the Jazz….
(Wednesday, May 16, 2018 4:37:58 PM)
Mike Budenholzer, a candidate for the Knicks’ head-coaching job before it went to David Fizdale, has agreed to become the next coach of the Milwaukee Bucks, multiple reports said Wednesday. ESPN had reported on Tuesday that Budenholzer, the front-runner for the Bucks job, and San Antonio Spurs assistant Ettore Messina, the other finalist, were meeting…
(Wednesday, May 16, 2018 8:28:05 AM)
Kristaps Porzingis has not been doing most of his ACL rehab in Latvia as previously thought, but secretly working in Spain with Real Madrid, according to multiple sources. Porzingis has conducted much of his offseason rehab in Madrid at its training facility that houses its superpower basketball and soccer clubs. Real Madrid’s basketball team is…
(Wednesday, May 16, 2018 7:45:00 PM)
The Knicks have a new coach and they know where they’re going to pick in next month’s draft. Now the real work begins.
(Wednesday, May 16, 2018 6:09:00 PM)
Knicks general manager Scott Perry said there still is no timetable for Kristaps Porzingis’ return from a torn left ACL.
[NYDN] Trae Young’s father tells News his son is a fit for the Knicks (Wednesday, May 16, 2018 9:33:58 PM)
It’s a cliché, but it’s true: not all athletes can handle New York. But Trae Young can.
[NYDN] Ethan Hawke says James Dolan took away his Knicks tickets (Wednesday, May 16, 2018 6:48:59 AM)
Charles Oakley has some company, apparently.
[NYTimes] N.B.A. Playoffs: Rockets Pull Even With Warriors in Conference Finals (Thursday, May 17, 2018 4:01:26 AM)
Houston was written off by many after a bad loss in Game 1 of the Western Conference finals, but in Game 2 they thoroughly outplayed Golden State.
[NYTimes] In a 2-0 Hole, Cavaliers Need to Give LeBron James Some Help (Wednesday, May 16, 2018 10:49:02 PM)
James had a triple double with a game-high 42 points, but the Boston Celtics won again in the Eastern Conference finals.
[NYTimes] N.B.A. Draft Combine 2018: Who’s Invited and How to Watch (Wednesday, May 16, 2018 5:46:17 PM)
The event has almost all of the top prospects, extensive coverage on ESPN and the support of the league.
[NYTimes] Inside the Hamptons House Where Kevin Durant Hosted N.B.A. Suitors in 2016 (Wednesday, May 16, 2018 12:13:26 PM)
The estate at 189 Further Lane was the venue for one of the most significant courtships in N.B.A. history. Durant paid $100,000 for the 10-day rental.
[NYTimes] Corner Office: Chris Paul: Point Guard, Activist, Union Boss (Wednesday, May 16, 2018 9:00:09 AM)
CP3 plays many roles in the N.B.A. Besides being the starting point guard for the Rockets, he is an outspoken voice on social issues, and leads the player union.
(Wednesday, May 16, 2018 11:20:57 PM)
Oklahoma PG Trae Young had the national spotlight on him all of last season. He was one of the most electrifying players in the league as he launched 30-foot threes at whim and dished out double-digit assists.
(Wednesday, May 16, 2018 8:50:11 PM)
Knicks star F Kristaps Porzingis hasn’t been in home Latvia rehabbing his torn ACL injury as everyone expected. Instead, he is in Spain working with Real Madrid.
(Wednesday, May 16, 2018 6:43:49 PM)
The Daily News Live panel discusses whether the Knicks are close to contending and what their plans should be for the upcoming season.
(Wednesday, May 16, 2018 1:45:07 PM)
It’s no surprise that the Knicks didn’t get any luck in the NBA Draft Lottery and stayed at the ninth spot.
90 replies on “Knicks Morning News (2018.05.17)”
These headlines about KP “secretly” rehabbing in Spain are so ridiculous. You literally cannot “secretly” do anything when you’re 7’3″. He’s instagramming from Spain. What do you think he’s doing, rehabbing in Latvia and then flying to Spain after physical therapy every day in secret? So overdramatic. The kid is from Europe and wants to be in Europe. It’s not like he’s rehabbing with a minor league team out there — Real Madrid has some of the greatest athletes in the world working out in their facilities.
Wonder what Kanter and Fizdale talked about yesterday…
@1
Big facts!
Sometimes I think mainstream media just wants to see anarchy
I am anxious to see this allegedly bulked up KP. I think I read somewhere a couple of months ago that his trainer was still focusing on KP’s upper body. Why is no one talking about building strength in his legs? All I know is someone better feed him sweet potato pie, baked mac & cheese, calzones, loaded cheesesteaks, etc so he can come home with a bigger arse and thick thighs lol. He needs to be able to hold position
Of course it’s all chatter, but the idea of Luka Doncic giving the Suns/Kings/Hawks/Grizzlies top 5 the Peyton Manning treatment is doing my heart proud. There’s literally no incentive for a paid professional athlete to join those shitty franchises in mid market (at best) cities. I wouldn’t want to go from Madrid to Sacramento either. The only problem is that if Doncic doesn’t come out this year, that makes it harder for Michael Porter Jr to slide all the way down to nine.
