Knicks Morning News (2018.12.11)

Very afraid to see what Perry does.

There, I fixed it for you 🙂

Seriously, I don’t think the Knicks are going to be active. Maybe they could be involved in a fringe deal as a third team, dunno.

I hope I’m wrong but I see no way we’re dumping Lee without sweetener attached. Everyone on the planet knows we want to have max space available and the only alternative is to have two stretched contracts on the books. This is why holding out for the pipe dream of a first rounder until the bitter end was a bad idea.

I’m fairly certain you can stretch as many contracts as you want, it’s just…not ideal.

Hopefully Lee shows enough over the next few weeks that we can just swap him for Wilson Chandler or something.

Thanks, Phil!

Roughly 40% of our salary cap for next year is wasted on Lance Thomas, Courtney Lee, Tim Hardaway, Frank Ntilikina and Kevin Knox.

Total misery.

Actually Lee could be valuable to Houston, they need 3-and-D guys badly.

Houston needs players who can contribute. Lee is not good enough for the Knicks. Why would he be good enough for Houston?

this provision was put in place to protect swiftandabundant’s sanity in the event that the knicks’ entire salary cap in a future year was composed of previously waived players and some on knickerblogger interpreted this negatively.

I’m weak.

There are definitely teams who could theoretically use Lee, but I don’t think anyone really wants to pay him nearly $13m for his age 34 season. Also he might be cooked for all we know at this point.

Tnfh,

I agree. But Houston is the rare desperate team that might bite.

Actually Lee could be valuable to Houston, they need 3-and-D guys badly.

You know, when we got Lee he had a reputation as a good defender, but I don’t think I ever saw any strong evidence of that.

So I guess we can call him a 3 and ___ guy.

@9

But don’t you think there’s value in seeing a stretched contract every day in practice, day in and day out? Stretching just gives you more time to assess the player who’s no longer on the roster.

Rama, was that a Soul Coughing quote? I like it.

I would be upset if we stretched Lee bc Lee doesn’t deserve to be stretched. He’s a “good” player and a professional who has done everything this organization has asked of him with no complaining. He might be taking up a roster spot that a younger player could use but that’s not really his fault. Also, I can live with a little bit of dead salary cap space for the Noah mistake but Noah and Lee stretched would be A LOT of dead cap space over the next few years.

Noah attacked our last coach and was hurt about 70 percent of the time he was here and is completely washed up.

All the sudden Houston’s situation looks very scary. Pushing more chips in when you’re below .500 is generally a bad idea, but they’re already extremely pot committed. It definitely seems like they need to make some kind of move for a wing. I just think given their defensive strategy (i.e. switch everything) and the fact that Harden and Paul are going to be playing huge minutes come playoff time they need big wings much more than small ones. Consequently, I think Lee isn’t quite what they would be looking for since he tends to guard 1 and 2 much more readily than 3 and 4. Also I agree with those saying Lee is still going to have to prove he still can actually play before he becomes tradeable. 33 year-olds returning from injury don’t get the benefit of the doubt.

@22

Yes it was. Figured at least a few people would get it here…

Everyone is tradable; it’s just a question of what each party needs to accept as part of the trade. We’ve done well with second-rounders, but I’d still ditch one or maybe even two to get rid of Lee – who seems like a decent guy and is an OK player, but at this point, just taking up space.

Don’t nobody want Courtney Lee

Soul Coughing was amazing and I wish we could talk about them more vs this shitty basketball team.

Yeah I definitely wouldn’t stretch Lee until after the deadline, but if the only deals available involve us attaching sweetener I just might prefer that route. I don’t think it’s out of the question that we’re able to dump him for expirings but that would require him looking much better than he has to this point.

this is what makes it especially weird for Courtney to decide to miss a game trying to get burn in the G league. with trier and presumably Burke out, he may never have less competition for minutes than tomorrow. What’s the point of getting your rhythm back if you rejoin a more crowded team and go back to playing sporadically? the only reasonable verdict is that there is a traffic warrant for Courtney Lee in the state of Ohio.

Cap question–Lee for Tyler Lydon (or any other low salary Denver scrub) doesn’t work on the trade machine, but it seems like Denver has trade exceptions from Chandler and Faried that should cover it. Not sure if the trade machine takes those into account. Does that work?

I imagine they’d have some interest seeing as how they just signed Nick Young.

Their Faried exception alone is over $13M, so my understanding is that should cover it.

nuggets could do it but never would bc the whole point of ditching faried and chandler was to avoid the tax

nuggets could do it but never would bc the whole point of ditching faried and chandler was to avoid the tax

Ideally this would change now that they seem to be legit contenders but you’re likely right.

