Knicks Morning News (2018.07.24)

Also thinking back to yesterday, Lagavulin is a great scotch.

i was thinking about yesterday……the only thing you guys seem to have in common is your love for this mismanaged and jinxed basketball team, and I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. Then I saw your scotch connection, and that made me feel better. The scotch will make it OK

I’m not sure all of Phily embraced it. They took a big dip in attendance, which just spiked back up last year. Everyone loves it now, that they are good, but they were 1 more embied or simmons injury away from a mutiny

One of the disincentives for tanking will reveal itself in coming years. Now that everyone is tanking, it will be easier to see the tanking efforts that lead to a series of mediocre draft picks that make the team incapable of competing at a high level for 5 or more years and also eventually force them to make early difficult decisions on extending young players with big contracts even though can’t tell whether the player is worth it yet. I believe there are going to be some young capped out mediocre teams and some teams that let some of those players walk and remain buried in lottery hell for 10 years.

This actually demonstrates perhaps the primary benefit of tanking, which is that as long as you stick to the system (or Trust The Process, if you will) it’s virtually guaranteed to work eventually.

If your high lottery picks aren’t productive, you continue to not sign mediocre free agents, you continue to take on salary for assets, and you don’t do anything stupid with your high lottery busts (i.e. re-sign them to poor value deals instead of just living with the sunk cost and letting them walk, or trading them), your team will continue to be bad. So you’ll keep picking in the high lottery, and eventually you’ll get some hits.

Obviously this is a rather extreme approach that takes loads of patience, owner buy-in, etc. but as the Sixers demonstrated people will generally stick around if they can see the light at the end of the tunnel.

IMO, here’s where the catch 22 lies:
You can “tank” for a better pick (I like rebuild strategy better), and that’s perfectly fine if you are in a teardown. Every team in every sport NEEDS to do this eventually. Even the Spurs. But at the same time, premium picks don’t always yield premium players. Remembering the Olowakandis, the Bennetts, the Johnny Flynns, and players of the like- the onus really is on your scouting and talent evaluation- as was stated in yesterday’s thread. The problem in building a roster probably lies more with fiscal sense than drafting.

Shit..even with Lebron being as otherworldly as he is, can you imagine how his career might have ended up if his teams consistently spent money on players like Jerome James, Eddy Curry, Howard Eisley- and bid against themselves for past-his-prime-and-broken-down Noah and knee-less STAT?

In using Knicks players as examples, I guess I’m trying to point out that the Knicks haven’t drafted poorly- just managed money poorly. There are a few teams who have drafted poorly, but it really hasn’t handicapped them as much as one might imagine because they spent money better than they drafted.

So..in a long roundabout way..”rebuild strategy” is perfectly fine. If you lose games saying “we can get the top pick and all will be well”, then that’s kind of a shithead way of building. Never fail on purpose

Tristan’s agent currently threatening indoor land speed record for pursuit of his phone

How in the fuck is Cleveland extending Kevin Love?!

We know the how. We’d like to know the why! lol.

Love has been absolutely mediocre (by his salary/reputation standards) in Cleveland.

Now is the time to offer them Courtney Lee, Emmanuel Mudiay, and Lance Thomas for George Hill’s expiring contract.

Right?

I guess Cleveland thinks that if they just get close to .500 this year, they can convince a big free agent to join them next year.

I just wanted to see how that sounded when another team is that crazy. It sounds pretty darn stupid.

Good point 15. Cleveland apparently is trying to win (make the playoffs) this year, so let’s get on the phone and offer them Timmy and tell them if Timmy shoots 40% from 3 with a .600 TS% he’ll be a steal for them.

This actually demonstrates perhaps the primary benefit of tanking, which is that as long as you stick to the system (or Trust The Process, if you will) it’s virtually guaranteed to work eventually.

Not necessarily.

You will most likely draft some duds. Even if you eventually draft a star player he may leave unless you build around him quickly enough that he thinks he has a chance to win in your city. And even if you do that, it could eventually be close to a 10 year process before you actually have a serious team.

Let’s use the Knicks and Porzingis as an example.

The Knicks have done WELL in the draft. But by the time Knox, Frank, Robinson and next year’s pick are peaking it’s going to be another 5-6 years. The Knicks will be almost 10 years into a rebuild by draft and there’s no guarantee Porzingis’s body holds up or any of those other guys actually pans out into real stars.

It’s not automatic and it can take forever. You need some luck drafting and developing players when they are coming out at 18-19. Obviously it can work, but imo it’s monstrously overvalued now.