I think it’s a bit fucked up to be honest.
Phoenix and Sacramento I get it, but the Hawks and Grizzlies, despite obvious management issues sometimes, have been perennial playoff teams for long stretches and the OKC stars have shown that you can stay relevant in every marketing way etc even on a super small market. If even drafted stars will refuse to play for those teams then just extinguish those franchises altogether and let’s move on. I don’t want the spanish soccer league to become a model for basketball, where small town teams are 99% irrelevant every single year.
I obviously would respect his choice as a person but it would be very disappointing for the overall situation of the league.
He ought to get placed with a high quality, well run franchise like the New York Knicks.
American AAU players aren’t going to take the risk that the best European basketball talent would consider. Luka Doncic is a big deal and gets paid to play in one of the world’s best cities. There’s no chance that if he enters the draft he’ll get past the Sacramento Kings, and he’d be stuck there or Phoenix for 9 years of his life unless he takes a QO.
Next year, the Knicks, Nets, Mavericks, and Bulls could all have top 5 picks. That’s way more appealing than what’s going on in this year’s draft. KP didn’t commit in 2014 and the top teams that year were Cleveland, Milwaukee, Philly, Orlando, and Utah. In 2015 the Lakers and Knicks held top 5 picks, and Porzingis is now lionized in New York City.
If the Knicks were picking 2nd overall, I bet we wouldn’t be hearing about Doncic having cold feet. This isn’t something a one and done kid from Duke would do, but in Europe the top guys play cities in Athens, Barcelona, Madrid, Paris, Moscow, and London. I can see why Doncic isn’t excited about Phoenix or Sacramento. It’s precisely why I hope MPJr refuses to work out for Cleveland.
And don’t doubt for a second that having Porzingis in Madrid isn’t having any impact on Doncic. The conspiracy theorist in me is screaming that Porzingis is telling Doncic’s people that he’s going to stay out the entire year next season so the Knicks can tank their way into a Doncic/Porter Jr/Porzingis team up in the Big Apple. Even if it isn’t actually happening, Rubio was pretty upset to be a Timberwolf in 2009 and that didn’t exactly work out for him. Porzingis’ situation isn’t the best but there’s already talks that guys want to play with him in New York. That wouldn’t happen if Porzingis played in DC or Charlotte.
Pie-in-the-sky: Doncic really is pulling an Eli Manning, and tells Phoenix and/or Sacramento that he only wants to be in New York. KP is off the table. How much are you willing to give up in terms of players and picks to make this happen?
The way things work nowadays makes it impossibile that Doncic won’t come out in this year’s draft. Staying in Europe one more year would guarantee him virtually nothing (as of now the worst slot he’ll be drafted in is #2; staying in Europe will not guarantee him the top spot next year, and your salary is dictated by the slot); at worst he’ll pull a Steve Francis and tell Sacramento he will never play a game for them so they better trade him as soon as the pick is made. If that happens, I guess Boston will come calling in like zero seconds.
@8 — Doncic is already registered for the draft so he’s getting drafted this year one way or another. The drafting team has his rights forever basically, unless he sits out ALL basketball for a year (if I remember the rule correctly). I don’t think he has the ability to just not come over and get drafted by another team next year (unlike the NFL).
PHX has Kokoskov – I’m sure he’d be fine going there.
Sac is in some part run by Divac and Stojakovic, and they already have Bojan Bogdanovic there — they’re all Serbian and Doncic is Slovenian — not sure how the previous Yugoslavian nations get along, but my feeling is that would be ok (unless Bojan is just miserable there?).
Memphis has Gasol and Conley and could be good pretty quickly with Doncic on the team. Gasol’s probably in Madrid right now talking smack about Fizdale.
Atlanta kind of sucks as a sports town and they’re in tear-down mode. I can imagine him not wanting to get drafted there, but one way or the other, if he gets drafted there he will be a Hawk. They’re not trading him.
Luka Doncic could also never come to the NBA and collect a check playing for Real Madrid his entire life. Not just that, but he could threaten to stay in Spain until he’s 21 or 22, and that could get somebody fired. With all this controversy around Doncic stirring, I’m sure Phoenix drafts Ayton. What this should do for Sacramento is put them in a space to trade down with Dallas, Chicago, or the Knicks because I don’t know too much about their job security up there. Trade down, collect assets, avoid a headache, and keep on pushing.
P sure Doncic still has time to pull out of consideration. Or did that deadline pass?
With KP off the table I’d offer: Frank, pick swap this year, and two future firsts
You guys are hilarious as Carrot-Top.
Mudiay
No, not just tall, he’s big.
He’s got a great handle and skills for his size.
