(Wednesday, September 26, 2018 11:25:00 AM)
In his quest to determine the winners of an open competition for all five positions, David Fizdale said he has total autonomy and will not be swayed by contract or draft status.
“No one is promised a starting position. I got the freedom from my bosses over there,” Fizdale said, pointing at the…
(Wednesday, September 26, 2018 11:04:29 AM)
Three teams had modest traded player exceptions expire this week, as the Grizzlies, Clippers, and Knicks declined to use their respective TPEs. The exceptions ranged in value from $1.58MM (Clippers) to $3.41MM (Grizzlies), with the Knicks’ $2.38MM TPE falling in the middle. As we explain in our glossary entry on the subject, traded player exceptions […]
(Thursday, September 27, 2018 1:09:16 AM)
Knicks’ 2018 first-rounder F Kevin Knox is all about winning, and he has made that known before stepping foot on the Madison Square Garden court
(Wednesday, September 26, 2018 10:11:19 AM)
Timberwolves G Jimmy Butler reportedly has a new top trade destination in the Miami Heat.
[NYTimes] Jack McKinney, N.B.A. Coach Trailed by a ‘What if?’ Dies at 83 (Wednesday, September 26, 2018 11:00:02 PM)
With Magic Johnson he brought “Showtime” to the Lakers in 1979, but he missed their glory years after a calamitous bicycle accident.
(Wednesday, September 26, 2018 8:26:54 PM)
Tim Hardaway Jr. said he believes coach David Fizdale will make the right call on starters and won’t play favorites. Fizdale has opened up the competition for all five spots. On the surface, Hardaway has an advantage, having known Fizdale for longer than any other Knick. Fizdale was first Miami’s video coordinator in 1997-98 when…
(Wednesday, September 26, 2018 2:46:35 PM)
Enes Kanter didn’t know what to expect from Kristaps Porzingis in training camp. After all, once he tore his ACL last Feb. 6, Porzingis became a ghost, doing his own thing. Though Porzingis spent all of his five-month offseason in Europe rehabbing, fellow European Kanter stayed in the US, touring the country. For the second…
(Wednesday, September 26, 2018 10:15:01 AM)
David Fizdale got fired up when a reporter asked the first-year Knicks coach if his starting-lineup choices will be influenced by politics and big contracts. Enes Kanter and Tim Hardaway Jr., both starters last season, make significant salaries. Kanter will make $18.6 million in his final year and Hardaway Jr. has three years and $54…
51 replies on “Knicks Morning News (2018.09.27)”
An important part of the Pat Riley post LeBron tenure that I think has thus far gone unmentioned: he traded two unprotected first round picks for an expiring Goran Dragic! I like Dragic as a player (and he was even better back then), but the Heat didn’t even make the playoffs in the year they traded for him and then were forced to sign him to a near max contract. That trade gets like an 8/10 on the Knicksy scale.
Everything else I think ptmilo captured pretty well. Some good deals, some awful deals, with the final product looking thoroughly mediocre with no clear path to improvement.
Keep in mind that while this is morbid to mention in this context…Riley got pretty lucky with the Bosh situation. He was simply not worth the money they were paying him, and if he didn’t have blood clots that team would look even worse.
Too early for predictions?
Predicted starting lineup:
C: Kanter
Forwards: Knox, Hezonja
Guards: Burke, THJ
Rest of rotation: Frank (25+ min/game), Lance (15 min), Lee (20 min), MitchRob (10), Dotson (15)
Out of rotation: Kornet, Baker, Mudiay, Vonleh, whoever gets 15th roster spot
Predicted record assuming KP back around ASB – 30-52
Predicted record if KP is back around New Year’s – 32-50
Predicted record if KP is not back at all (or just for a token 10 games at the end) – 26-56
All things go right record (KP back early and is healthy, Knox/Frank/MitchRob are for real) – 38-44
All things go wrong record (KP out for year, Frank is same as last year, Knox/MitchRob are middling rookies) 24-58.
If KP is back by NYE, we win over 41 games. These kids can all play and/or need contracts.
“Kevin Knox thinks Knicks can win an NBA title ‘in the next five years’ ”
Great, now our first round pick has a drug problem.
