[Sports Illustrated] Three at 3: Knicks Could Struggle Against Lowly Suns (Monday, December 17, 2018 12:51:00 PM)
The Knicks are far from a sure thing against the Suns, and both the Pistons and Clippers should take care of business at home.
[Sports Illustrated] James Dolan Has Received Interest In Knicks For $5 Billion But No ‘Bona Fide Offer’ for Sale Yet (Monday, December 17, 2018 11:54:33 AM)
Knicks owner James Dolan says he has received some “feelers” about purchasing the team.
(Monday, December 17, 2018 7:00:00 PM)
James Dolan might want to lower his asking price. Or, as history suggests, winning potential has nothing to do with earning potential at MSG.
The revenue will always pour in. The crowd will always show up. And often – like Monday – it boos.
(Monday, December 17, 2018 9:15:00 AM)
There is hope for Knicks fans.
James Dolan, the unapologetic, vape-smoking Trump supporter who doesn’t like being berated in public, has not ruled out selling the Knicks and Rangers.
In a lengthy profile on ESPN that touched on several hot topics with a positive Dolan spin, the owner acknowledged…
Devin Booker: Ties season high to bury Knicks
(Monday, December 17, 2018 10:44:00 PM)
Devin Booker: Booker scored 38 points (11-23 FG, 2-7 3Pt, 14-15 FT) while adding seven rebounds, two assists and two steals in 37 minutes during Monday’s 128-110 win over the Knicks.
Visit RotoWire.com for more analysis on this update.
(Monday, December 17, 2018 12:30:32 PM)
While there are no indications that Knicks owner James Dolan plans to sell the franchise anytime soon, he didn’t entirely rule out the possibility during a recent discussion with Ian O’Connor of ESPN.com. Noting that his family has no interest in selling the Knicks, Dolan told O’Connor that he has a responsibility to his shareholders […]
(Monday, December 17, 2018 11:21:33 AM)
Earlier this morning, we relayed a report from Kevin O’Connor of The Ringer suggesting that the Jazz are among the teams with interest in Bulls forward Jabari Parker. O’Connor’s full article for The Ringer includes a number of other interesting tidbits worth passing along, so we’ll round up some of the highlights in the space […]
(Monday, December 17, 2018 7:28:17 PM)
If it’s any consolation, Kevin Knox won the scoring battle over Suns rookie forward Mikal Bridges, 17-7, and looked much like the rookie with the bigger upside. The two 2018 lottery picks waged their first mano-a-mano contest since the draft, when the Knicks passed over Bridges for Knox at No. 9. Knox came out a…
(Monday, December 17, 2018 7:11:52 PM)
We understand the won-loss record isn’t supposed to mean much this season and that there will be plenty of growing pains as the Knicks continue their slow process of trying to rebuild into a contender. But gee-whiz. The Knicks were actually favored Monday night against the Suns, who entered the Garden with just six wins…
(Monday, December 17, 2018 6:42:51 PM)
Revenge is a dish best served cold — even if you’re on the Suns. Nearly a year after Knicks big man Enes Kanter taunted Phoenix’s Devin Booker on social media, the Suns guard took the opportunity of his team’s 128-110 win Monday to clap back on Twitter. Along with a face-palm emoji, Booker tweeted after…
(Monday, December 17, 2018 5:11:40 PM)
No wonder owner James Dolan would consider selling the Knicks one day. The Knicks embarrassed themselves and Garden stockholders by getting crushed by the Suns, the NBA’s worst team, 128-110. A 41-17 third quarter was the Knicks’ undoing as the Suns took a 17-point lead into the final session at a silent Garden. When the…
(Monday, December 17, 2018 6:56:55 AM)
Live by the triangle, die by the triangle. That essentially is how James Dolan describes Phil Jackson’s failed tenure as team president of the Knicks, according to a wide-ranging ESPN interview in which the executive chairman and CEO of Madison Square Garden also slightly leaves open the possibility of one day selling the Knicks and…
[NYTimes] W.N.B.A. Executive Kelly Krauskopf Joins Pacers’ Front Office (Tuesday, December 18, 2018 5:32:21 AM)
Krauskopf, who helped guide the Indiana Fever to 13 playoff appearances and one title, will be the first woman to be an N.B.A. assistant general manager since the 1970s.