He looks up the floor and makes good transition passes.
He keeps his dribble, head up, and creates. That one needs emphasis. He CREATES!
He can get to the hole. (needs to learn to finish)
He’s a good passer.
He’s a pass first, unselfish PG!!!!!
He’s young. Very young.
Sure, Mudiay has played like shit. But, if you can’t see his positives and potential, it’s because you don’t want to or you don’t understand basketball.
Larry Brown sees it. Juwan Howard sees it. He was drafted #7, as projected. So, scouts and GM’s see it.
Right now, he’s still only potential.
I’ve said it dozens of times. I think his game is fixable. I’d give him another chance.
Even if the deadline did pass (and I’m not sure it did), he could pull a Fran Vazquez. But why? Doesn’t he want to get paid?
Hoola. If a player is shit in his third year, he’s gonna be always shit. And mind you, Mudiay is not untapped talent. He’s by many metrics one of the worst guard to ever play in the NBA.
It would be nice to move up to #2 for our pick and say Mudiay. But then there’s this reality we live in that I figure we don’t have enough to move up without likely losing us KP as well.
Guys, do you realize that even the second rounder Perry gave to Denver for Mudiay was too high of a price for that sad bum?
@15
There were some reports last year that Real Madrid was willing to throw a lot of money at Doncic in exchange for him staying one extra year past his contract expiration (which is expiring this year.) He might not end up losing much if any money if those rumors are true, and if that gives him a better chance at landing in a major market, it’s probably pretty tempting if there’s no real opportunity cost beyond losing a year of NBA play.
Here’s an article citing Givony from last year on the subject:
https://sportando.basketball/en/cups/euroleague/228985/real-madrid-will-try-to-convince-luka-doncic-to-remain-in-europe-till-june-2019.html
I’m rooting for Doncic to defer eligibility for one more year; that’d be a real coup for us even with the new lottery odds, all things considered. He’s probably just being cagey about coming over this year because the Real Madrid season isn’t over, though. Kind of bad form to talk about how you’re leaving before the season is through, imo.
hesi stepback jimbos from this baller ova here
From what I’ve seen of Emmanuel Mudiay, he is a terrible jumper in traffic, he always falls down after contact which means he’s always late to get back in transition, he has bad shooting mechanics, and his handle is probably average. The kid isn’t hopeless in the truest sense of the word, but he’s hopeless as far as I’ve seen it. We’d probably be picking 7th if he didn’t have that concussion, and I’d consider starting Mudiay and Kanter next year all 82 games so we could go 19-63.
This third-year performance evaluation to me is a little bit misguided, or at least becoming blurrier as the demographics and dynamics of player entry into the league change. I’m not as bullish on Mudiay as Hoolahoop but I’m not as bearish as most everyone else around the league.
My thinking here is that using milestone dates to check player performance benchmarks is based on the overall development history of young players in the league. But for most of the league’s history, very few players were coming to the NBA immediately after high school or, in the one-and-done era, after only one year of school. The league has never had the amount of mediocre prospects and players trying to get drafted after playing only one year of college. Previously, only the top high school or one-and-done prospects would come out, but that’s totally changed with marginal prospects leaving school after one year and getting drafted in the second round or playing in the G-league or whatever. So, using “third year in the league” is not necessarily an appropriate benchmark for player development anymore, when so many third year players are younger and have fewer developed skills than was true on average in the past.
There’s a flip side to this dynamic, though, and that involves paying players after their rookie contracts. Because rookie contracts are capped at a certain length, the younger a player is when you draft him the younger he will be when you have to negotiate a second deal. This dynamic can both positively and negatively affect teams (Wiggins demonstrates the negative here).
I think there’s going to be something of a market inefficiency that teams can exploit by grabbing 22-year-old “busts” for reasonable second contracts. Many players don’t seem to “get it” until 23, 24, or 25 years old. Those players probably won’t develop into transcendent superstars like LeBron, but they will be valuable to building roster depth and asset diversity.
Holy shit Mo Bamba just measured in with a wingspan of 7’10”. That’s insane.
I wish Kristaps would stop associating with that snake oil salesman who is his ‘performance doctor’.
Mudiay has been terrible and is likely to continue being terrible.
Perry basically thought that the chance of him being not-terrible is greater than the chance of the #43ish pick being not-terrible — and greater enough that he’s willing to pay a lot more for this year and then free agency.
I think he’s wrong unfortunately — the “hit” rate on mid-40s picks is probably 33% of just being at least a role player on an NBA team — chances of Mudiay being good enough to 1) justify giving up that pick AND 2) being worth the extra cap space this year AND 3) the downside of him being a RFA after this season— those chances are pretty small…
Not an outrageous shot at it but certainly not a good shot at it.
I guess Bamba is not falling to #9. Someone in the top 8 will fall in love with that 7’10” wingspan regardless of anything else that happens. That is redonkulous.
