Knicks Morning News (2018.11.15)

Not sure two games makes a trend. The Knicks got blown out from early because we started Knox and Mudiay, two of the worst basketball players in the NBA. Also, here’s this jewel:

https://twitter.com/BDawsonWrites/status/1062881424817250305?s=20

Steven Adams just told David Fizdale re: Kanter: “Sub him out. He doesn’t know how to play defense. We’re running pick and roll every time. Sub him out.”

That Adam’s quote is insane.

I would love to think all these lineup changes are a way of stealth-tanking. “we’re trying to find the best combination” could also be “we are making sure we don’t”.

I mean, didn’t Fizdale say they look at lineup data? What part of a +6.1 net rating and 98th percentile defense in 394 possessions did he not like out of the starting lineup? One bad 5 minute stretch vs Orlando?

(by the way the Mudiay/THJ/Knox/Vonleh/MRob lineup in very very limited (58) possessions has a net rating of -58.6 and a DRtg of 155 – TAKE THAT FOR DATA)

Steven Adams just told David Fizdale re: Kanter: “Sub him out. He doesn’t know how to play defense. We’re running pick and roll every time. Sub him out.”

lmao

Yeah, but he has good boxscore stats! 🙂

Honestly, I’m beginning to lose a bit of respect for Fizdale.

IMO, this lineup stuff shouldn’t be that complicated. We have quite a few guys that are one-way players. If you put too many of the same type on the court at the same time you are going to have major issues on the other side of the ball. It compounds! One bad defender is a problem that can be dealt with, 2 bad defenders is more than twice as bad, 3 bad defenders is a catastrophe.

The thing is, our one-way offensive players are not even good at that. They are really zero-way players on offense and -1 on defense. However, a couple of our defenders are actually pretty good at defense. We should probably be playing defense first lineups the most minutes.

Robinson, Vonleh, Dotson, Hardaway, and Frank is OK. If they want to take a shot with Knox in place of Vonhleh at times that’s understandable. But you can’t possibly have 3 player combinations of Burke, Hardaway, Knox, Hezonja, Kanter, and Mudiay out there.

(KP changes things a little because he plays both sides and makes it easier to construct balanced lineups).

I’m in favor of some experimentation to try to find the best combinations, but some combinations are so obviously going to be terrible I don’t see the point.

I’d rather see Baker getting minutes than some of the people we are throwing out there now. Baker can’t score at all, but he CAN defend.

Trier can score, and as far as I can is not a horror show on defense.

I don’t think the Knicks have a single good line up because the one-way players on this team aren’t very good at their one way. Frank is a great on ball defender but doesn’t create turnovers or rebound well. Tim Hardaway Jr is a decent scorer but isn’t the 600 TS% guy that can carry an offense. Vonleh, Trier, and Dotson are good enough on both ends, but the personnel around them requires they be better than they actually are. Knox is trade bait, Mitch struggles to rebound, Mudiay’s contract shouldn’t exist, Hezonja sucks, Kanter can’t play defense when the other team passes the ball, and Fizdale is trying to figure out who can actually play.

By the trade deadline I’d be surprised if we have more than 12 wins.

I don’t think the Knicks have a single good line up because the one-way players on this team aren’t very good at their one way.

I think you’re absolutely right. I don’t think the lineups I’ve been suggesting are going to improve the results. I just think when you’re this shit, why not get blown out while playing optimally and with the players most likely to be part of the future (i.e. not Mudiay, Kanter, Hezonja)?

Having said that, I also understand the human part of it. Fizdale needs to try in the beginning. Let’s wait and see what he’s doing in February before we make judgments about him.

If you’re thin slicing, though, the ATO dysfunction is more of a concern than the two-big offense.

I’m not so sure you can run a sophisticated offense when your best pure PG is Burke and quite a few of your players that can defend can’t shoot or score. I think we have to develop the young players that are probably going to be part of the long term, but we should at least put combinations on the court that make some basketball sense. There’s no point to losing by 25 every night trying to run an offense that your players are incapable of executing.

