(Sunday, January 06, 2019 11:23:23 AM)
The Knicks are fully committing to a youth movement, which means a smaller role in the future for Enes Kanter, Courtney Lee, Trey Burke and Lance Thomas, writes Mike Vorkunov of The Athletic. Kanter has been the most outspoken about his loss of playing time since being pulled from the starting lineup in December. He […]
(Sunday, January 06, 2019 10:03:55 PM)
Knicks guard Frank Ntilikina will miss an undetermined amount of time, beginning with Monday’s game against the Portland Trail Blazers with a strained left ankle, head coach David Fizdale said.
(Sunday, January 06, 2019 4:25:17 PM)
Enes Kanter may not have requested a trade, but that doesn’t mean teams haven’t called the Knicks about the big man.
(Sunday, January 06, 2019 8:15:14 PM)
PORTLAND, Ore. — Knicks coach David Fizdale said he had no problems with Enes Kanter missing the London game Jan. 17 versus the Wizards because he fears for his safety. “We’ll obviously miss not having him, but it is what it is,” Fizdale said after practice at the NIKE campus. “We’ll try to go out…
(Sunday, January 06, 2019 7:44:33 PM)
PORTLAND, Ore. — This has been a growing year for Kevin Knox. Literally. Knicks coach David Fizdale said Knox sometimes has sore knees because the 19-year-old is experiencing growing pains. Knox confirmed doctors have told the 6-foot-9 rookie forward some good news. “Doctors said I have a half-inch or an inch left in the tank,”…
[NYTimes] The Mavericks’ Key to Keeping Players Fresh? Blood Samples (Monday, January 07, 2019 8:00:05 AM)
Dallas works with Orreco, a company that proposes individualized remedies to combat fatigue while trying to identify increased risk for injury and illness.
123 replies on “Knicks Morning News (2019.01.07)”
Whoa, whoa, whoa, you’re telling me that Courtney Lee is available in a trade? That’s huge news!
Groundbreaking news!
All along I thought he would retire a Knick and now this bomb drops.
‘We are through the looking glass here people’
Over under for Knicks trades before the trade deadline: 1.5
I still bet the under.
Zero.
I think they are too nervous to pull the trigger in any trade while they still have this fantasy KD is coming.
No! Not The Great Courtney Lee Contract!
I don’t even want Durant anymore. If dude can’t be happy on the Warriors, he definitely won’t be happy at MSG.
Cavs give Pat McCaw a 6 mil contract and then cut him a week later? I want some of that free money…
Yeah, I don’t understand. I feel like there’s something we don’t know about him, like that he insists on repeatedly blasting Kero Kero Bonito’s “Waking Up” through the locker room stereo at 6 AM and threatens with violence those that ask if they can play something else for once. I mean, that’s the main reason that my friends have all abandoned me, so I’m just putting it out there as a possibility.
Contract wasn’t guaranteed, so they could still cut him without having to pay him anything.
You mean like suggesting them to drink bleach? 🙂
(Meanwhile, the Cavs have signed Cameron Payne to a 10-day contract. Low lottery is a total crapshoot).
The Knicks would never punt the cap space, and I’m pretty sure they know Durant isn’t coming. I think we’re gonna end up drafting top 3 and giving D’Angelo Russell the big press conference. I’m not sure how exciting adding RJ Barrett and D’Angelo Russell to Porzingis, Knox, and Vonleh will turn out, but at least they’d be young and TH2 would be coming off the bench.
And the Pat McCaw situation seems like nothing about it makes sense but nobody will ultimately care because he’s not a great basketball player.
The McCaw situation definitely feels like agent stuff. He was a RFA, and with this move he becomes a UFA, so I’d say it certainly was Cleveland making a favor to his agent for whatever reason.
@13
Just reading this comment made 1% of my life force vanish from my body, so I’d say that’s the level of excitement I’d have for a Russell + Barrett backcourt for 4 years.
I guess it would be better than the crap we’ve watched the last many years, but ugh.
Wow. That’s wild.
Of course that’s it. I guess he’ll end up signing somewhere else in the next 3-4 days.
I have a feeling we end up with Ja Morant. Don’t forget, too, that Cleveland and Phoenix are the types of franchises to possibly pick RJ ahead of Zion. Literally no one other than those three are interesting to me (and RJ only because he might be picked ahead of Morant)
Also, speaking of D’angelo Russell- does anyone else notice that almost all the hyped point guards drafted in the past, I don’t know, five years, all suck? I mean, Fox is playing well, and Russell is ok, but look at the insane PG hype that surrounded Ball, Fultz, Mudiay, Fox, Russell, Frank, Trae, Exum… The last PG drafted that actually has any reputation is freakin’ Lillard in 2012. Who was the last good PG prospect that actually lived up to any of the hype???
I don’t get it, you answered your own question. Fox is the answer.
You guys are gonna hate Ja Morant day-to-day if we draft him. It’s not that he’s not a great prospect, because he is, he’s just rail thin and will a good amount of his rookie contract to adjust to the NBA. He’s also not a guy with a reputation for great defense, so he’s definitely going to struggle in his first season in a division with Kyrie Irving, Ben Simmons, Spencer Dinwiddie, and Kyle Lowry.