I wouldn’t trade frank, 9 this year and two future unprotecteds for Doncic. I love the idea of him as a Knick but he’s not a can’t miss superstar and that’s almost certainly a great pick next year plus at least two other top ten picks and who knows how good we’ll be in three years when the final pick conveys? That’s what you give for an all nba player about to enter his prime…
@27
It wouldn’t be next year’s first, at least that’s not what I’d offer–that pick is gonna be top 5. It’d be something like 2020/2022.
I’m pretty sure Doncic is as close to a can’t miss superstar as AD, KAT, and Ben Simmons are. Would you make those trades for 5-9 years of control for any of those players? I would and I wouldn’t blink twice.
Bamba is for sure gone now that his wingspan has been measured at 7’10. That’s crazy.
I would trade frank for a chance at what Doncic could be.
Anyone interested in writing a blurb on the top ten prospects? Now that Draftexpress is out, everywhere else is either unreliable or outdated.
would consider Frank +#9 + ONE more top 3 protected pick, but not more than that for Doncic. Anything more than that and you risk dumping your entire future down the drain if Doncic isn’t as good as expected, gets injured, etc.
Anyone who wouldn’t trade Frank for Doncic is such a homer that it’s hard for me to comprehend
Yes, this is an issue we’ve talked about at length. My draft strategy would be to tank hard to acquire picks, and not just at the top of the draft. With late 1RPs and 2RPs you can draft older players who, if they turn out to be actual stars, may not be shoo-ins for max contracts (due to perceived value being lower for older rookies), and also will be locked up through age ~30 on their first extension. This is a twofold win for a franchise, as most players will not be Simmons- or even Mitchell-level productive at age 21, yet they’re already up for RFA/QO discussions, which is a terrible negotiating place for a franchise.
Wiggins is the cautionary tale of a team likely having to pay a young player based entirely on upside rather than actual production. If you draft a stud NCAA senior who isn’t productive by age 25, you can cut him loose. Jordan Bell is the model for drafting an older player, especially since his productivity peak will match up with GSW’s stars’ decline periods. They should continue to draft BPA, even if that means drafting a 23-year-old rookie. Or especially if–
@28 – that’s definitely more reasonable.
I would make that trade for those guys now but there’s some hindsight bias there – they’re all already all star level players in the nba. With any pick there’s some uncertainty… but yes, later (and protected) picks I would probably do.
@29
I could? Is this a request for a separate article or a comment on this thread? It’d also be nice to have a roundtable with some of the people more invested in the NBA draft process like me, djphan, etc. maybe.
@32
Yeah, I for sure wouldn’t open with two unprotected picks, that’s just bad negotiating. But that would be my final offer. Next year’s first would always be off the table unless they were willing to significantly change the structure of the deal.
Nah, it’s the draft that’s fucked up. We’re just so used to it that it seems bad when someone does what anyone should do.
Imagine you graduated college with a 4.0 and dreamed of moving to NYC and could work at Goldman Sachs if you wanted to…. but Nationwide Insurance in Des Moines, IA had the first pick in the draft so you had to go work for them.
The draft is awful. We should never get mad at a player for not wanting to let a stupid process determine his career.
Come on, Mudiay fucking sucks at every component of basketball. Can’t shoot from deep, can’t shoot from midrange, can’t convert at the rim, can’t defend. He has mediocre assist rates for a supposed “creator” and with that he has mediocre assist to turnover numbers. He hasn’t improved at all in three seasons since coming into the league. It’s actually kind of remarkable how consistently shitty he has been over so many minutes.
He has a career 2pt% that is under .400, in like 5,000 minutes. That is so bad you almost have to tip your cap at it. I could see believing in him if there was some little ray of sunshine in those numbers, but there isn’t. He literally sucks at everything. He is good at nothing except generating ping pong balls.
The T-Wolves didn’t have to pay Wiggins. They had plenty of evidence telling them that paying Wiggins would be a bad decision. Someone like Kristaps is a better example, I think, of the problems with drafting really young players. He has shown legitimately valuable high level NBA production in some areas of the game. He’s a great shot blocker. He’s a good 3 point shooter. If he could just improve either his shot selection or his shot making off the dribble he’d be a very valuable player. But he’s also had health issues and he might never get better at some of the things he’s bad at.
I’m trying to mock up our best case scenario and reverse engineer Wendall Carter falling to 9.
Top 4 seems pretty easy:
PHX – Ayton
SAC – Doncic
ATL – Jackson
MEM – Bagley
Maybe the order is different.
Dallas seems like they would go for Bamba. They’ll need a rim protector with Dennis Smith being a turnstile and all.
Orlando seems like a desperate team to me. I think they would pass on a fundamentally sound player like Carter in order to draft a high ceiling player. The two best swing-for-the-fences choices are Young and Porter. Let’s say they take Porter.
Chicago needs a wing. They take Mikal Bridges.
Cleveland figures Trae Young can give them what they lost in Kyrie and never got in IT.