So Willy is averaging 20/13/2.3/1.2/1.4 per 36 (along with 2.5 turnovers per 36) on 64 TS% and shooting 58% from 3 on three attempts per game. He’s also posting a 3.2 BPM and a .223 WS/48.

Nice trade!

Yet Barrego has played him a total of 21 minutes in his last 10 games, including extreme mop-up duty vs. the Knicks. What a freakin moron, doesn’t he know that he has a legit superstar riding his bench?!Isn’t there some stathead GM out there that would offer a first for him? Geez.

@44

He should be getting every minute that has gone to Kaminsky (i.e., plus 200 minutes). And yes Borrego is a moron if he refuses to glue Kaminsky to the bench/refuses to play Hernangomez more minutes for the likes of a washed Marvin Williams. Notice how I didn’t say he was a star, or that he would maintain those numbers–that was all you. But clearly he should be the starting center or PF on this team given his production to date. Just like how KOQ should’ve been a starter on the Knicks for 2-3 years.

Also, the reports of his defense being atrocious (like another player with a similar body type in Jokic) are greatly exaggerated–he isn’t considered a negative on any defensive metric (DBPM, DRPM) other than PIPM (with a barely-under-break-even -.03 DPIPM). The snark is making you look silly, considering what the stats say. Any argument to the contrary is more eye test “coaches know better than anyone else” nonsense.

The trade was horrible, and it was from the moment we traded him. He’s a far better version of Kanter for one fifteenth of the price.

Just a friendly reminder that we could have had Willy and not Mudiay. I know that would have resulted in a potential logjam in the front court, but would have we been worse if Mudiay’s and Mario’s minutes went to Baker and Willy? And if so, wouldn’t that have helped the tank?

He’s a far better version of Kanter for one fifteenth of the price.

Dingdingdingding!

We’ve all discussed how Kanter on a good deal wouldn’t be a bad bench player. And we had the equivalent of Kanter on a good deal. Probably BETTER than Kanter, given his D isn’t as bad.

But he was a Phil guy, and we had KOQ, who was better, and Noah, so there was no place for Willy…because they’re both going to be contributing to this team for years to come…

OMG get over Willy! He’s a back up big at best and replacing that type of player ain’t hard at all. This is Cole Aldrich all over again.

Swift I want to take you seriously but I just can’t if you’re going to say we should get over Willy but provide tender love and care to Emmanuel Mudiay and his enormous cap hold.

OMG get over Willy! He’s a back up big at best and replacing that type of player ain’t hard at all. This is Cole Aldrich all over again.

The most detailed and in depth discussion on this blog has traditionally been reserved for end of bench/fringe guys (see. Cole, Copeland, Randle, Murry to name a few). I think that’s probably more of a reflection of not having a great deal to get excited about at the pointy end of the roster for a while.

I get the statistical arguments, but I can’t get worked up over Willy Hernangomez. It’s not like we drafted him then signed Kanter as a free agent to his current deal. I thought he had potential, but not gonna lose sleep. Also, even though we didn’t trade Willy for Mudiay, there seems to be an argument that the team punted on Willy but is giving a longer look at Mudiay. Being that lead guard has/had been much more a position for need for us (and center a bit of a glut), I don’t mind giving Mudiay a longer look – though as it stands right now, I don’t think he deserves said look past this season.

I AM over it – in the sense I’m no longer angry when I think about it. But in the sense of “we’ve been right about 90% of what we’ve complained about,” I’m not. It is a reminder that, when we’re embroiled in a debate about whether Mudiay or Hezonja should be playing, we are probably right there, too. And when we said we should trade KOQ for anything, a second round pick, whatever, if we weren’t going to re-sign him. And when we wanted to trade Lee when he had more value than now. And so on.

Willy is likely the player the numbers said he was: a productive big who isn’t great on defense. At Kanter’s salary, that isn’t valuable. At Willy’s, it is.

If we’re re-litigating the Willy trade on a slow news day, I’d argue it wasn’t a great move but not a brutal one, either. Yes, he’s a younger and cheaper Kanter who’s not as bad on defense but also not quite as good on offense. But Kanter was going to be on the team another year and a half at the time of the trade, so there wasn’t a path to a ton of PT for him for the majority of that rookie contract. And he’s the kind of center from whom the game is evolving away, and thus not someone for whom there would be big demand. Ideally, you hold onto the second-round pick that hits rather than flipping him for another pick that might not (which is why I’m mostly opposed to trading Dotson), but based on leaguewide trends, where we are in the success cycle, the funky makeup of our roster, and Willy demanding the trade himself… I don’t know that we could have done significantly better. And since one of the few things this team has been consistently good at throughout all these terrible administrations is finding marginal value in the second round and with UDFA types like Trier and Galloway, I’m hopeful the pick they have left turns out to be useful.

talking about botched moves…was watching the grizzlies play the other night…while he was moving around kind of reactionary and mechanical like – newsflash: noah definitely did not look “done”…

So he’s essentially giving more minutes to similar players who have worse production than the guy sitting on the bench. How is that not stupid?