The only solutions are to either eliminate the incentive for tanking altogether (e.g. the wheel) or to actually “incentivise” winning (e.g. start with equal lottery odds for non-playoff teams and then give extra ping pong balls for each win during last 24 games of the season).

This presupposes that we can’t eliminate the draft altogether. I’m not sure why such a ridiculous method of distributing talent has become so ingrained in our sports culture that we can’t imagine alternatives.

Why not an auction each year with available cap space? Luka Doncic is on the board. Team A has $10mm in cap space, offers him a $9mm starting salary, etc.

Even if you keep the draft, I have no idea why we can’t use the rolling three year wins average to determine draft order. It’s much more difficult to manipulate. And if you wanted to actually play socialist basketball and reward the teams who perform badly, it would yield a more honest result. The Spurs were a WC Finalist, had one lousy year, got Duncan. The Cavs had 7 years of LeBron, lost him, got Kyrie straight away. The Hawks had a 60 win team that they chose to disassemble, three years later they can pull a top 3 pick. Then you have teams like us, with the worst record in basketball over 18 years, consistently getting fucked because we can’t tank hard enough.

There are endless possibilities once you divorce yourself from the idea that we must have a draft and it must be based the previous year’s standings. Frankly, the wheel is probably one of the dumbest alternatives outside that box.

Just out of curiosity, l wonder if we have any season ticket holders here. I would love to hear their opinion on which way the franchise should go from here.

@24 I have also thought about eliminating the draft as you suggested. But this would discourage teams from paying veterans, which the union wouldn’t like, not to mention veterans. It might also cap out teams on young, unproven players that don’t pan out. Imagine if a guy like Okafor signed on a bad team for $15 mill per year for 4 years. I mean, vets can screw up the cap too, but at least you have a reasonable history upon which to base the investment. Also, if two teams have relatively equal cap space, the team from the more desirable market would have an unfair advantage.

Let’s use the Knicks and Porzingis as an example.

The Knicks have done WELL in the draft.

If you’re using the Knicks as an example, they would have Karl Towns instead of Porzingis if they’d decided to tank, and they wouldn’t have all these relatively useless vets on big salaries

@24 I have also thought about eliminating the draft as you suggested. But this would discourage teams from paying veterans, which the union wouldn’t like, not to mention veterans. It might also cap out teams on young, unproven players that don’t pan out. Imagine if a guy like Okafor signed on a bad team for $15 mill per year for 4 years. I mean, vets can screw up the cap too, but at least you have a reasonable history upon which to base the investment. Also, if two teams have relatively equal cap space, the team from the more desirable market would have an unfair advantage.

These are fair points, but you can easily work around them.

For instance, MLB gives teams designated money each year for international signings. This money is outside team salary that counts towards the luxury tax. And it can be traded.

So something similar could work. Again, I would use three year rolling averages to determine who the worst team in the league is. Each year that team would be allotted x amount of dollars, the second worst team would be allotted x minus y amount of dollars, third team x minus z (with z > y) etc, all the way down. This money would exist outside the salary cap, so it wouldn’t impact veterans (like teams now can sign their rookies regardless of cap room).

Teams could choose to spend all their money on one prospect, save money for multiple value picks, trade an established player to a team for extra auction money to outbid another team, etc.

Also, if two teams have relatively equal cap space, the team from the more desirable market would have an unfair advantage.

I’d like to see an auction-based system where teams receive “cap space” to sign rookies, roughly equal the current draftee payscale. If a team didn’t want to use their whole allotment, they could apply any portion of it to their luxury tax bill. Maybe there would be a scale to offset the difference in value between, say, a $1M rookie and a $5M tax bill (you could argue that some rookies, like Jokic and Jordan Bell, were worth far more than their contracts). I’m not sure what it would be, but it could potentially be $1M in renounced draftee salary for $2.5M in cap hit or $10M in luxury tax.

This would put much more power in the hands of the rookies, which the teams wouldn’t like, but it could also create a more competitive market if teams like GSW or OKC passed on signing a rookie to reduce their tax burden.

Ideally, the luxury tax-paying teams should be in contender mode and perhaps have less use for young players, so it would allow the weaker teams to compete among themselves, with superior cap space, for the premier rookies.