(Monday, December 17, 2018 11:10:47 PM)
Devin Booker and the Suns got revenge on Enes Kanter and the Knicks on and off the court in Monday’s game.
(Monday, December 17, 2018 10:08:32 PM)
The Knicks fell apart in the third quarter and lost to the lowly Phoenix Suns 128-110 on Monday at Madison Square Garden.
(Monday, December 17, 2018 6:57:20 PM)
The Knicks will be without Tim Hardaway Jr. on Monday vs. the Suns, the team announced. The guard is dealing with a sore right heel.
(Monday, December 17, 2018 5:05:49 PM)
The Knicks, who have lost six of their last seven games, face the Phoenix Suns at Madison Square Garden on Monday night.
(Monday, December 17, 2018 11:31:04 AM)
Dolan addresses a number of wide-ranging topics from the Anucha Browne Sanders case to Phil Jackson’s triangle.
(Monday, December 17, 2018 8:43:28 AM)
Dolan announced in June that he was planning on branching off the Knicks and Rangers from the entertainment side of the company. fueling speculation at the time that he was getting prepared to sell.
(Tuesday, December 18, 2018 12:44:27 AM)
The Suns and star shooting guard Devin Booker took to Twitter to troll Knicks center Enes Kanter after their win at Madison Square Garden.
(Monday, December 17, 2018 7:43:11 AM)
Madison Square Garden chairman James Dolan says he has a “responsibility” to shareholders to consider selling the Knicks, if the right offer came along.
29 replies on “Knicks Morning News (2018.12.18)”
My favorite bit from the Dolan interview is where he basically shit talks his own 92-year-old dad, without whom he would be some drunk nobody. I’m somewhat shocked that Dolan even conceded that being born a millionaire was partially responsible for his current success.
So in trying to find some silver lining in the dumpster fire of losing to the Suns at home by 50, I found this:
Player A per 36: 20.2 points, 7.5 rebounds, 5.1 assists, TS 55.7, 18% TOV% (4TO/36), 26.1 usage
Player B per 36: 19.9 points, 4.3 rebounds, 5.0 assists, TS 55.9, 13.4% TOV% (2.7 TO/36), 23.9 usage
Player A= take a guess
Player B= Emmanuel Mudiay
by the way if you look for players this season averaging 19/4/5 with TS>55 (per 36), the list =
Durant
Giannis
Lillard
Lebron
Jokic
Harden
Kyrie
Bledsoe
Curry
Blake
Kemba
Jrue Holiday
Fox
Player A
Mudiay
Jeremy Lin
that’s it
not saying Mudiay is great, but we should totally max him out this summer amirite?! hmmm?
Sorry it appears there’s no more edit button, so I’m forced to write new posts when I think of new things.
Going back in the last 10 seasons, here is the list of seasons for players 22 and younger who have averaged 19/4/5 + TS 55+ per 36:
Giannis x 1
Jokic x 2
Curry x 1
Kyrie x 1
Fox x 1 (so far this season)
Player A x 1 (so far this season)
Mudiay x 1 (so far this season)
It is true that we are less than 40% of the way through the season, but Mudiay has been much better than any of us could have imagined. Max him out! Max him out! lol
Mudiay = Felton
Their 22 year old year numbers are exactly the same, except mudiay has an absurd fg% from long two’s, which will come down.
I’d rather be without him, but I think he played himself into another contract, fine if it’s on a backup pg level… but we know it won’t.
If Mudiay was a 19 year old rookie this year like Player A, I’d be pretty pumped about his season, as well.
Not only will it not be on a backup PG level, but they’re literally unable to sign him to such a contract and sign a max free agent (they could only offer him the room exception if they get a max free agent). So how well Mudiay plays is pretty much academic unless the Knicks miss out on every max free agent that they want, in which case it will be, “Let’s bring back this same 9-23 team plus KP, a 2019 first rounder and a mid-level free agent…that should work, right?”
Devin Booker’s “Enes Kanter revenge game” doesn’t exactly have a whole lot of “zing” to it, does it?
A is certainly Doncic.
I still think the same: the only move the Knicks should do about Mudiay is to trade him asap and let someone else figure out if this very unsustainable looking improvement is real. If he had a rookie contract for 3 more years then sure, keep him and see what’s there, but he doesn’t.