I guess DBPM and DRPM posted by MSA don’t mean much to you. Right or wrong, some coaches prefer guys that don’t look totally bewildered every time they have to make a quick defensive decision, especially in space.

Nobody is saying Hernangomez is a superstar, so there’s no need for the strawman here, just that comparably to the other options in the Hornets roster he is probably better while being a bit younger.

Well, the stats Silky posted scream “superstar,” don’t they? Especially since they are similar to last year’s? Isn’t there some GM somewhere that would make a reasonable offer for that kind of production? What do you think a 24yo WS48 superstar at a near minimum salary locked up on a team friendly deal for the next 2 years could bring back on the open market right now? If you were a GM somewhere, would you offer a non-lottery first rounder for him? Would the Hornets take that offer?

Or would he essentially bring back no more than we gave up for him, and probably less?

Are the Hornets purposely trying to depress his value? Do they think of him as a secret weapon? A Eurostash that they’re stashing on their own bench?

Would he be any more valuable to us right now than Noah Vonleh? Who do you think is worth more right now? Keeping in mind, of course, that we found Vonleh in the picked over clearance bin.

Of course, you are smart enough to know the real answer. Willy has absolutely no value right now beyond what we got for him because he is a demonstrably god-awful defender. If he were still on the team, he’d likely be sitting behind Kanter, Mitch, and Vonleh.

I would advise you watch every Grizzlies game for the next month before you declare that Noah isn’t done. He looked pretty decent in the first few games with us 2 years ago too.

Every time I think this board is among the smartest collections of basketball minds out there, we get a thread like this one, where we get arguments like, “Stop crying! He’s a dime-a-dozen player!” and “Don’t you think that he’d be getting PT if he were good?” as though centers who post a >.200 WS48 are easy to find (#5 out of 40 qualifying centers >230 MP) and NBA decision makers are smart enough to recognize talent when they see it (this is a league where Matthew Dellavedova got $28M over 3, Miles Plumlee got $50M over 4, Mosgov got $64M over 4, Deng and Noah got $72M over 4, and Zach LaVine and Wiggins are max players, but, haha, okay, yeah, you right).

Can we wait until he’s played more than an hour’s worth of basketball before claiming Joakim Noah is back? Not to mention, his advanced stats are fucking atrocious.

i hate all of you and your stupid numbers…

fuck it – i watched him for about 10 minutes, and, he didn’t look turrible…so sayeth i…

Vonleh has been very good this year, but yes, Willy is better. Please tell me more about how bad he is on defense, as if you watched all 235 minutes he’s played this year. Foolishness.

I feel like whenever someone says “wow I thought this board was smart but then I read this comment” that comment is almost always mine!

I mean, sure, keeping wIlly would have been nice. I’m all about younger players with upside and I was excited about him. But like, he is a back up big and that is replaceable. Finding a future starting PG is a much more difficult task. So yeah, Mudiay’s cap hold sucks and maybe that means he can’t stay here past this year cause it won’t be worth it, but the developing Mudiay potentially has so much more upside than developing Willy. A developed Willy (gross) is still a back up big. And even if Mudiay just develops into a decent back up PG, that is still more valuable in my book bc of the position he plays. Just my two cents. But then again, I’m the resident moron on this site, so what do I know.

Again, you miss the point Z-Man. I ignored the defensive stats argument by MSA you know why? Because one of the 5 or so Centers with a lower DBPM than Willy is precisely Frank Kaminsky. So the advanced stats argument really only favors my argument, which is that he deserves minutes over Frank motherf’ing Kaminsky because he’s a better player in every aspect of the game.

Every time an argument like this comes along you go to these absurd lengths to ridicule it. Silky never once said the words superstar, nobody said teams should trade firsts for him, etc.

You know very well it’s not that simple, yet when it fits your narrative you oversimplify stuff so that it fits your perception of the player. I don’t have any idea nor could I possibly have on if any other team is interested in him, and I don’t work with the Hornets so I have even less of an idea on why Kaminsky is playing over him.

You could, as many did at the time of the trade, argue that Hernangomez is not a good fit for the style most teams seem to favor nowadays, and that’s a fair argument. But you have decided he’s simply garbage and we all know there’s literally zero chance of you budging even a little bit on this, so why bother discussing with you?

Serious question: do you think that WHG is a better (or more valuable) player than Vonleh right now?