The flaw, I think, is Chicago. I think they’ll like Carter.
I’d take Carter if I were Chicago.
I’m completely fine if we end up with Mikal Bridges.
wonder why no one is bringing up Klay as a comp for Mikal? 3 year college player, superlative shooter who doesn’t do much off the bounce, excellent defender. Similar height. Physically Mikal probably has more footspeed, longer wingspan. Klay did more distributing in college whereas Mikal was (much) more efficient and blocked more shots.
Interesting measurements at the combine. Zhaire Smith is small. He’s like combo-guard sized. No way he can play the wing.
Trae Young is tiny (6’0.5″, 6’3″ wingspan). I have a feeling he will be available to us at #9.
Possible second rounder for us — Justin Jackson might be underrated as a guy who could play small-ball 5 and regular PF – small sample size this year after I think a shoulder injury.’
I’m not sure Sacto would deal this year’s pick for a package including picks in 2020 and 2022. That’d be them committing to a rebuild for at least another 4 years, and I doubt that they’d be that patient unless they hire Hinkie.
However, let’s say Donic tells them he doesn’t want to play there, which is certainly possible. So, they ask the Knicks for this year’s #9, Frank, and next year’s Knicks pick, unprotected. Do you pull the trigger?
Me, too. I think Perry would pass on him to take Collin Sexton, though.
I assume you mean in the media, but I’ve been banging the Mikal = Klay drum for a while here. From two days ago:
@40
I don’t think I can give up next year’s pick in good conscience unless it’s top 3–maybe top 2–protected. That’s a tough trade to say yes or no to. I think the only prospects that even sniff Doncic’s jock in next year’s draft are RJ Barrett, Zion Williamson, and mayyybeeee Nassir Little, so I wouldn’t be distraught if we made that trade, but I don’t think I’d do it unless I knew KP wasn’t gonna sit out the entire year which would jeopardize our draft position anyway.
@39
My favorite is SGA having 3% body fat! Dude is thinnnnnn. Great measurements otherwise though at 6’6 with a 7′ wingspan. And yeah, Zhaire is strictly a SG, which is disappointing to me and lowers my estimation of him a bit, at least for this team of 200 SGs that we have.
Someone should really give Theo Pinson a shot in the late 2nd round, perhaps by buying a pick (nudge nudge.)
You can’t offer next year’s pick unprotected.
I like Doncic a lot. I wish we could have drafted him. I wouldn’t hesitate to give up Frank for him. But I would not give up three lottery picks when we’re as bad as we are.
Frank + possibly Carter or Bridges + our pick next year > Doncic
@34
Ok Hubert, but in this case the Nationwide would be able to pay you the same amount as everyone else and you’d still compete with everyone else. It’s not a similar case at all.
I just think there’s enough things already making it harder for bottom 10 franchises to succeed that we don’t need a new influx of Steve Francis’ guys to make it even more imbalanced.
I would trade Frank, this year plus next year for Doncic, but I would require top 5 protection on next year’s pick (then unprotected for the next drafts). He and Porzingis are about as ideal as it gets in terms of complementary skill sets, as Doncic provides passing, rebounding and penetration while Porzingis can play pick and roll with him and play closer to the basket, while covering the paint on defense.
Doncic would not only be great for the Knicks for his potential, he would also be a perfect fit. The Knicks have weaknesses in pretty much everything he does well.
I’d trade next year’s pick or Frank, but not both. And I think Doncic is gonna be a star.
Bear in mind that Frank & KPs numbers when sharing the floor were great – basically because they made it hard for the other team to score. We can go far with them and a third piece.
I consider this our worst case scenario. I don’t rate Young at all. I think we’re picking 9th in an 8 player draft. But I’m hopeful someone desperate in front of us takes a chance.
I want us to come away with the 3rd or 4th best player on our future team. That’s Mikal Bridges or Wendall Carter. You gotta hope some teams are desperate to get a star, so they swing hard for Trae Young and Michael Porter in the hopes they can be their Curry or Durant, and it lets a solid player fall to us.
To be frank, I don’t think the bottom ten teams should be in the league, so I don’t care if they can succeed. Get rid of ten teams, and suddenly you don’t have this pathetic mess where half the league thinks the only way they can ever get good is to tank so hard for 2+ years. The talent stops being spread out and wasted in Sacramento, or staying undeveloped in Orlando, etc. We don’t have to sit around for a decade waiting for the chance to acquire a second really good player in the draft.
30 teams can’t survive in this league on their own. They depend on the top half of the league generating enough revenue to share with the bottom. Relegate their asses instead of propping them up. The Spanish football model you mentioned is bad, but Spain has a unique economy (not to mention a king that literally backs one team). Give me England and Germany’s model all day over this crap.