And a total of zero teams will pick RJ ahead of Zion, especially not a team in a small market like Cleveland. Not only is Zion a better prospect, but Zion is the greatest show on television. Drafting Zion Williamson will boost your city’s economy in ways very few athletes can. He’s a better bet to lead to more wins, and a surefire way to skyrocket ticket sales and jersey sales. Drafting anyone ahead of Zion is more than a poor basketball decision; it’s a poor business decision.
This draft is so bad that if we fall below both Zion and Morant I would still take my chances with Bol Bol. His NCAA production is #1 overall worthy and I just don’t see anyone else besides Zion with that upside.
Good night for Wily. And good win for the Hawks. Just wish the Suns could have buckled down.
Au Revoir Thibs. No one will miss you.
Ja Morant… reminds me a bit of the great Cameron Payne.
Speaking of point guards, Linsanity has pretty good numbers for ATL rn. He’s a sieve on D, but it seems like most point guards are these days.
The pg position is clearly much harder to master than others. Not many come into the league fully formed like Chris Paul. I think that’s why teams put up with the Mudiays and Russells of the world, thinking they will turn a corner eventually.
But you really need that intense SOB attitude that Paul or Nash had to be successful. Your pg just can’t take plays off or have brain farts the way Mudiay does.
Boy, the Lakers sans LeBron are one giant shit show. Lonzo with the 0-fer last night.
Hope that Hollywood thing works out for you Mr. James.
Thought I’d pass along some observational notes from a good friend and Warriors season ticket holder. He sent these to me last night. They’re obviously all speculative, but so is our assumption that Durant would have to be out of his mind to want to leave the Warriors to play here. The conversation was initially about Draymond’s health and whether or not he’s about to go Larry Johnson on us.
Some good stuff I thought I’d pass along, if only to see ProjectKnicks get salty about not understanding the joke in the last line.
Am I the only one with reoccurring nightmares of a Mudiay-Russell backcourt of thick-bodied, 6’5″ chuckers with no basketball IQ next year? If we draft Bol Bol then we’d also have two 7’3″ pencil-thin, injury-prone unicorns for the front court. I would presume that the final position would have to be filled by the prototypical non-entity, Lance Thomas, to avoid a Sesame Street “one of these things is not like the others” situation (since Lance doesn’t actually exist when he’s on the court).
In a Mudiay-Russell backcourt, which one of them eats the vaseline?
No one commented on my Darius Garland post the other day, so I thought I’d try again. He’s out with a meniscus tear, but beyond that, looks like the best pure offensive PG in the draft. If we fall out of the top 5, would anyone think he’s worth taking?
And for the record, I’m a big NO on Bol Bol. He’s got pretty much the same joints as his dad, i.e not build for a long career in the NBA, especially with the way the game is played today.
Maybe, but probably not a big one. Perry said if we strike out on the big names he’s not handing out anything else big. We’ll see.
And if we finish between 3 and 6 we’re probably drafting 7 or 8. Hell, if we finish with the worst record we’re probably drafting 5th. At 5th I suspect even Bol Bol will be gone. Let’s all start accepting it now: we are going to spend the next couple tears upset we didn’t draft Rui Hachimura.
I think guys like Barrett, Morant, and Bol’s trade value is going to be a lot higher than their intrinsic value as basketball players so for me it’s 100% Zion or package the pick with Hardaway for a 2nd star that would ensure Durant’s arrival.
Remember, the Celtics used the shine of Jeff Green’s star to acquire Ray fucking Allen. Everyone loves these kids before they play a game.
No, but only because Mudiay and Hardaway already give me those nightmares.
I like garland. Reminds me Lowry …
MCW to the rockets?
I liked Garland a lot in high school, but I couldn’t make a definitive answer without seeing more of him while healthy. Maybe he falls out of the 1st round and we can get another Mitch Rob special.
Also, there’s no way we’d pay both Mud and Russell. Right now, D’Angelo Russell is taking all of Mudiay’s Knicks money.
Bad fiction. Those were obviously not observations, your ‘ticket holder friend’ is your own imagination and your writing needs lots of work. Lmao.
Don’t get mad at Hubert, because he’s telling you what’s real. One plus one is two all day long, and it’s never gonna change.
Hubert ask your friend if I can have some money
Don’t hate me for not buying into your pompous, dumb bs. I can easily tell a cheap salesman.
I think it’s fair to be somewhat skeptical about Fox still. He’s obviously made some huge improvements to his playmaking and finishing that would at least make him a solid player going forward, but if the shooting improvements aren’t completely for real that will probably keep him below all star level. If the shooting is for real than yeah, he can be the next hyped point guard that becomes a star.
Counterfactorial
I was asking about the ‘hyped’ point guards drafted in the past, like, 7 years not living up to anything near what we said they. You know, when we were so sure of ourselves that Fultz and Ball were the next Curry and Kidd, and we were in love with D-Lo… I mean, I’m just pointing out how the best of the crowd is Fox, who’s not even great. It’s really weird. There really hasn’t been a great PG drafted in a long time, probably Kyrie in 2011.
