Knicks Morning News (2019.01.06)

It’s pretty fucked up that Kanter can say something like that and not even sound crazy for saying it. Poor guy.

You know this world is fucked up when you live in a country where a rabid loony is President and still it’s one of the safest places on Earth for free thinkers.

(You can substitute “President” with “Home Secretary” to adapt my former remark to Italy, too)

You know this world is fucked up when you live in a country where a rabid loony is President and still it’s one of the safest places on Earth for free thinkers.

While I would agree that Trump is a detestable human being and gives ass holes a bad name, I don’t see the “rabid loony” as far as most of his policies are concerned. For the record I haven’t vored in America since I cast a vote for George McGovern in 1972 so take what I say with a grain of salt. I can see why 48% of Americans voted for him an like what he campaigned on and has done policy wise.

Trump won the election clearly because the democrat party forgot all about their time honored base…. the middle class and lower working man in this country. Trump won because the millions of white lower-middle income workers who voted for Obama in 2008/12 in Michigan, Ohio, North Carolina, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania switched to Trump because he became their champion as the democrat party through environmental regulation made the exploration for fossil fuels and the steel industry in America untenable and refused to stem the flow of very low income workers from flooding over the southern border knee capping the wagers on the lowest earners with excess labor.

Trump’s policies have been to:
1…. cut taxes on almost 90% of Americans
2…. deregulate the economy by fiat
3… attempt to slow the flow of ultra cheap labor across the southern border.
4….Get the euro’s to pay a larger share of their defense
5… successfully re-negotiate NAFTA
6….Squeeze China’s balls to force them to the negotiating table to negotiate a reasonable trade agreement.
7…. Stop N.Korea from lobbing missiles over Japan twice a week
8….. Preside over a booming US Economy
9 ….remove US forces from the Levant (which used to be a democrat idea since Viet Nam!)

I’m not so sure what’s so ultra Bat shit insane about these policies. 🙂

the vast majority of nba players who turn out to be really good and start out terribly tend to improve quickly. like what fox is doing this year. defined role or not, it’s hard to imagine anyone has watched frank this year without downgrading the odds of really good case outcomes for him.

the corollary to that is that slow developing useful but merely decent players have very low npv for their draft team. draft value mostly comes from players who can contribute while on rookie scale and/or eventual homeruns who are so good their second deal is a predictable discount even at 25pct max.

Two points here.

I love stats, but you aren’t going to make optimal decisions looking at broad categories like “all 2nd year players”. You need to examine these players as individuals and look at what’s holding them back. Is it athleticism, physical maturity and strength, emotional maturity, basketball IQ, partying, work ethic, shot, system etc.. Some of those things will almost inevitably improve. Some of these things will never improve. Some can improve with work and the right development. The idea would be to find players “like Frank” and see if and how much they developed and how long it took.

Frank looks like a bit of mixed bag there.

On the second point, you are basically saying what I’ve been saying for the last 2 years. Given that teams are drafting 18-19 year old kids now, these rookie contracts often don’t provide good value because it takes more time for the players to be productive and earn their salary. That doesn’t even count all the inevitable busts. Then when you actually do hit a “potential” home run, you often have to extend him and give out a max before you know he’s going to grow into that contract.

Over and above the added risk of guessing who the BPA is, the draft is more of a minefield than it used to be at the very time when people are valuing picks higher.

1…. cut taxes on almost 90% of Americans

That’s what the deplorables thought, only to discover they are just as fucked as before…lmao

https://www.45chaos.com/

Such a robust, functional and thought-out platform that 406 people have been fired or resigned in under two years.

It would take me ten posts to even begin to cover the lies and half-truths in the above post. So I won’t. I will tell you with certainty that the multibillion American manufacturer I work for began laying off workers, despite record sales, due to the Trump tariffs. We expect another round next month. So much for winning, I guess.