Those knocking the draft: I’m from the uk and grew up watching football (soccer) but also basketball and football (your version) because my parents had spent some time livin in NY and big friends of theirs loved the Knicks and Giants. As a fan of a mediocre small soccer team, I wouldn’t wish away the draft/salary cap and revenue sharing. Watching the same 5 teams at the top of the league (same 2 in spain) is mind numbing. And it’s ruined international football too because the best young English players want to play for the same five teams and can’t get a game when they do.
The draft may seem odd bit for $40m guaranteed, the guy can live in Atlanta for half the year for 5 years. I don’t feel that sorry for him when that money comes from fans who get to watch something vaguely approaching competitive balance…
Dude, we’re all watching a league in which the champion of last year, this year, and probably next year was determined in the Hamptons on July 4, 2016, and there’s been little to no doubt about it ever since. The NBA is the most uncompetitive league in the world! You watch FIVE teams compete for the title? I’m so fucking jealous. I can’t recall the last time I thought five teams could win the NBA title. At least in Spain there’s Madrid AND Barcelona, and you have the occasional Atletico, Sevilla, Valencia, etc.
The NBA has had maybe two unexpected champions as long as I’ve been alive: 2004 Detroit and 2011 Dallas. It’s been dynasty after dynasty after dynasty. Once you luck into getting 2-3 top players on the same team, the talent consolidates there and it’s too spread out everywhere else for competition to develop. That’s why half the league tanks to improve their luck. How many teams did you watch tank in England? The system sucks. It’s designed to maintain a cartel for the owners.
The problem with the Spanish league is that advertising revenue has skewed the power to the top teams in the last 10 years. Late 90s, early 00s the league was much more balanced and more entertaining, and I hope they agree to better split the revenue. I think that even between Europe’s top clubs, there’s too much disparity.
A smaller team in Spain cannot win the league, but has other kind of objectives. Being in the top league is a reward on itself, since you can be relegated to lower leagues. There are european leagues which you can enter if you finish in a good position in the league (top 4 to Champions league, 5 and 6 to Europa league). And there is also an elimination tournament running in parallel (Copa del Rey). So everyone is rooting for his team to do the best, and even lesser matches are interesting and have a nice following, something you cant say of a Kings-Magic game, for example.
If becomes more common that highly recruited draft picks and other young stars start demanding trades, refusing to workout for certain teams, refusing to release medial records etc… because they don’t want to play with bad rebuilding teams, some of the incentive for tanking will vanish.
Not that I think Dennis Shroder is a star player, but the very fact that he’s demanding a trade because he doesn’t want to spend his prime rebuilding in Atlanta is telling you something.
I meant that the Wolves would have to either pay him or openly admit that he was a bad pick and try to trade him with the stain of being a ROY who’s looking like another Michael Carter-Williams.
If there’s a time to trade him, it’s now. I wouldn’t sign him for anything more than something like the MLE.
Since 2005 four teams have won the premier league and six have finished in the top 2. Most of those seasons were done for everyone bar the top two or three by Christmas.
Since 2005 7 teams have won the nba title and a third of the league have made the NBA finals. Plus at least two of those were regularly picking in the lottery within the same period. A team that finished with a bottom 5 record in the nba this year has an immeasurably – almost infinitely – better chance of contending for an nba title in the next ten years than one who finished in the bottom five of the premiership.
Competitive balance in the nba is clearly far from perfect. But from where I’m sat it is a lot better than in football.
@48 — I’m not so sure that it’s a great idea for a Knicks fan to be advocating that the NBA get rid of the bottom 10 teams. If the NBA did that, who the heck would we all root for?
Since the advent of the lottery in 1984, 9 different teams have won an NBA title. During that same span, 9 different teams have won the premier league.
It’s the same hegemony. One is determined by size, one is determined by luck.
If you think that’s cherry picking, I went back another 25 years….from 1959 – 2018: 15 different NBA champions, 15 different English football champions. And that doesn’t even get to cup winners.
I could keep going, but I don’t know how relevant results of the 1950s are. This is not a competitive league. The only difference is it’s random selection vs natural selection.
I would argue having no hope supporting the biggest team in the league (i.e. Knicks fans) is worse than having no hope supporting a tiny little club in the midlands. You don’t need to give hope to Sacramento, because there shouldn’t be a basketball team in Sacramento.
Leicester City is kind of the fly in the ointment for the anti- Premier League case. But that was a once in generation thing. Although so was the lack of competition this year. Man City was monstrous.
But I agree, unless an oligarch or a sovereign wealth fund comes along and wants to make a team his pet project and lose a lot of money on it, there really isn’t a path forward. But Man City was in that position a few years ago and look at them now.
Overall though, I do prefer the NBA also because there is a sunset on dynasties built in.
You are sort of swaying me Hubert. Not sure how I feel now.
Hubert – your stats on winners are hard to argue with and you make a good overall argument. I guess the issue for me is I’m a small-market fan in football and I know now with reasonable certainty that my team won’t do better than scraping into the top half of the table for the next few decades.