The incentives seem strong:

1) Taxpayers, ideally playoff contenders, give up rookie contracts for better cash-flow.
2) Rookies have more freedom to go to the best available team, as opposed to the well-compensated indentured servitude of the current draft.
3) Despite weighted odds, the lottery injects randomness into a system that should be merit-based. (This is America, god dammit! Pull yourself up by the bootstraps, Sacto!)
4) All teams are incentivized to produce a “winning culture,” or at least a good reputation, so as to attract young talent. If they don’t, they can expect to pay more for the same free agent rookies.

Not saying it would ever happen, but it looks like it solves some problems. Tanking would still be a thing, though.

Everyone fights the last war. After Orlando won the lottery that year with something like the 13th worst record in the league, there was a demand to change the odds so that the bad teams would have a greater chance of winning.

That made tanking so much more favorable, so now we’re leveling out the odds and returning to the same broke system that we wanted to fix 20 years ago.

Right. With the flattened odds there will inevitably be a few years where a 38-win team gets a very high pick while a 19-win team drops. People are going to scream about the unfairness of it and propose a new system.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-rockets-are-melos-best-last-hope/

This is some interesting analysis, largely the implication that Westbrook’s passing accuracy was the cause of Melo’s drop in efficiency. I see that they hedged pretty hard on playing the blame game, but I’m looking forward to the statistical analysis when Melo continues his sharp decline with Harden and Paul throwing on-the-money passes.

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/carmelo/carmelo-anthony/

Yikes.

From the 538 article on their 2018-2019 projections:

(If you can sign a guy who’s only slightly below average for the minimum salary, you shouldn’t pay that much of a premium to grab a merely average player instead.)

Someone paint this on the wall of the Knicks offices

Those 538 projections do not think very highly of the Knicks roster.

A good rebuild doesn’t involve just sucking real bad and then hoping to draft good players. That’s one part of it. A successful rebuild involves COLLECTING ASSETS. You’re probably going to miss on a fair number of your draft picks, that’s why you want a lot of them.

Agree 100%. To me that is an integral part of “tanking” or whatever term one wants to use. “Cheating,” if you will.
🙂

Let’s be generous and say your team has a 50% strike rate finding really good players in the draft. You are probably going to have to draft 6 times to find 3 really solid players and the last guys in that process will take another 4-5 years to reach their prime. So if everything goes according to plan it’s a 10 year process.

Not if you COLLECT ASSETS and have more than your piddly little one draft pick every year.

A good rebuild doesn’t involve just sucking real bad and then hoping to draft good players. That’s one part of it. A successful rebuild involves COLLECTING ASSETS.

I agree, but even that process takes forever.

Look at the Nets. They have been doing exactly what most people here would have recommended when you start from scratch. They have been renting cap space, adding picks etc.. The Nets could very well be better than the Knicks this year given some of the moves we made, but they are several years into their rebuild and still a hundred million miles away from being any good. imo they have less than us in terms really good prospects. They started their rebuild without some 1st round picks and were at a huge disadvantage. But the Knicks started theirs without two 1st round picks also or they would be way further along than they are now despite apparently drafting well. Either way, the “peak” is many years away.

The point being, rebuilding from the ground up via tanking can take up to a decade even if you do it well. Again, I’m not arguing that it’s a bad idea. I’m just arguing it’s just being way overvalued right now. IMO we are going to see a LOT of huge failures among teams that are tanking now and even some of the successes are many years away.

Not if you COLLECT ASSETS and have more than your piddly little one draft pick every year.

Strat doesn’t view anything Phil Jackson wouldn’t do as legitimate

Did we really sign Noah Vonleh???

Nice, now we have regular Mudiay and tall Mudiay on the roster!

Look at the Nets. They have been doing exactly what most people here would have recommended when you start from scratch.

They didn’t start from scratch. That’s the problem, and it’s a point you’re underselling in service of this agnostic, skeptical attitude about tanking. (Of course some teams are going to fail at rebuilding. There’s only so much talent to go around, and again, many front offices are populated by old-boys-club idiots.)

Year, draft picks, wins

2018 29 40 45 (28 wins)
2017 22 27 57 (20 wins)
2016 55 (21 wins)
2015 29 41 (38 wins)
2014 no selections (44 wins)
2013 22 (49 wins)
2012 57 (22 wins)
2011 27 36 (24 wins)

That’s right — the Nets haven’t picked better than 22nd since Derrick Favors (#3) in 2010, and he was promptly traded to Utah for Deron “Is He Better Than CP3?” Williams.