22-60 is my prediction for the year. This team will not be able to get stops with so many poor defenders and negative contributors overall. Emmanuel Mudiay and Lance Thomas might combine to play 3,000 minutes this season, and there aren’t enough Enes Kanter minutes around to grab offensive rebounds. Kevin Knox projects to see a lot of time at the power forward position and he’s probably going to be one of the worst rebounders there all season. Burke will be good but I hope we trade him and Courtney Lee to Phoenix.
Bottom line for me is we do not have enough good basketball players to keep Emmanuel Mudiay from destroying our chances in every game he sees more than 20 minutes.
It’s harder than you think to only win 22 games unless the team is trying to lose. Even the Hawks won 24 games last year.
After reading this my sick brain immediately flashed back to Mitzi Gaynor and 1960:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0DusO6ipLw
Pat Riley had a legendary basketball hall of fame career. He lost Wade, Bosh and LBJ at the same time and in third year team was back in playoffs wining 45 last year games. 40+ year career in NBA as player, coach and GM you should focus on the entire body of work not on misses. Top 5 coach of all time and top 5 GM of all time, and you want to talk about his misses???
Its like bringing up the times when Hank Aaron or Babe Ruth struck out with bases loaded. Really?
@ 7 BobNeptune – really? just another example of men (boys, really) not respecting the opinion of a female who disagrees with them.
Figured this blog was different as most people are well educated and thoughtful but prevailing sentiment of making fun of female judgments in sports remains with some.
Jowles and some others got jokes on my calls but he’s equal opportunity, – so its all good and a ton of fun but if you were here I may throw both my Christian heels at your head.
Riley does not believe in blowing a team up to get a better draft picks and rebuilding over a 5-8 year period . He believes in trying to put together the best team he can possibly put together every year and using picks, players, and cap space as assets to try to get better every year after that.
There’s no way he’s obsessing over Butler’s next contract and whether it’s going to a burden 4-5 years from now. He wants to get better now and assumes that by the time that happens he would have already made a multitude of other moves that may even include trading Butler if it makes the team even better.
@GianaDani
We are in the minority here in that neither of us seems to be “all in” on 76er style “extreme tanking” and think other methods of rebuilding can and often do work better. I wouldn’t have done some of the deals Riley did, but that sort of makes another point I’ve been making all along too. Morey, Riley, and Buford have generally been brilliant, but they have all made some bad moves. You can’t focus all your attention on the mistakes and “what could have been”. You have to look at the net results and direction because they all make mistakes. If Riley lands Butler, despite the mistakes, he’d have built a very good team quite quickly and will still be moving forward even after losing 3 hall of fame players.
Riley has 3 titles and 5 NBA Finals appearances as a GM. And before Wade showed up he had put together a very good squad with Alonzo and Hardaway Jr. and that was after taking over as GM a franchise that had sucked since its inception as an expansion team. The Heat have only had a few truly bad seasons under his watch and most years they are at least a 500 team that makes the playoffs.
Also, I think D Wade coming back for a final season might be motivating Pat to get Butler so he can be as good as possible this season and give D Wade a great final season since D Wade is the number one player in that franchise’s history.
Riley does not believe in blowing a team up to get a better draft picks and rebuilding over a 5-8 year period . He believes in trying to put together the best team he can possibly put together every year and using picks, players, and cap space as assets to try to get better every year after that.
if you “believe” in one or the other like they are binary ontological questions you’ve developed a brain that isn’t useful for running a basketball team, unless your main goal is to please an owner who cares only about his own utility and is obscenely flat and myopic. if you talk yourself into the bullshit excuse of all philosophies being created equal and diametric (either trade two firsts to pay Goran Dragic and sign long term deals to guys past their prime on a team that tops out at mediocre/pretty good or be Sam hinkie), you’ve lost the plot. yes, it’s important to make good decisions and not pay shitty players like Dion waiters. But it’s also unabashedly true that timelines and marginal strategies matters because marginal win values are not homogenous and the market for payers is far from perfectly liquid.
there are 15-25 shades of grey in the league and you, like the pacers or the blazers or the bucks can be one of them. spending all your assets to speed headlong into a best case of competing in the first round shouldn’t be excused as just another personal dot along the efficient frontier. some strategies really are genuinely stupid when your constituency is a large, median age fan base who on average place last a higher marginal value on the 55th win than the 45th, and a much, much higher marginal value on the 16th playoff win than any other game.
