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.

While we’re discussing modern players, Siakam is kinda the embodiment of it. Maybe his 3 point improvement isn’t sustainable too, but he’s already extremely valuable for everything else he does.

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.

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?

I bet if we saw Knox’s 3-on-3 practices, we’d see what Mills and Fizdale saw in him, too. So far, hasn’t shown up on the court. And I don’t care about practice if you’re as productive Willy has been over 2000 NBA minutes. You act like this is JV basketball, where failing to hustle during suicides will get you a permanent seat on the bench. This is the NBA, dawg.

And you still haven’t addressed the issue that he doesn’t do what centers in the modern game are supposed to do.

And yet he’s still an efficient scorer and excellent rebounder. I agree that he’s not a “modern” center, a la Capela/Gobert, but in his rookie year, nearly 10% of his shots were dunks. The next year, it was up to 12%. Yes, I too wish that 31% of his shots came from dunks like Tyson Chandler, but acting like he’s some kind of 90s holdover is totally silly. He’s a medium-volume scorer on above-average efficiency with a knack for rebounding. And again, $6M over four years.

It’s not the difference between a championship and a 2nd-round exit, but it’s still an incremental loss. Do that four or five times and you go from a mid-playoff team to the lottery. And that’s what the “who carez” squad doesn’t understand: the Knicks can either be bailed out by one A+ move (like if AD suddenly decided to become a Knick) or grow from a whole bunch of B moves. This franchise seems to stumble into the B moves (blows a lottery pick on Knox and then picks up the best values in the draft in Robinson and Trier), but they’re especially good at undoing them.

Charlie Ward’s extension: never forget.

I liked Cole better.

Well, unless you work for the Knicks or Hornets you haven’t seen him in practice either. You simply chose to believe Hornacek, Clifford and Borrego know what they’re doing in this case without any information other than the evidence that he doesn’t play much. I choose to believe that I know two of those coaches are not good, with the evidence that they got fired, and the third one is a rookie head coach who might or might not know what he’s doing. We’re kinda in the same boat, except the stats tell us that it’s likely those coaches are wrong in this case, while the eye test probably says the opposite. I’ll stay comfortably with the stats.

Tnfh also already answered your question. Guys like Jonas Valanciunas for example have been a part of playoff team’s rotations with success, even Kanter himself was a rotation piece for OKC when they made a very deep run in the playoffs. Is he an ideal center in the modern NBA? Hell no. Does that mean he’s worse than Frank Kaminsky?