You need to read Woodward’s Fear, bobneptune. If you read that book, trust that a renowned journalist like Woodward will report his sources fairly and accurately, and think that Trump is a competent leader upon completion… well, we don’t live in the same world. At all.

He’s a child. He doesn’t read. He barely works. He sides with violent dictators over his own intelligence agencies. He runs the presidency like a reality TV show. That’s factorial.

@14

If you were an actual Knicks fan, you’d know

The dems lost the election because trump colluded with our enemies in Russia and committed treason to manipulate social media and to sway millennials voting output. He lost the popular vote and still got elected that’s all you need to know.
Back to the knicks.

We need to get Parker from Chicago for Timmy and kp and their first this year.

Yeah, that was my final post on the matter. And that’s factorial.

Google plus search terms equals knowledge all day long and it’s never gonna change.

That level of improvement doesn’t make him a stud, but if it was reflected in the boxscore people wouldn’t be so down on him. I am speculating that those improvements haven’t shown up yet in the boxscore because he has no defined role, no defined system, playing style of teammates, and noise.

I’d be willing to bet that if he was playing for the Spurs in a real system with some similarities to the triangle his stats would look better too.

I suspect the same, if nothing else by watching how Derrick White and Bryn Forbes have become serviceable players under Pop’s nurturing.

The problem with this counterfactual is that teams with well-defined offensive systems tend to be good teams, and good teams don’t give minutes to players of Frank Ntilikina’s caliber.

To be clear I believe that Pop and other elite coaches can coax more production out of players, but I think people tend to get some things backwards about that process. They don’t start with complete and utter scrubs and coach them up–they intentionally acquire players who have a baseline of skills they can work with.

Derrick White had a BPM of 11.9 during his only year of D1 college. Granted he was old as hell after 3 years of D2, but that’s the perfect kind of player to take with the 29th pick no matter who’s picking.

Bryn Forbes had a 43.5% 3PT% on 749 (!) NCAA 3PT attempts, including shooting 48% during his senior year. His secondary skills were non-existent, but he was a great target with a UDFA signing.

I still regard the work Pop and the Spurs have done with those guys highly because it’s never a given that anyone will be an NBA rotation player, let alone the 29th overall pick and an undrafted free agent. They could play before they got to San Antonio though.

The point I’m making in a roundabout way is the Spurs wouldn’t acquire Frank because he has never demonstrated the ability to positively affect the outcome of a basketball game.

it’s been a while since I’ve seen someone that salty they didn’t get the joke, and that’s factorial

Totally agree with TNFH’s counter-factorial position on the Spurs. However, what’s interesting to consider is that if we skip entirely the position Frank was taken (which I think we can all agree was at best way, way too early), few if any of us thought he’d be a total scrub. Lots of violent disagreement about what he’d become, but even the pessimists were mostly looking at a bench rotation player capable of doing some lock-down defensive work now and then, and hopefully canning a few threes to keep things honest. And league-wide, there were some raised eyebrows at the slot, but I don’t think anyone thought he couldn’t play in the NBA.

But now we’re seriously considering his future in Europe, while Derrick White and Bryn Forbes are finding their feet and building on their own modest if useful skill sets. Just makes me wonder.

he was old as hell after 3 years of D2, but that’s the perfect kind of player to take with the 29th pick

We’ll never know who the Spurs have liked as lottery picks because they’ve, literally, only made one lottery pick in the last 30 years.

But I’ll tell you this: any team that bases it’s entire system on the needs of Frank Ntilikina isn’t going to be very good regardless of who’s coaching. (And, like one plus one being two all day long, that my friends is factorial).

The Spurs are 30th in the NBA in 3-point attempt rate and yet they’re still 8th in eFG% and 7th in offensive rating. They offset the fact that they’re 30th in 3PA rate by being 1st in 3-point percentage.

They’re a pretty interesting team.

I, for one, think that Frank can be a reasonably good NBA player, meaning a low-to-mid-7-digit salary role player. He has physical tools, ia smart and coachable, and works really hard. Probably a Langston Galloway/Ish Smith/Justice Winslow level player with more emphasis on D.