Whisper::Is it possible Lance Thomas was a stabilizing force when he was in the lineup?::Whisper

I’m still trying to figure out what the Knicks front office saw in Knox that compelled them to draft him at #9 (when I believe a lot of draft boards had him going in the 2nd round) I don’t see freaky athleticism (he actually moves kind of awkwardly) I don’t see lights out shooting and I definitely don’t see a strong defender.

Was it the Kentucky pedigree? I’m not ready to write him off yet, but I have seen absolutely nothing thus far to suggest Kevin Knox is a legit NBA player.

I’m still trying to figure out what the Knicks front office saw in Knox that compelled them to draft him at #9

We’re not joking when we talk about the 3-on-3 workout. I mean, we are, but we’re making fun of it because it’s true.

I believe a lot of draft boards had him going in the 2nd round

He was definitely a late lottery pick. Just should have been later.

If you were trying to win you’d probably start with something like Robinson-Dotson/Vonleh-Timmy-Frank-Burke. It’s tough-a lot of our players are extreme one way guys. Our best two way player is probably a low usage center who came to the NBA out of low level Louisiana HS basketball. The guys who can score don’t pass, the guys who can play defense can’t shoot.

I still believe that there is a young Bernie Williams timidity issue with Frank. Frank can shoot, drive and defend. His passing remains a deficiency, but the rest of his game is centered around confidence. It took Bernie at least 3 seasons of struggles (and Mel Hall’s departure) to gather steam.

I think Knox needs 2500 minutes this season so he can put up great counting stats. Portland is going to deteriorate soon and when they do, we need to put up a similar offer to the Lakers for Damian Lillard (anything close to what LAL/PHX offers and he’s ours by virtue of being in the opposite conference). I’m not kidding when I call Knox trade bait. He’s both young enough that most teams would want him in any deal and bad enough that we shouldn’t mind losing him. Maybe someday he develops into Danilo Gallinari, but I don’t want to wait 6 years for that potential to come around. If/when we land KD, draft Zion, and give KP a max contract, we can’t afford to waste $25M in salary on TH2 and Knox.

Shit, Enes fucking Kanter is averaging more assists than 5 of our rotation wing players (Hezonja, Dotson, Thomas, Knox and Trier). Not really sure how you get a motion offense out of that.

I agree, but this is as much a product of our offense. How do you expect players to get assists when no one is moving and so much is ISO?

I would rather force players to move and pass until they get better at it than run an offense that caters to all the aspects of their game that are terrible.

Mitchell has regressed a bit so far this season, it seems he’s really struggling shooting. It’s what I talked with my concerns about him, that as an older rookie who was impressive in his first season his ceiling would be somewhat limited, as his stats were impressive for an unheralded rookie but not very good overall. His production so far this season has been a lot like Andrew Wiggins, which is ok for a 2nd year player but not the superstar everyone thought he would develop into after the impressive rookie season. He’s also only one year younger than Wiggins, and there’s obviously still a lot he can develop, but the media and the fans definitely went too far on the hype.

It’s what I talked with my concerns about him, that as an older rookie who was impressive in his first season his ceiling would be somewhat limited

I agree.

Mikal Bridges has been pretty solid so far and has worked himself into the starting lineup. But how much better will he get beyond being a solid 3&D player given he’s a few years older than some of the other rookies out there?

Same with Trier.

I was trashing Knox last night. It was a a little tongue in cheek. You can’t give up on young players, of course. But really, he doesn’t look like a goer. His game consists of a little transition, and some threes. The rest seems to be mostly driving towards the back right pylon and then wildly hoisting it towards the rim. I know “shoot it every time you touch it” is a sound strategy for maximizing NBA revenue, so I applaud him on exploiting that market quirk, but there doesn’t seem to be much else there.

I hope to be proved wrong.