I’ll give him credit for a few things:
1) drafting Wade despite some uncertainty about his “ceiling”
2) trading for O’Neal, even if he had to give up Odom (and Butler, who wasn’t good but had a sterling reputation as a “steal” during his first couple years)
3) creating three “max” slots during an extraordinary offseason
I would call Riley best at opportunism. Wade, in hindsight, was the 2nd-best player in the 2003 draft, and Riley pounced. He pounced on the chance to get a top-20 all-time player and recent MVP for mostly peanuts, owing to the fact that Shaq was forcing his way out of LA. And the Big Three was a huge risk, which yielded four incredible playoff runs and two Finals wins against teams with three future MVPs and another with four HOFers still playing near their peak.
When it comes to top-to-bottom roster building, he’s not all that great. This is a guy who enlisted Joel Anthony as a starting center on a Finals team. He purposely placed Mario Chalmers, Mike Bibby and Norris Cole as the PG rotation for that championship run. The 2006 run only happens because of Wade’s Jordanesque play, supported by out-of-character play from James Posey, Antoine Walker, and a late-career Zo.
Give him credit for his opportunism, but don’t act like he’s a Danny Ainge/Bob Myers architect who built 12-deep rosters for sustained dominance. Anyone looks good with LeBron James and peak Wade on their roster.
Hopefully we can move on from the Kyrie fantasy now.
One of the things I hate the most is blindly believing in reputations without analyzing current performance, and that’s why I can’t stand this Riley argument.
Bob Myers was a radio commentator for UCLA and a sports agent, then he became the GM who built one of the best teams ever in the history of the NBA. Ainge was a good player who became a mediocre coach for a short stint and then he builds a championship team 1 year into his front office job with the Celtics.
If you sign Dion Waiters to that sort of contract it’s simply a bad move, I don’t care if you’re Scott Perry or Pat Riley. Reputation should not factor on analysis of performance as an executive, and I think we would have all understood that with Phil Jackson, but apparently not.
And, just a reminder by the way, they haven’t even traded for Butler yet, the reports are they negotiations are getting very rough. We have no idea what the proposed deals really are before we start praising the genius.
And I also want to clarify that Riley, despite the Waiters deal, is not a “bad” GM. I reserve that label for people who consistently try to build win-now teams despite a lack of talent, whether through “high upside” moves or trading future assets for players whose reputations outshine their on-the-court production. GMs like Isiah, Walsh and Jackson, for example.
Please check the #metoo stuff at the door.
I defy you to find any reasonably objective person who thinks the Knicks as consisted today will finish the season >41 wins….If you do please let me know so I can fade the under for all I can eat!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3sLhnDJJn0
lmao
I agree. This is obvious.
I am talking about high level strategies not the details of getting there.
Riley is not going to add a 40 year old productive player to a really young team because it makes him better now. He’s going to do sensible things that make him better now. What he’s not going to do is get way worse in the short term in order to get theoretically better in the long term. That’s not his style. That can work also, but it has no intrinsic advantage over what other people are doing.
Basketball is a market just like any other.
The primary assets are players, picks, and cap space (others are market, coach, management, owner willingness to spend money etc..)
Where the value lies changes over time. The smartest people don’t lock themselves into one strategy. They go where the value is now, but of course they do logical things and build a sensible team.
Some people want to try to find value exclusively in the draft.
To me that’s like being an investor and saying I’m only going to look for value in stocks. What happens if stocks are overvalued and the best place to be is in mid western farmland?
I put Riley in the same class as Cuban in that he’s a “churner” who won’t settle for more than a year or so of abject tanking, and who by and large has been pretty darn good at churning. Sure, at some point it catches up with these kinds of executive/owners (Cuban is the de facto GM for the Mavs, imo) but it’s pretty amazing how both the Mavs and the Heat have been able to remain relevant despite some really dumb moves. I mean, the pick swap that Cuban pulled off to get Doncic is pure genius, more than offsetting his dumb moves with both Chandlers, etc.
I agree.
And when Morey signed Ryan Anderson he made a terrible deal. They all do, but on a net basis both have been terrific at building contending and wining teams.
Cuban reminds me of the kind of guy that is trying so hard to be the smartest guy in the room he sometimes overthinks himself into terrible moves. What happens to some people is that they are so bright, they come up with insights that no one else has and they know it. But then they overweight that insight relative to the basics until it gets to the point where they start making bad moves.
Reub pretending to be a woman and complaining about the chauvinist treatment he’s receiving really is something special.