But as I said at draft time, there are probably at least 10 players picked below him that would have been better picks. That has turned out to be a conservative estimate. The good news is that one of them is on our team.

I do think that much of Frank’s time up here has been mostly wasted by trying to turn him into a PG, a position for which he was never suited and never will be. People here have rationalized nine ways till Sunday to make a case for it, but it was so freaking obvious. Now that he’s settling in to a more suitable role (defensive combo guard off the bench, best playing next to a volume scorer or three) maybe he can start to develop organically.

Don’t do Frank dirty like that.

If this were the final year of Frank’s contract, I would not offer him another above whatever the minimum would be for a two-year veteran, and maybe with a second year team option. Maybe multiple team options. But anything above that, he’s out the door. But because he is still under contract for two years, and the Knicks suck, I say let him fully earn the bust title.

Stephon would be so proud reading this

Apparently teams have called the Knicks about Kanter and they’ve been listening. Hopefully he’s off the team by the end of the month, and maybe we’ll get a 2nd round pick out of it. As long as we don’t take back salary, he can get lost. Sucks what’s going on between him and the Turkish government, though.

The Kanter rumor comes from a reliable source in Mike Vorkunov, but as someone who has spent more time on the trade machine than I care to admit I just can’t see a team who would trade for him using only expirings. I’d have no problem trading him for non-expiring money as long as we got worthwhile assets but Mills/Perry seem pretty intent on having max space this offseason.

hello sir yes fine thank you anyway you probably will be shocked if not floored to your knees to learn this but i must now report that your highly stylized actuarial table is quite disturbingly imperfect (in fact it is almost always wrong),

I can tell you from gambling experience (successful I might add) that nothing is perfect in this world. But I do know, I never made a nickel looking at generalized data. I found value by digging further and understanding specific situations.

You may not want to put the time and energy into defining the player attributes and profiles correctly so they can be studied the right way. Neither do I. I don’t get paid for this.

I’d rather use observation and common sense (like if you have a pot problem, bad work ethic, and low IQ I’m going to lower your chances of getting a lot better relative to a guy that lacks strength, maturity and confidence, but is younger, has a strong work ethic, good athleticism, and high basketball IQ)

Some profile samples may be too small to draw any confident conclusions no matter what.

However, generalized data is not going to be very predictive when attributes vary widely and some attributes are more or less likely to make you successful and lead to improvement. The more specific you get the more predictive the profile as long as sample size is adequate. That’s just a fact.

ptmilo this season is the most consistently on fire Knicks-related person since Jeremy Lin in February 2012

But as I said at draft time, there are probably at least 10 players picked below him that would have been better picks.

You can find guys all over the lottery that ultimately don’t turn out as well as a bunch of players picked below them. That does not mean it was obvious beforehand or that if I am right one year I’m going to right consistently enough year after year to outperform the market.

I hate to be in the position of defending Frank all the time because before the draft I spent a couple weeks arguing the pick was nuts because he was a zero on offense in France. It wasn’t until the end I softened on the idea. Then he grew on me so now I am biased and hoping he gets better.

All that said, people are writing him off while he’s still a very immature 20 year old that’s been used poorly. It was known before he was selected that he was a project coming in.

As soon as we drafted him the Knicks haters in the press were saying he was a pretty good pick given what was available at the time but knowing the Knicks they wouldn’t have the patience to develop him.

I guess they were right.

Maybe the kid belongs in San Antonio where they’ll use his defense, unselfishness, and passing skills in an effective way and get him shots than he can knock down with reasonable efficiency instead of asking him to be aggressive and create off the dribble when that’s not what he is.

Wiggins has 18 points on 12 FGA and 4 FTA. Who wants to bet he ends up below .500 TS% by the time the game’s over?

I’d rather use observation and common sense (like if you have a pot problem, bad work ethic, and low IQ I’m going to lower your chances of getting a lot better relative to a guy that lacks strength, maturity and confidence

Strat’s looking at you, Balkman!