The fascinating thing is that if their Plan A falls through and they miss out on every max free agent out there, they’ll have plenty of cap room so they could just sign Mudiay away from whatever team they trade him to! There’s basically no cap benefit to keeping Mudiay on the team.
Not that I am advocating resigning Mudiay (although I think it’d be sort of an interesting discussion if he keeps this up) but he is certainly not Raymond Felton at age 22.
Felton at age 22 = 13.9/3.4/6.9, TS 48.1 on 21 usage
Mudiay at age 22 = 19.9/4.3/5, TS 55.9 on 23.9 usage
Mudiay is also 6’5″ with a 6’9″ wingspan whereas Felton was 5’11” with a 6’4″ wingspan. His physical profile has always been what has intrigued evaluators.
I think this long 2 thing is a bit overstated in that he just hasn’t taken that many shots from long 2. It is true that he’s shooting an unsustainable 57.1% from long 2 but he’s only taken 35 total shots from 16-24ft according to stats.nba.com. He’s also shooting a probably unsustainable 47.5% from 8-16 feet, making him 49 of 96 (51%) from 8-24 feet. OK, so let’s say he actually missed 10 of those mid-range shots, making him 39/96 (40.6%) which seems more reasonable. His TS would STILL be a career high ~52.7% which is not great obviously, but would represent a career high by a fair amount – and a far cry from Raymond Felton’s 48.1 in his age 22 season.
Other than his mid-range shooting, the main driver of his improved efficiency is sort of the “little bit of everything” principle. He’s shooting more from 3 point range than his career and also shooting a little better in terms of percentage. He’s shooting more free throws this year (6 per 36, 28.3 FTR vs career 25.8) and shooting better than his career average at the line (76.9 vs. 73.6). He’s shooting more at the rim this year (29.3% of FGA) and shooting a fair amount better than his career (54.8% vs. career 50.9%). We could call it unsustainable, or we could just call it that weird thing called “getting better”.
I would actually be just fine with this plan to be honest, as long as we pay that mid-level free agent appropriately. We could let Lee expire without sending assets out to trade him. THJ will be just a 2 year contract after the end of this season, and one could imagine a team with cap space being willing to take him on. We could rent out whatever extra cap space we have to a team that wants to make a splash in FA or just to dump $$ for the 2019-20 season. We’d get a late lottery pick for summer of 2020 and we would have a buttload of cap space for potential free agents. I think this is what normal teams do, no?
Trading Mudiay makes so much sense. Especially when you consider he has the potential to turn into a pumpkin on his new team and make whatever pick we acquire so much more valuable.
New Orleans is desperate for help and they throw away their 1st round pick every year.
If they could dump THJ, sure, but, well, I don’t think that they can dump THJ. If they can’t dump THJ, they’d basically be in no man’s land. Not enough room to be able to offer a max in 2020 and then having to make decisions about their own guys getting raises (or whoever else they pick up in this offseason).
That’s why Mills and Perry so clearly have planned this season around adding a max guy to pair with KP this offseason, because they know that once KP is extended, they likely won’t get another chance with this specific roster configuration.
That was the most likely scenario the moment the team made the decision to “double dip” rebuild.
That decision made it more likely we would get a star player out of the next draft, less likely a player that was already a star would come to NY as a free agent because we are so young and bad, and the path to serious contention more dependent on the inherent luck of the draft and the time it takes to develop 19 year old players.
The good news is that we may have made “a score” with Robinson. If he turns into a legitimate star defensive C that can score efficiently around the basket (a Capela type player), that potentially knocks a couple of years off the rebuild as he begins to put it all together. We may have gotten a 1st round quality player that pans out in the 2nd round.
Side note: I’d been perplexed all year by how awful the Suns were. I know they’re not great, but they have Booker, Ayton, Warren, and Bridges. That’s a *lot* better than what we throw out. Not surprised they walloped us.
If THJ is traded his AAV jumps to around $20M (!). That guy is finishing his contract here or getting traded with significant sweetener. I don’t know why any other scenario is ever discussed.
BC is correct that there is something of a “use it or lose it” imperative to the cap space with KP’s contract about to be signed, but it is worth pointing out that if we whiff on all the big fish there’s no reason to panic and max Kemba Walker or whoever. We can re-sign Vonleh et al. to deals that expire at the same time as THJ/Lee and have 10+ year max cap space in the summer of 2021 (even with Dotson and Trier on $10M AAV deals by that point). It would involve renouncing Frank but his cap hold is going to be $18M so that might happen regardless unless things change drastically.