The Nets have made their offense work over the last few years without anyone who is at all heralded as a lead ball handler. Atkinson’s first year their leading assist guys were Isiah Whitehead and Dinwiddie, and then Levert has grown into more of that role over the last couple years. You can introduce the style even if you don’t have the players to make it hum at the highest levels. It’s not like the current simplistic offense is doing something special (25th overall). So even if we don’t have the guys to make a more modern system work well it couldn’t drop us that far, the basketball would be more entertaining, and pushing guys towards what you want them to become is developmentally beneficial. I’d rather see Frank get reps (and fail) trying to run a good offense then see him get reps (and fail) trying to run a bad offense.

I think we might be romanticizing the Nets a bit much here. Atkinson’s first year (2016-17) they were 28th in offense and last year they were 21st in offense. It is true they had a more discernible system but to say those were good outcomes is pretty optimistic.

I mean, it’s permissible to say the kid looks like one of those natgeo videos of a baby giraffe dropping out of the womb into a straight walk and at first you’re like ‘holy shit that’s amazing look at the incipient gangly coordination potential’ but summer league ends and then you’re like ‘oh no don’t go anywhere near those adult animals over there wobbly baby giraffe that’s going to be quite scary for you,’ without really meaning you’ve given up on him forever.

we can probably agree that not all 19 year old lottery picks look quite this much out of their depth, even very early on. some do and nonetheless develop, many more don’t.

lololol that’s exactly what I think when I see Knox play. He looks like a baby deer or giraffe that doesn’t really know how to use its legs yet.

Actually you know what stands out to me is that it doesn’t look like he has good ankle flexibility or control. I wonder whether that is fixable.

There is no ‘best’ lineup with this group, guys. Stop the wishful thinking.

We have no talent. We are rebuilding from zero. Most of these guys won’t be in the NBA in two years. A couple of them might make it as journeymen subs. Fizdale is a bad coach handed a worse roster – no chance in hell he will achieve anything.

This is what rock bottom looks like, folks.

This is not rock bottom. Rock bottom is being terrible AND having no one with upside AND not having your draft pick AND being locked into long-term contracts with aging vets. We are terrible and locked into one bad contract with an aging vet (Noah) and one bad contract with a prime-age vet (THJ). But we have our pick, and a few guys with upside, and some cap flexibility.

All things considered, better than where most Knick teams have been since 2002.

In summer league, against crud opposition, Knox actually looked pretty decent at times. But I dunno, in the NBA he looks a lot like the most negative parts of his scouting report: doesn’t do much outside of score inefficiently, game consists heavily of low-percentage soft floaters and awkward layup attempts, has zero court vision, forces bad shots.

He’s young but I didn’t like him coming out of the draft and I’m not too high on him after watching him play. I’m trying to envision the path where he becomes a plus player but, ehh, I dunno.

This is exactly where we want to be, no? Bad, with very young talent that may or may not work out, with our draft picks.

Right now it looks like passing on Mount Zion would be a poor decision, but let’s get through a season of college basketball before we declare Zion the obviously superior prospect over RJ (and Cam Reddish, who looks like the best shooter, the best defender, and the tallest of the three).

Zion is going to be the #1 pick. I’ll be very, very surprised if anybody else is drafted ahead of him.

I think we might be romanticizing the Nets a bit much here. Atkinson’s first year (2016-17) they were 28th in offense and last year they were 21st in offense. It is true they had a more discernible system but to say those were good outcomes is pretty optimistic.

That’s a fair rejoinder although I’m trying not to romanticize. I don’t think putting in some modern offense is going to make us way better. As I said, it may be true that it actually makes us worse in the short run, although how much worse we can be than the current offense is an open question. I do think it would undeniably make us more watchable.

I think the most important question is what it does developmentally. My belief is that asking guys to try (and often fail) to do the things you ideally want them to be able to do is valuable, and that’s the case I would make for the Nets. 28th two years ago, 21st last year, 10th this year in offense , and that’s with no really significant talent additions. They’ve had some pretty nice internal development from some guys without high pick pedigrees. Obviously it’s impossible to say how those guys would have developed in a different system but I do think there’s something to be said for having a system. Right now it feels like Fiz is basically saying we don’t have the talent to have any system on offense and that seems like a bad idea from a developmental perspective to me.