This is just one piece of small-sample data, but he’s made just one of twelve corner threes this year, and 10 of 36 for his career. It’s not like he’s some kind of knockdown shooter when he’s got a high-value shot attempt. He’s a garbage offensive player in virtually every way.

This is one of those glass half full or glass half empty stats.

Less than a week ago I argued that he was pretty good from the corner last year but was terrible so far this year. That could mean multiple things, but one of them is that his overall 3p% this year may be more noisy than people realize. If he should he start hitting 3s from the corner at a more reasonable rate and sustain the rest, we might see the kind of improvement overall that would be encouraging.

Besides that, when he got off to that hot start from 3 in those first few games I immediately said his percentage was going to fall because they were going under the pick on him. He’s still getting open shots, but with the “get more aggressive” mantra, he’s now taking more bad shots than he used to. He’s still scared and passes on some, but there are more occasions now when he puts up what I would consider a bad shot than he used to. He hasn’t figured it out yet.

The Kanter rumor comes from a reliable source in Mike Vorkunov, but as someone who has spent more time on the trade machine than I care to admit I just can’t see a team who would trade for him using only expirings. I’d have no problem trading him for non-expiring money as long as we got worthwhile assets but Mills/Perry seem pretty intent on having max space this offseason.

Yeah, I’d also obviously take anything another team offered if there were attached to just expirings and I, personally, would take longer contracts if they added assets (I don’t think Mills would, but I would), but since Mills isn’t taking on 2020 salary for Kanter, who in the fuck is offering expirings plus assets for Enes fucking Kanter? How could that possibly work anywhere? I guess GarPax might be stupid enough to trade Parker and a second for Kanter? Maybe? I just can’t see it. I’d love it if it were to happen, but I don’t see it anywhere.

If you were convinced that none of the star free agents was going to sign in NY and you were going to wind up trying to roll the cap space over with short term contracts anyway, it might be worthwhile to consider taking on a longer contract if it came with an asset, but it depends on how long and what asset.

I think they are going to wind up signing 1-2 of our guys and then add some filler 1 year deals trying to roll the rest over.

I think Franks a good passer but he never gets into the paint enough to capitalize on it.

Also his assist numbers are down since we play Fiz’s ISO offense this this year.

I can tell you from gambling experience (successful I might add) that nothing is perfect in this world. But I do know, I never made a nickel looking at generalized data. I found value by digging further and understanding specific situations.

hard to imagine, i know, but you’re not the only degenerate to have covered the psychic hotline bills with some other sucker’s paycheck. maybe it would help to imagine everyone in their underwear but also at an otb just across from the cme. because as it is the whole malcolm gladwell dumbing it the rest of the way down for ‘what do mom and dad do’ day shtick is gumming the tracks.

it’s hard to beat most markets with obvious empirics, but a player’s future success is not a handicapped price, it’s a feature of the physical world. and as malcolm might say but for money and with a shit ton of jargon, by far the bigger mistake people make in making guesses about the physical world comes from overestimating their vaguely specified case rate and the value of their intuitions while subordinating the well articulated but highly flawed base rate. “common sense” can be composed of intuitions that improve on some stylized model, or it can be a great excuse to totally just make shit up and discard the very narrow bit of unbiased high level information we actually have.

You may not want to put the time and energy into defining the player attributes and profiles correctly so they can be studied the right way. Neither do I. I don’t get paid for this.
i’m not trying to be the opinion police here. if you wanna say you don’t buy the relevance of some well specified but highly general population compared to your gut feeling or common sense that is your right as an internetican. just say it as the grandpa on the couch “that ain’t how it works in the real world” blurt that it is without the epistemology 101 sermon. nobody anywhere thinks a half assed basketball reference longitudinal study is dispositive.

d a m n

ptmilo is posing a legitimate threat to Joe DiMaggio’s streak

This is just one piece of small-sample data, but he’s made just one of twelve corner threes this year, and 10 of 36 for his career. It’s not like he’s some kind of knockdown shooter when he’s got a high-value shot attempt. He’s a garbage offensive player in virtually every way.