There’s loads that’s wrong with the NBA and i’m not glorifying the idea of competitive balance that isn’t really there. But if you draft well and manage cap space you can go from bottom feeder to contender in the NBA in a way that – to me at least – simply allows for more hope than now exists in football. Both my football team (Crystal Palace) and my basketball team – and for that matter my American football team – are currently bad. But only one of those three situations is structurally irreparable. The cap, revenue sharing, the tax and the draft distributes opportunity and time limits dominance in at least somewhat more effective a way than oligarchs, individual team level TV deals and uncapped salaries.
The NBA competitive balance overall doesn’t look much better than Euro soccer, however, with good management you could convert a small market lottery team in a fringe contender in a reasonable time.
The same can’t be said about small market soccer teams.
And it’s hard to argue that Sacramento shouldn’t have a team while they can pay a better salary for players than 99% of basketball teams in the world.
With that being said, the draft as it is must end. At some point in the season it just suck to be a fan of a team that has no chance to be in the playoffs. In Europe at least they have relegation and euroleagues that keep the season interest alive for most of the teams.
Today’s NBA is playoff or tank.
There was no premiere league in 1984.
The English first division league is one of the oldest leagues in the world.
The difference is that in 92 the clubs took control of the league from the Football Association and they called it “Premier League”.
It’s a fascinating argument. It would be more complicated to check obviously but I’d love to know how many EPL teams have finished in the top-4 since 1984 vs have played in a conference championship in the NBA (or maybe had a top-4 regular season record). I think that’s where you might start to see the distinction because while it may be similarly difficult to win a title in both I do think there’s more variance in the sub-elite in the NBA because almost any team can aspire to that level being not too far from their current station (look at where the Celtics and Rockets were a couple years ago). On the other hand there are a pretty limited number of EPL teams who I think can aspire to even that level of contention in the time horizon of say 3-5 years.
Manchester United have won the title at the end of half of the premier league seasons and finished second six times. It’s been way less competitive than the NBA over the equivalent time .
Man, this sucks. We could easily be picking between two 6-foot guards at #9. I’m not even sure Sexton is the worse choice either.
Tre and Miles are probably just too tiny to man their respective position… at least Sexton has some length.
That said, it could be a nice move to trade Tre to the Clippers for their 2 picks if they fall in love with him. Or someone else would likely want a shot at Tre.
If we got #12 and #13, I’d look hard at Shai, Williams, and Lonnie. Would also love a late first to grab Bates-Diop and then take Gary Clark in the 2nd round.
I hope we take a good, long look at Lonnie. Not sold on him yet, but the talent/skill package is worth examining.
Uhm, guys, I root for a team (Virtus Bologna) that won 15 Italian titles and 2 Euroleague titles, that’s probably the second most winning team in the history of Italian basketball. Our last title was in 2001 (Manu <3) Quite simply, once money was over that team kinda folded and never competed again, no matter what. There's a chance next year we'll compete for the title, but only because a wealthy entrepreneur splurged some cash. This is not competitive balance. This is the triumph of the rich.
Bamba’s wingspan is insane, although no one should be surprised:
https://uproxx.files.wordpress.com/2017/12/mo.jpg?quality=95&w=650
According to NBA.com, his standing reach is 9′ 7.5″, 3 inches longer than #2 in this draft! It’s a half-inch longer than Gobert’s. But then again, Thabeet had a 9’5″ wingspan. A guy named Pavel Podkolzin had a 9’8″ wingspan. Darko had a 9′ 3.5″ measurement. And DPOY Draymond Green sat way down on the list at 8’9″, and he’s… really good. I wouldn’t invest too much in it.
This entire play by Doncic is being orchestrated with the help of the Knicks management. Mills and Perry visited Spain to collaborate a strategy to get him drafted by the Knicks. Once it was found that they are picking 9th, the strategy was put into play. Knicks will tank this upcoming season, increase the team’s chances of picking first, and will take Luka.
This is my rationalized fantasy and I am sticking to it.
Manchester United have won the title at the end of half of the premier league seasons and finished second six times. It’s been way less competitive than the NBA over the equivalent time .
You’re not getting me….
Basketball does a better job of rotating who the dominant teams are, but that doesn’t mean the league is more competitive.
The NBA offers every team an equal chance to get the best players, but in so doing, it spreads the talent out so thin and locks them in place for so long that it’s nearly impossible for more than a few teams to be really good at the same time in the same year. The league we watch is completely unbalanced.
But if you just had 20 teams and relegated/promoted, a) you’d stop tanking, b) you wouldn’t have so many good players unable to contribute to the competetive balance of the league bc they’re languishing on a crap team that shouldn’t be in the league.
i’ve hyped this guy before but there is absolutely no reason why the knicks shouldn’t be looking at troy brown at #9… imo.. it’s pretty close between him and mikal and brown is quite strong in the areas mikal is weak on… namely ball handling and offensive creativity….
there’s gonna be someone with some brand name recognition who falls to us… but there’s a good chance that brown is better than some of those guys….