I don’t care about the lineup changes. Maybe he finds some two man combos that work well together, because we’ve got fuck all at the moment. They actually start to run a lot of things that look PNR-esque but fail miserably, as if neither person knows how to work with the other in an actual game situation. I don’t know if that’s because they aren’t practicing it but I kinda think that’s not the issue cause they are trying to run those plays. Kanter is our best screener and he’s not all that good at it. Our ball handlers are either too focused on getting to the hoop or too focused on passing to leverage the play. Nobody is consistently good at executing any part of a PNR, and we almost never have secondary options other than a full reset. It’s not clear if that’s on Fizdale or on inexperience/inability.

I’m not sure how much of all this is on Fizdale. The defense works pretty damn well in general, considering how many bad defenders we’re putting on the court. The offense is constantly breaking down in the half court and devolving into guys freelancing on their own.

I know this is very off topic, but I’d be so upset if Zion Williamson ends up a Cleveland Cavalier.

you very well just may have spoke this in to soon to be objective reality…

oach Cal’s teams are a joke when they don’t have the best players

And when it rains, it’s also wet outside.

but how likely is it that Zion plays an entire season shooting better than 80% from the field?

I’d bet real money that he ends the season over 70%. His shot selection is incredible, and much of his output is self-created. He is a dominant athlete with A+ basketball instincts.

It’s like if you took Bo Jackson and put Mike Trout’s eyes on him. So, basically, it’s like having Mike Trout. But my point stands.

Man I really don’t want to sound like I’m against Zion Williamson, but the NBA Draft is really my favorite part of the sport. Before anything else, I think Zion Williamson is a 6’6″ 280 pound version of Russell Westbrook. I think if he were drafted to the Knicks he’d turn the franchise around overnight and would be a billionaire by age 30. I also know that Kentucky, Army, and Eastern Michigan are not good basketball teams. Zion Williamson is a hyper aggressive athlete who has yet to run into a defender with the type of lateral agility necessary to stop him from getting to his spots. Zion hasn’t shown he has a counter move in his arsenal as yet, and he’s going to need one since he’s a perimeter player. A lot of his excellent shot selection is because he’s been so fast nobody can stay in front of him or keep him from him spots.

Again, we could be looking at the most dominant athlete of the generation here. LeBron is a similar freight train, but LeBron can’t handle it like Zion, nor does he have Zion’s ability to hop step a defender on a dime. I spent this entire post trying to convince myself that Zion shouldn’t already be crowned the #1 overall pick, but man. He can handle it, he’s a bully on the boards, and he has Derrick Rose’s speed and agility. Please let this guy be a Knick.

The first real real litmus test for Zion and Co. will be against #4 UVA in January. I’ll be very interested in seeing how Zion handles UVA’s excellent defense.

On the other hand, Zion is going to murder Luke Maye in the UNC games, which makes me sad.

My only concerns so far with Zion are his freakish size. 6’7″ 285 is NFL big. That’s a blocking TE or a rush LB. I don’t buy that he’d be the second heaviest player in the NBA right now, but he’s only 18 years old. How big is he going to get? Can you play 70+ games if you’re 6’7″ 305?

Shaq was like this. I can remember him breaking rims and just being such an outsized behemoth you had to watch every time you could. There have been fewer of those guys than you would think though, although part of that is that so many guys went straight to the pros. Blake Griffin was a little bit like that in his second year. Allan Iverson was also appointment viewing in his own way at Georgetown.

How did Shaq and Mahmoud Abdul Rauf, one of the greatest inside players and one of the great shooters ever to play in the NBA, team up to come in 3rd in the SEC? (Oh, right, Robert Horry’s a “winner”, I forgot).