@25
Yeah, it’s really annoying because my gut feeling is to bash the chauvinism right away, but if it’s just reub it’s a mockery anyway, so I just won’t touch it I guess.
Strato, Morey signed Melo. That should prove beyond reasonably doubt that every GM, no matter their reputation, has terrible moves in his resume. My point in this thread was more to acknowledge the fact that there’s so much more involved into being a GM, and that if one simple thing doesn’t go right everything changes. In Riley’s entire Miami tenure that was Mourning’s kidney disease, which took a 36 win heat team in 01-02 to a 25 win team with the 5th pick in the lottery that eventually became Wade.
If they had Knicksed the 02-03 season and won 4 more games they would have probably ended up with Chris Kaman or Kirk Heinrich and our perception of his entire tenure with the Heat would be very, very different.
Kind of a non event, don’t you think?
A guy shows up to media day before the season starts and talks about how great it is where he is and how he never wants to leave. What do you expect him to say before the season starts?
It’s amazing how “she” picked up Jowles’ nature in such a brief time during which he’s posted very infrequently and hardly not gone after anyone, isn’t it?
This is so clearly a man pretending to be a woman that it’s kind of offensive to women. It’s like the scene in Tropic Thunder when Robert Downey Jr’s character, pretending to be black, starts talking about Crawfish and the actual African American starts pointing out how racist it is that he thinks black people are so stereotypical.
Quick off-topic:
Is Chris Davis’s now the worst contract in the history of professional sports?
>> if you were here I may throw both my Christian heels at your head.
> This is so clearly a man pretending to be a woman that it’s kind of offensive to women
I’m 99% sure GianaDani identifies/presents themselves as a man offline…
GianaDani, what did you think of Phil Jackson’s tenure as POBO of the Knicks, and how would you rate Phil’s understanding of NBA strategy and player valuation as it exists in the year 2018?
@ 27 I think it shows that he knows what a great situation he is in and that he’d be a moron to leave. Our only chance to get him is if Boston decides not to max him, which means he’s damaged goods. In that case we shouldn’t sign him either. I would love the Knicks to sign him if he’s healthy, but I just don’t see it happening. I hope they have a plan b.
@32
When you have unused cap space, you can always do good things with it.
You can also sign Noah for four years.
I hope they have a good plan b, maybe Rozier. What makes you guys think it’s Rueb? I don’t recognize any style or phrases. I thought Rueb was always over the top optimistic.
I’m 99% sure that Mike K. has access to IP addresses or email signups. How fun!
Yeah Reub had some stylistic quirks that I don’t think he’d ever be able to shake. I don’t see it.
Definitely a troll though.
To all who is included in our Knickerblogger fantasy draft, please be reminded of our draft tom. Please check our yahoo league.
Thanks
I hope you guys don’t vote GianaDani off the island even if it actually is reub or some guy pretending to be a woman. This is the best place to discuss Knicks basketball by far, but we don’t want too much group think. We need people that disagree as long as they are polite. You guys would be board if I didn’t occasionally say our favorite stats don’t capture xyz. 🙂
Is there a reason some of my comments are awaiting moderation today?
I reread the last one and I don’t see any words or phrases that would get flagged, although I used board instead of bored. lol
It happens from time to time.
Today I learned that a “devil’s triangle” is a drinking game. And here I had thought that it referred to an ancient basketball system trying to displace the modern motion offense.
And I thought “boof” was the reaction from a player missing a game winning shot.
Chris Dudley is now officially on the senate record as a character witness. Go Knicks!
A man who shoots free throws like that should never be allowed to testify about the accuracy of anything
Take Giana’s post today:
Substitute Phil Jackson for Pat Riley and tell me it doesn’t sound familiar.
Giana, I want you to answer truthfully: have you ever taken a cruise before?
If you google reub + knickerblogger the first thread that come up has this:
Reub On Our Way To Greatness
June 19, 2017 at 10:34 am
We don’t need to go into purgatory rebuild mode. If we can add Rubio, draft well and maybe add a player or two in free agency we’ll be well on our way to greatness. There’s no need to throw the baby out with the bathwater. We’re not that far away.
When is our first pre-season game? I could use a distraction from uh, everything else
Got it
First game is Monday
First preseason game is on the first Monday in october, which, coincidentally, is also the first day of the US Supreme Court’s new term. But that shouldn’t have any impact on the knicks game. It’s not like there’s a rush to fill a vacant seat or anything before tipoff…