For that plan to make sense we’d need to make good lottery picks in 2019 and 2020. It’s not ideal, but I guess my point is don’t let Mills/Perry claim the cap space this summer pre-KP contract absolutely has to be spent. If it’s spent we should still want it to be spent wisely.
By “double dip rebuild” do you mean basically tanking?
If so, let’s try this one more time.
What specifically would you have done instead? Use player names, contract figures, and other real things that exist instead of “I would have won a bunch of deals.”
The best thing that Scott Perry has done since becoming the Knicks GM is that he has at least halted the absolutely dumbfuckery decisions that Phil and Mills did during their respective tenures as being the sole Knick decision-makers. The mess that the Knicks are in right now is pretty much solely assignable to Phil and Mills making astonishingly bad decisions with free agents. If you just removed the three free agent contracts that no one should have ever expected to be good ideas when they were signed (Noah, Lee and THJ), the Knicks would be so much better off than they are now.
And while some of that might be wishful thinking (in that Perry hasn’t really had the opportunity to do a shitty signing like Phil and Mills did), I think it’s also pretty fair. Normal teams can have normal rebuilds, but moronic decision-makers like Phil and Mills make that impossible. Perry, at the very least, seems like a normal NBA decision-maker. Maybe not a great one, but at this point, just having a normal NBA decision-maker is a godsend.
Unless you really believe the following, Mudiay WILL regress:
– 30% of his shots are coming from 10ft-3pt line, where he’s shooting 55% (!), up from the circa-35% he’s had before (can’t do the math exactly right here)
– His at the rim numbers are up from 42% to 54.8%
– His 3pt% went from 31% to 33.3% (the only point I may concede, and it ain’t much)
These numbers are what drive up his TS% and WS, even though theyr’e really not that high. His FT% is still in the 70s. ALL his other stats are as before, except for slightly lower Assist numbers.
So yeah, 630 minutes of good play in a sea of thousands of minutes of bad play doesn’t Doncic make.
He’s gonna bust, and probably soon before/after we give him a contract.
the same voices on this board that have historically been wrong will continue to be wrong
Literally nothing has changed except ruruland isn’t here to articulate their wrongness with words that resemble those that a D-III basketball coach would use
@19 – I did the math for you in post #11.
The point was that he’s gotten a little better in everything. FT%, 3p%, rim FG%, etc. It doesn’t have “regress to mean” although certainly it might – it could actually be this thing called “improvement”.
For instance, until his age 22 season, Giannis shot about an average of 64% at the rim over the first 6500 minutes of his career. This season he’s shooting 81% at the rim. Is he going to “regress” or did he just get better at dunking over everyone?
Similarly, Kemba walker shot 31.7% over his first 1165 3 point attempts. Then at age 25 he shot 37% on 490 attempts. Surely he “regressed to the mean” the next season, right? Well actually he shot 39.9% on 602 attempts, then followed that with shooting 38.4% on 601 attempts.
Sometimes players just get better. Some players regress. The hard part is figuring out early in the process which it is, so you can get players at under-market contracts.
Frank, you gotta look at where the improvement seems to be: is he really now a 55% long-2 shooter?? The other areas he got better at were smaller improvements, if any at all.
FWIW I recently read that the trade kicker would not apply to his option year. So we’ve got that going for us.
Yeah but according to your own post, he’s still bad. He’s just better than Raymond Felton was at 22.
When did Raymond Felton become a good benchmark?
Look everyone, I’m not saying Mudiay is amazing and that we should re-sign him. We just shouldn’t automatically assume that he’s incapable of improving. After all he is only 22.
btw how amazing a shooter would he be if he could actually jump straight up and down on his jumper without going left and kicking his leg out, and if he actually released the ball on the way up rather than the way down? I mean maybe like Steph Curry. MAX HIM OUT
Some of his threes, I just don’t understand how they go in. They seem to defy the laws of physics.
The thing is I hate even this improved version of Mudiay. If you guaranteed me he would sustain everything he’s doing this year over the next three years, I still wouldn’t want him.
he has a lot of baron Davis in his handle