Well, I do think Zion will struggle sometimes, he’ll face better competition and it will expose some weaknesses he has on his game because, damn, he’s 18. Even Lebron at age 18 was very far from the greatness we saw developing later, he had no 3 point shot and struggled shooting from anywhere that wasn’t a dunk, but the whole package was there. I don’t know if Zion will figure things out as Lebron did, if he has the same insane work ethic and intelligence for the game or if his body will hold up, and my guess is he doesn’t at the same level because nobody is Lebron, but I don’t want to be the one to pass on him and find out later.

7 months till the draft…7!

I would love to have a dime for every time Jowles has said he will turn his back on this team if they do this. I’d have at least a dollar.

Me too. This is a bright line though.

@77

I don’t know a thing about making pizza and bagels, but I once saw that issue discussed and some expert insisted that the local water was a factor in the quality of the dough. I’m not sure if was how hard the water is or what the PH is or whatever, but the water was key.

THose 2 Duke kids are worthy of the tank.

Okay, this is slightly alarming in an “The East is big, man” kind of way:

@StevePopper
Fizdale with a little bit of a “Take that for data” moment at practice today. Pointed out that the lineup with Ntilikina and Dotson was 3rd in net rating among lineups he countered with his own stat: “We weren’t winning, so it’s not like it was winning games for us.”

Ditto for Belle’s Bagels on York. Boiled and perfect. Best in LA.

A somewhat reassuring defense of the Fizdale quote:

@JCMacriNBA

People are already getting on Fiz for this quote.

My 2 cents: he ain’t dumb. His rep around the NBA for years has been a guy who knew numbers intimately. He didn’t change overnight.

His “winning” line is BS, IMO, but it sells a lot easier than “I’m tinkering, leave me alone.”

I don’t know the writer, but “knew numbers intimately” could be any number of things. Does that mean he knew PPG and FG%? I’m not saying this quote is actually worrying me, but “he knows numbers” doesn’t really mean anything on its own.

When you lose as badly as we did in Orlando, most coaches will make changes. Fizdale obviously likes to experiment and try new arrangements too. It is probably true we would have lost by less if he hadn’t started Knox and Mudiay, I think he was more interested in finding out what those two can do than in anything else. That was the right priority for this year’s Knicks.

Besides finding out what Mudiay and Knox can do, Mudiay and Knox probably benefit from finding out what they can’t do. Sometimes you can tell someone over and over they have to learn something, for example that certain shots won’t work against actual NBA defenses, but they don’t learn it until they experience it themselves. It’s frustrating to watch as a fan, but it increases the chances Mudiay and Knox will work on improving the right parts of their games.

Oh, Oregonians have no idea what good pizza is. They eat cardboard shit gleefully.

The thing I hate most about Portland pizza is the price. I lived around the corner from a place that had 16″ “specialty” pies for $28-32. That’s absurd when your pizza isn’t even good.

By the way, Mozza in LA was really, really good pizza. I haven’t been in a couple of years, but I live in NYC and made a point of going back. And not just because I sat across from John C. Reilly at lunch.

This morning I had an everything bagel toasted with butter from Ess-A-Bagel. Good enough for you, Jowles?

Mozza is expensive and celebrity cheffy but decent at best for Neapolitan. It couldn’t sniff Motorino’s jock. The tacos are great in LA. Better than anywhere in the world. Eat them. If you want good pizza fly to New York or pretend the best they have going is good enough.

Black Seed is a legit banger. Perhaps the best bagel in New York. If you’re ever in Boston head to Exodus Bagels in Jamaica Plain and get the Everywhere Bagel with horseradish cream cheese. Revelatory.

Yup, K & Z is overrated and overpriced. There’s also a place that’s purported to be a Jewish-style deli (Spielman Bagels) that is terrible and staffed by fashion-punk LA hipster college kids who just blankly stare at you when you throw them generous tips. (Sometimes I hate my fellow millennials as much as I hate boomers.) I’m also allergic to waiting in line for overpriced food. You can get me to wait an hour for Pok Pok or Toro Bravo, but I’ll be damned if I’m waiting that long for someone to poach a couple eggs over crusty toast and arugula.