Categorically, they’re not tanking since they swapped all of their picks for nearly a decade. No part of this follows a “rebuilding” blueprint. It’s disingenuous to argue otherwise. Ignorant to the facts at best.

They started their rebuild without some 1st round picks and were at a huge disadvantage.

Even saying “huge” doesn’t accurately capture just how fucked the Nets were after their “blockbuster” trades. It’s franchise-crippling, like the Ricky Williams or Eddy Curry trade. We saw how the Curry/Carmelo/Bargnani trades went down. The Nets did the same thing, only more recently.

Also, I think you can build a contender by picking in the 20-30 range consistently. Perhaps not as fast as adding Anthony Davis or LeBron, but it can be done.

It cannot be done if you’re the Brooklyn Nets and you don’t know your ass from your elbow when it comes to scouting. So not only did they have a capped out mess of a roster at the end of the KG/Pierce/Williams years, but they had no high draft picks AND couldn’t select good players because they don’t know what that looks like.

That’s a trifecta of sucky franchise management. You can overcome bad luck (Blazers, Sixers) by being consistently smart. You can overcome a lack of high draft picks (Spurs, Warriors) by knowing what good players look like. You can deal with a capped-out mess of a roster (Thunder, Cavaliers) by actually having good players under contract, or getting good players in trades. You can’t fail to accomplish any of the three and expect to survive.

I think it’s really underrated how awful that Nets trade was. People should talk about it more.

I still wonder about how much of that trade was Billy King and how much Prokhorov. The latter was so desperate to make a splash in NYC (remember the dumb billboard outside MSG?) that it wouldn’t surprise me if he called the shots on that one. Maybe someday Billy King will spill the beans.

Mitchell Robinson’s sparring partner.

Noah Vonleh: Anthony Randolph without the occasional blocked shot.

Well, we are thin at the 3/4, and Vonleh is only 22….and has improved a tiny amount over the last few years….so it isn’t totally pointless.

Agreed, it’s better than signing some past his prime, washed-up has-been, like Bill Russell.

I can’t wait to see Mudiay and Vonleh go up against Evinkay and Itchellmay….

I have a friend who is a diehard Celtics fan, and she had a very emotional attachment to Garnett, Pierce, Allen, Rondo and all of those guys, and she was CRESTFALLEN when that trade happened. Like she was never going to watch basketball again. I remember telling her, you have no idea how badly you just ripped off the Nets, and that this trade will set you up for the next decade.

She thinks I’m some sort of genius savant now.

So Danny Green played most of last season with a groin muscle tear that was undetected by the Spurs medical staff. He doesn’t seem mad at the Spurs, but He is quoted as saying it was reasonable for Kawhi to get a second opinion.

Thanks for the input d-mar. I live in Charlotte now, but if I were still in New York, I don’t think I would pay to see a tanking team.

Do the Spurs and Mets share medical staffs? Wait, the Mets owners and front office probably just ignore what the team’s medical people say…

This is what I’m talking about.

Noah Vonleah is another example of a former lottery pick in the early twenties whose severely undervalued in today’s market.

Perry is going to hit it out of the park with one of these cheap bets.

https://twitter.com/MikeVorkunov/status/1021849753578033154

One of these kids has to mature and develop into a baller.

Just checked out what fans are saying on fearthesword.com (aka Cavblogger). Of the close to 500 comments, at least 90% thought the Love extension was at least a good move (some thought it was a great move) and virtually none thought it was a terrible move. The prevailing thought seems to be that he can be the centerpiece of a rebuild and, at worst, the fact that he’s locked up for five years makes him a valuable trade asset. Is that what you guys were calling the endowment effect the other day?

Love is a good player who has a good chance of having better counting stats now that LeBron is gone. Depending on the price it might be reasonable to extend him. Stretch fours like him could get much more expensive next year. I don’t think it makes him a trade chip though.

Does anyone have the $$$ and years on the Vonleh signing? Can’t seem to see anything about that.

Pending the above, I don’t mind the signing. He has been pretty meh since being drafted, but (pending contract particulars) is a pretty uncontroversial move. Young player we get to take a look at that provides a bit of front court insurance while KP is out. If he sucks then no biggie, that is great for the tank.

Love is going to be 30 and hasn’t had a great season since he was in Minnesota. Massive overpay by the Cavs. They are going to be a truly dreadful team, but I don’t know their draft pick situation off the top of my head. Really terrible timing to have to re-sign their “star” player. If it were anything like the summer of 2016, they could have pulled off a S&T heist with his star power.