@72
hard agree, I think Brown is a top 10 prospect in this draft and is getting shafted because he was on a mediocre Oregon team and isn’t the most flashy looking prospect. I like him more than Mikal but I could see an argument being made the other way as well. I have him at 9 on my personal list.
Odd that Mikal Bridges didn’t show up to get measured. I really wanted to get an official weight on him- I’ve seen him listed at 190, 200, and 210. If he’s on the lower end then even if he adds 10-15 pounds he’s probably a two who can play some three but is going to get beat up by bigger guys. If he’s at 210 now and can add 10-15 then he really might be a 4 position defender. Perry saying that they’re going to take the BPA but obviously need wing help makes me think that Mikal probably will be the pick if he’s there.
i have him a bit higher.. and i’m tempted to put him ahead of mikal … everyone seems to think defensive switchability is the new hotness.. and yes it’s pretty great to have that … but really the rarest thing is having playmaking ability at non-pg positions… and playmaking ability is something we need quite desperately since we don’t even have a pg….
mikal is nice… i think he’ll have a long and decent career… but i feel like we have sg versions of him already on the roster and would exacerbate the”pass to the wing long two “type of offense we constantly got stuck in…
If not for a few lucky bounces, a bad tip out right to Robert Horry, and a great shot by Horry, the Sacramento Kings probably would have won the NBA championship.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hcE6H1LpaQ
In a smaller NBA with more player freedom you’d probably end up with the team that had Lebron on it winning most of the NBA titles for his career.
I think I watched every single Miami game this year–Lonnie Walker would be a fucking terrible pick. Believe me, I wanted so badly for him to be good and fall to the Knicks since my last Hurricanes-Knicks emotional investment didn’t go so well (even though now he gets rotation minutes for a contender, just sayin’). He’s a chucker, and his reputation on defense exceeds both the stats and what I saw. He’s a perfectly good 1-on-1 defender but gets completely lost on switches and any other kind of defensive movement. I hope I’m wrong and he overcomes his NCAA statistical profile and is good! I don’t think that will happen.
If everything was random and you reduced the number of teams, the probability of winning the title would rise for each team. More teams as a percentage of the league would also have a superstar. So the droughts for each team would tend to be shorter.
However, since it’s NOT random, the chances of 1 or 2 teams being totally dominant and winning even more titles than now might rise.
The league was smaller in the mid 80s, but the Lakers and Celtics dominated.
The league was even smaller than that when Bill Russell was winning championships, but it was probably even easier back then to string them together and he did.
The fewer the teams, the easier it probably is to string championships.
The larger the number of teams, the greater the certainty there will be some brutal multi decade droughts for some teams.
Would it be fair for both sides if we trade with Clips – our 9th, plus second rounder this year and next for their 12th and 13th? We take Robert Williams and Troy Brown?
Knicks have talked to Porter, as have many other teams. See the quote below from ESPN
The article also quoted him as saying he has no problem sharing his medical records with teams, so I think it very unlikely he will be available at pick nine.
Oh, you mean the guy that Phil renounced the rights of before he played a single minute as a Knick so that Phil could free up cap space to sign Derrick Williams?
Who did Phil renounce the rights to?
I thought he was talking about Shane Larkin as he’s the last Hurricane I remember playing for the Knicks, but he did play minutes and now I’m just lost.
I agree, I am confused about who it is. I don’t think Larkin was waived either. His contract just expired and the Nets signed him after the Knicks.
I’m not sure I believe in the concept of a replacement level player as applied to basketball (I think basketball is a lot different than baseball in calling up replacements) but if that concept exists, Shane Larkin is probably representative of it. So not signing him to try out someone else is not that great a sin.
Phil traded for Larkin and then renounced his third-year team option before Larkin played a single minute as a Knick. So Larkin became a free agent after his second season in the NBA (his only season as a Knick). This was because Phil didn’t want to have Larkin’s $1.6 million on the cap for the 2015-16 season because he needed as much cap room as possible in his mind. It’s the same dumb reason he wouldn’t take a first for Shump (because he needed to get JR attached to the deal to clear JR’s cap space).
Larkin obviously didn’t matter much, but to give up on him before he played a single minute just to clear up cap room was dumb and indicative of Phil’s whole dumb philosophy as Knicks GM.
Per basketball-reference Larkin played 76 games for the Knicks in the 2014-2015 season, starting 22 of them and averaging 24.5 minutes a game played. He had 3 assists a game and 6.2 points a game. He had a true shooting percentage of 0.504, maybe not so bad for a point guard, a 13.6% usage, a 19.4% assist percentage and 0.045 WS/48.
Again, Larkin obviously didn’t matter much, but to give up on him before he played a single minute just to clear up cap room was dumb and indicative of Phil’s whole dumb philosophy as Knicks GM.
How can you say that, when Larkin obviously played a whole season under Jackson?