Blue Star Donuts has the best donut I’ve ever had. If you come to Portland and wait in line for a stale brioche with breakfast cereal sprinkled over the top, please, go home.

I haven’t eaten at Motorino’s, but I could tell you about the pizza on almost every block of Manhattan – which, by the way, has dropped precipitously in terms of quality, like, really really far in the last ten years – and I could talk about the great pizza in a variety of other hot spots around the boroughs. Saying that Mozza is decent at best is just a silly hipster pose. The four-cheese pie with truffle oil was transcendent, enough so that I came back the next day (first time I had it) to order it again.

Yeah, generally when I’m not at work lunches I go with Mexican food in LA (which I almost never have in NYC), but a friend wanted to go, and I was glad we did, because it’s the best pizza I’ve had outside of NYC and Italy.

Thanks for the tip on Black Seed. But please stop posting links to pornographic images of doughnuts. That’s just wrong.

Bol Bol lighting it up at MSG. 6 points and 4 blocks in 6 minutes.

Draymond has 0 points and 5 turnovers because he hates KD.

Montreal bagels are incredible, even for a new York partisan like myself.

Hole donuts in Asheville, NC has far and away the best donuts I’ve ever had.

Favorite pizza places in NY are probably Patsy’s, Ruibrosa, Di Fara (despite how touristy it is to go to now), and Umberto’s of New Hyde Park. Frank Pepe’s white clam pizza might be my favorite pizza ever though.

My brother-in-law is an engineer who decided to learn pizza-making ten years ago. Buys pizza flour in 50 lbs. bags, built his own outdoor wood-fired oven, lives about half an hour from us and we eat there every Sunday. I complain only about access to good commercial pizza. Otherwise, spoiled as fuck.

Mike D’Antoni had had a good day.

Melo is washed

Oh, he’s totally washed, but even washed-up players can typically still fill a nominal role on decent teams. Like Sam Cassell on the Celtics 10 years ago.

For the record, a New York pie and a Neapolitan pizza are not even similar animals. They’re barely recognizable as cousins if you consider bread structure and technique in fabrication.

The Neapolitan pizza is ephemeral. The bread structure reaches its peak in an incredibly short window at astonishing speed. Cooking at anywhere from 750 up to 900 degrees the ovens that produce these pizzas are marvelous at producing very high temperature dry conditions that create leopard skin charred blisters while producing a delicate just cooked moist dough that is destroyed by merely pinching lightly. It’s more grilled than baked as in the New York pie.

These pizzas can be transcendent with the simplest ingredients. It’s why tomato purée from San Marzano, fior di latte, and basil can produce perfect resonance. The bread is the star and should not be lost in trying too hard. Naples, New York, San Francisco, Austin, and New Haven all have traditions of pizzaiolo who can pump these suckers out. There’s a pizzaiolo out in Milwaukee who is astonishingly talented. A good pizzaiolo is the most essential ingredient in a Neapolitan pizza because the ovens are fickle and require constant work to maintain temperature, placement and movement of pies, choices of perfect toppings, sourcing, choices of fuel (wood – oak), the weather, the batch of dough…

There’s a pizza shop in Bologna called Due Torri under the two towers that makes the finest New York style pepperoni slice in the world. They cook the bread the way it is baked all over NY. There are a few places like this around the world but very very few.

The bread in a New York slice is less difficult to perfect, it is closer to baking pies. It needs structure to carry a much heavier load. Following a good recipe will get you to the finish line. The place to get this Pizza is NY. I am often torn between two places in the village.

Latent yeast and water ph is not a myth.

Ps. Truffle oil is how you get a hipster to pony up and Instagram some inferior shit. It’s basic in the way that a hipster might use that word?…

Mozza is decent. Great selection of wine tho.

Man, Due Torri is my place of choice when I’m slightly wasted after a night of partying in downtown Bologna.

You’ve been calling people basic, and yet one of your top 2 places is Joe’s. I guess NYU freshmen must really know their stuff