The two players’ situations aren’t comparable and keeping one wouldn’t have precluded adding the other. I’d say Vonleh is a bit better, but they don’t play the same position, nor do they play the same role – other than getting rebounds, which happens to be very valuable in a lineup with Kristaps Porzingis. In that sense Vonleh is a better fit… Though when, exactly, will it matter? Oh yeah, next year. When we don’t have any rights to him.

Mild complaint aside, I’m fine with the Vonleh deal, and would totally bring him back if we could get a KOQ-type contract. I just think having Willy would be better than two future seconds. Though I can acknowledge we’ve done really really well with second round picks (including Willy).

You could, as many did at the time of the trade, argue that Hernangomez is not a good fit for the style most teams seem to favor nowadays, and that’s a fair argument.

This is definitely true, but it’s worth noting that plenty of good teams still have guys like this in their rotation. I don’t think the Raptors bemoan the fact that Valanciunas isn’t the ideal modern NBA center when he’s helping them rack up wins. Zaza Pachulia got 1,200+ minutes on a very recent championship team. Cheap production is always valuable!

And I thought you all would be live-blogging Courtney Lee’s d-league experience….

@87 how many of those players would you have trouble trading for anything more than 2 second round picks?

And sure, Willy is better this year than Vonleh. Right. I’m sure that 11-19 from 3 is sustainable too. Right.

Willy’s coaches obviously don’t think as much of him as the statistics you quote. I don’t know why that is, but I think there is a reason, and I suspect it’s a good one. I think there is a good chance he can beat out Kaminsky as a backup player, but being a starting quality center? He doesn’t do any of the things teams want out of their starting centers these days (defense, rim protection, and threes). You can make a case he could be a decent backup, but on the Knicks he basically couldn’t even beat out Kornet. Getting two second round picks for him was very reasonable.

@90

He’s had three coaches in the NBA: one was so bad he got fired and is still unemployed, the second also got fired and hired by the Orlando Magic of all teams, and the third is a rookie head coach. There might be a reason, but I’m not very confident these guys are the pinnacle of NBA decision making.

So you guys don’t see him in practice, you don’t know what he’s being asked to do on the court and whether he is doing it, but you know more than the coaches do? And you still haven’t addressed the issue that he doesn’t do what centers in the modern game are supposed to do.

I agree that Vonleh will not sustain 44% from 3, but I think that Vonleh’s value mainly comes from his ability to guard multiple positions both in space and in the post. His athleticism is truly freakish. He might have the largest hands and wingspan relative to his height in the NBA. He runs like a deer and is built like a brick shithouse. He fouls too much and makes some dumb plays, but overall he’s been legit. He’s also a full year younger than Willy. The contract is a serious problem when it comes to re-signing him, but if he keeps it up, maybe some magic happens.

We can only really speculate on what goes on behind closed doors at an organisation. The numbers however paint a picture of a productive young center on a very friendly, cost controlled deal. On that basis (being the only one we can properly analyse) it was potentially the wrong move.

Willy is better than Frank the Tank. And there are some guys coaches just don’t like. Willy is clearly improving, but was also petulant. We had four centers, he was probably the only tradeable one. It was a bad and dumb trade, but understandable and with a decent return.

I liked Cole better.

Willy’s hair game is still on point, I should have mentioned that.

the emergence of Siakam is just crazy. one day he’s the guy who is forgotten because they drafted OG, now he’s a bordeline unicorn. not too many players have ever had a profile like him. He’s shooting 73pct at the rim, can stand semi credibly behind the 3 point line, plays good defense at multiple positions, and never turns it over despite being an okay passer and scoring 17 per 36. when Lowry isn’t shooting 1-10 the raptors are just nasty.

I think we should forget Burke and Mudiay and sign 32 year old teodisic next year to a short cheap deal. it would be so fun watching an elite passer throw lobs to Mitch and KP and surely good for their development. Probably wouldn’t hurt Knox either. And frank can hope for osmosis from an offensive master with euro-roots, play some with him, and play 20 mpg as the primary when he sits. the prigs experiment was a raging success let’s re-up it. I’m sure he’d love to live in nyc and get some actual playing time.

the emergence of Siakam is just crazy. one day he’s the guy who is forgotten because they drafted OG, now he’s a bordeline unicorn. not too many players have ever had a profile like him. He’s shooting 73pct at the rim, can stand semi credibly behind the 3 point line, plays good defense at multiple positions, and never turns it over despite being an okay passer and scoring 17 per 36. when Lowry isn’t shooting 1-10 the raptors are just nasty.

The NBA is just so unforgiving. The Raptors are all coming together in a brilliant fashion and suddenly their biggest problem…is their star point guard, who seems to be hitting the age wall hard.