Love is an NBA champion and will have made $225M+ over the course of his career. He’ll be paid an incredible $28M when he’s ready to turn 35. Good for him. Very bad for the Cavs.

(FiveThirtyEight has him at $87.5M over the next five years, with a median 0.7 WARP in 2022-23. Woof.)

The Cavs are in a tough spot so I’m not gonna kill them. There is a minimum cap and nobody wants to play there, so what are they supposed to do?

Man I was really excited about the prospect of adding Anthony Davis to the Knicks and then I saw Boston has Sacramento and Memphis’ unprotected 1st round picks to go along with their own pick. There’s no way we’re going to outbid the Celtics’ godfather offer of Brown, Robert Williams and all three 2019 1st round picks. They’re going to let Kyrie Irving walk and go with Rozier, Hayward, Tatum, Yabusele, and Davis, and all we’re going to hear about is how smart Danny Ainge is when all he did was fuck over Billy King and the Kings.

Signing Kevin Love was a poor idea unless they think Sexton, Love, and Osman is a team that goes to the playoffs.

Honestly, with how weak the East is they almost could. We are going to see a lot of lower playoff seed and fringe playoff teams in the East massively overrate their roster on the back of how bad the East is and make terrible moves to get them to the “next level”. Let’s just pray it isn’t the Knicks this time around.

Yikes, it was worse than I recalled. He said Ainge got “35 cents on the dollar” for KG, Pierce, and Terry. And complained about having to take Gerald Wallace’s contract.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UJzx-PeG8zs

Honestly, with how weak the East is they almost could. We are going to see a lot of lower playoff seed and fringe playoff teams in the East massively overrate their roster on the back of how bad the East is and make terrible moves to get them to the “next level”. Let’s just pray it isn’t the Knicks this time around.

The Cavs outperformed their pythag by 7 (!) wins. I’m not going to give them all to LBJ, but damned if he wasn’t a contributor to them.

This could be a 30-win team next year, with aging curves. Nance is their only hope for surplus value, and he is going to be, at best, a very good role player, not a franchise savior. I don’t see them making the playoffs unless the East totally shits the bed.

Philly, Boston and Toronto are going to be contenders for deep playoff runs, all easily 50-win teams (barring injury or a failure to return to form for any of Kawhi, Fultz and Haywood/Irving) and perhaps 2 of the 3 could be gunning for 60 wins if everything falls right for them. Boston was stacked without their two max players. Toronto swapped out DeRozan for a much better version of that same player and look forward to Anunoby . Philly has two future MVP candidate and, as others have pointed out, are essentially adding a #1 overall pick to a 52-win core which underperformed its pythag by a win (proving that that win streak was no fluke). They lost no one important in the offseason.

The East will be shit from 4-15, but I see those three teams beating up on the weak and vying for the right to end the Warriors’ dynasty.

Yeah, 40 wins was the cutoff for the East last year. Pretty damn bad.

The Cavs probably figure Love is a better trade asset signed long-term than as a rental. If he puts up his Minnesota numbers or something close to them they can likely trade him anytime during that contract.

Of course, they probably signed him with the intention of being “competitive” which is stupid as hell.

In all fairness……
Simmons did say Ainge got $.35 on the dollar. but they he told a story about his dad, talked about Lost and played some Pearl Jam. so it’s all good

On paper, the Knicks probably go 2-18 against the top-10 teams out West. Then let’s say 2-16 against the top 4 teams in the East. Then let’s say 14-30 vs. the rest of the league. That’s a floor of about 20 wins. Sound about right? I can’t see them tanking much lower than that, not with Fiz coaching.

I’d say there are seven teams we have a chance of being better than: Orlando, Cleveland, Charlotte, Atlanta, Brooklyn, Dallas, and Sacto.

I’m guessing 18 wins and a #5 pick.

Screw Bill Simmons. He was all for the melo trade with his “You always trade 3 quarters for a dollar” theory.

That was one of the most intellectually dishonest pieces that he ever wrote, because the Knicks gave up so much in that deal, but he kept on coming up with reasons why the pieces were only three quarters total. “Yeah, I just said an unprotected first round pick is a quarter, but, well, if it is a quarter than the numbers don’t work, so let’s call it a dime now.” So dumb.

Knicks trying to win:
Burke, Lee, Hezonja, Knox, Robinson play together for 20 mins.
Burke, Frank, Timmy, Vonleh, Kanter = 20 mins
Frank, Timmy, Hezonja, Knox, Kanter = 8 mins