So if you went to a statistician and asked what is the statistical significance of 10 for 36 assuming a Poisson distribution, he couldn’t confidently say whether that meant Ntilikina was a 15% or a 40% three point shooter. There is just too little data. This is the case for many, many decisions about whether someone is a good shooter or not and is why you need other observations too. Since he was apparently 9 of 24 corner threes in his first year, does that mean he used to be good at them and now is bad? I doubt it. I think the difference is mostly noise. But I do believe that, as Stratomatic suggested, he may be defended a little differently than before and taking different shots. He may also feel more pressure to take shots this year and so is taking some he didn’t take the first year. It’s part of his development.

Any time you beat the Lakers by 20 you gotta fire the coach. That’s basketball 101.

I mean, you could make a case that a playoff hopeful team that only beats the Lakers without LeBron by 20 should change coaches, for sure.

I’m just puzzled as to why they didn’t do it at the time of the Butler fiasco, but I guess it’s just Wolves things.

That means it’s time to get Scott Layden on the phone

Scott Layden owes the Knicks a favor after he ruined the team all those years ago. Get him on the phone and make him take Courtney Lee for Bayless and Tolliver or something.

I actually miss Glen Grunwald.

After the Butler fiasco it was completely predictable that Thibs would be fired as GM and maybe as coach too. In fact, on September 24, I predicted here that this would happen within three months. It took three months and two weeks, so I was wrong about the timing. It’s kind of a shame for Minnesota. He was probably a good coach for them, but a lousy GM. He was clearly fired for his GM performance instead of his coaching performance. If they had a good GM, they probably would have listened to Butler in the first place and paid him instead of Wiggins.

Scott Layden bears part of the blame for this too. I find it hard to believe he will stay on in charge as GM. The riskier part of my prediction about Minnesota was suggesting that Billups might be hired. That is still possible. Whatever they do for GM, I think they may want to do it in the next couple of weeks, so that if they get a new GM, they get him in time to do something by the NBA trade deadline. Otherwise they might as well wait until the off season is near.

I’m watching Dick Van Dyke on the golden globes, just like old times!

I actually miss Glen Grunwald.

He did the Bargs trade, so, well…

He did the Bargs trade, so, well…

Again, if everybody that works here looks incompetent, but they look competent at all the other places they work, it’s probably safe to say that the are, in fact, competent, and that anybody will unltimately look incompetent here. Even guys that are in the hall fame, and have won at every level, and have more NBA championship rings than anybody on earth.

There’s a dude that sits above all these guys and that guy is to blame.

For the cited corner three statistics, Ntilikina hit 28% of them and the 95% confidence interval is 10% to 46% as his true rate.

It’s obvious that Frank is deeply uncomfortable being the guy who’s taking the shot and until he gets over that he’s ging to be a super shitty shooter. He may well still be shit after getting over it, he may never get over it. But it doesn’t really matter either way. Same deal for his handle. He’s clearly improved his skill level over last year but he is so damn nervous that the results are even worse. All he needed to do was develop skill and body and hope that led to consistency. But somebody lit a fire under his ass and it’s got him scared shitless that he’s going to fail. He needs to accept the hopelessness and inevitable decay of life and stop giving a shit.

Layden was the first of our many horrible GMs. He started out downfall with the Ewing trade, Houston extension, garbage draft picks, and taking on “high character” players who make lots of money but couldn’t actually play basketball ( Eisley, Anderson, etc). I actually think he was a worse GM than Isiah, though a better human being.

Anyway, he owes us one big time. Towns for THJ + Enes.

That is a scary thought.

From all reports Grunwald was against the trade but played the good soldier which is why his firing right before training camp was so odd.

For his sake, hopefully he was against the trade!