Hubert has never had a problem expressing his opinion on here. Why would he suddenly invent an alter-ego to make claims and hypotheses about Kevin Durant on an anonymous Knicks blog? Why would anyone?
Wetbandit is actually circling around a fair point. PGs have become like QBs in the NFL draft. If you’re considered one of the top ones in the draft, you’re going very high, even if players at other positions are considerably better prospects than you. Every year a QB whose talent merits that he be taken late in the first round gets picked in the top 10 over sure thing pro bowl prospects. The Fultz-Ball-Fox-Smith-Frank draft class is looking pretty busty right about now.
garlands sort of interesting…. hes like the poor mans version of kyrie… i dont think hes a pg like kyrie and if hes not then the bar is a lot higher..
also players who miss significant time in college also tend to either bust or miss significant time in the pros… if youre that young and have meniscus issues i think its likely hes gonna see more knee related things in his career…. thats why i have him outside the lotto… if healthy hes a mid lotto pick…
same thing applies for bol.. except if hes healthy he will be one of the best bigs since kat… but he has much bigger injury concerns since hes abnormally tall and he has foot issues… if you put him on the embiid program and have extreme patience you might have something but i have suspicions that he will have a short career….
the draft on the whole is ok… its stronger than the 2016 draft… and probably slightly weaker than 2015… which is about average… we will have an opportunity to pick a b+ prospect who will likely be better than anyone we have drafted since kp or since ewing even….
I dunno, that seems like typical production for a second round pick. No big deal.
there is a stud point guard who has lived up to the hype it’s just that some people call him something else because he’s tall
Heh, yeah, I was going to say the only good PG since Kyrie was Jokic.
lemme guess, jokic?
Simmons
Makes sense, right? By reputation and production, PGs are extremely valuable, and they can basically be any height you want now.
In 2016-17, for example, the vote-getters were:
Westbrook*
Harden*
Leonard
James (I consider him a point forward, but that’s an arbitrary distinction post-Magic)
Thomas*
Curry*
Wall*
Giannis*
Davis
Durant
DeRozan
Volume-scoring ball handlers, all.
Last four MVPs have been PGs, and this year looks like Giannis’s year (and yes, he is a PG). Harden could end up with it again, too, and justly.
In my googling for the MVP voting by year, I found this. Have fun. I believe that the olds on the board will have a distinct advantage… I’m just going to mash names I’ve heard of but never actually seen play for everything until 1980 or so.
https://www.sporcle.com/games/sultanofswing/top5nbamvp
Simmons
I think the pg to qb comparison is an excellent. They both get more credit than they should for their team’s success. And there are a lot fewer truly great ones than you would expect.
Edit: Although if PG means anyone who handles the ball a lot. i.e. Giannis, then I retract. I mean more the traditional sense of a small 1.
Giannis
This is behind a paywall, but ESPN’s new mock draft has us taking Cam Reddish (at 5) and Garland going 7th. Bol dropped to 15. Zion, RJ, Little, Morant were top 4, in that order.
http://www.espn.com/nba/insider/story/_/id/25700360/2019-nba-mock-draft-new-picks-knicks-bulls-wizards-celtics
The only trouble with the PG-QB comparison is if a QB doesn’t get protection from his offensive line, he’s gonna struggle no matter how good he is.
Not sure there’s a corollary for PG’s, except maybe defensively where a shot blocking center can cover up a PG’s deficiencies.
haha yeah I meant Simmons. Giannis went maybe a little to low to quite say he had hype, maybe hoopla…or if we’re feeling generous ballyhoo. jokic of course has negative hype and is also too cute an answer as point guard. Simmons really is a point guard in many of the important ways besides archetype.
Even though I was only Jok(ic)ing, do we really want to conclude that Simmons is any more of a PG than Jokic? The Joker averages more assists per 36 and has a higher AST% than Simmons.
In other words, Jowles in @50 is correct (gag reflex suppressed) in that traditional PG duties are more diffuse now than ever.
Of course. But I was only specifically bringing it up to back up wetbandit’s observation. If you’re a QB or a PG in the draft, teams will do mental gymnastics to convince themselves that you’re worthy of a high selection. They value the position more than the likelihood that you’ll be good at playing it.
It’s crazy, in retrospect, that Frank was widely considered a lottery pick. He’s the Blake Bortles of the NBA.
Should be on the supreme court. dude got screwed.
Maybe the refs are the offensive line in this analogy.
yeah I mean jokic is somewhere in there in the great point guard continuum, but clearly below Simmons. for one, Simmons commonly brings the ball up the court, including really pushing the pace with the basketball, which is a very point guardy thing to do and Jokic only does it once in a while. you might not think it’s important until one day you find yourself watching jeremy lamb trying to beat the 8 second rule against the press.
Simmons also guards all five positions and you can safely put him on a good chunk of opposing point guards (and they do). he’s way under the really classic pgs on the spectrum like cp3, but I’m not sure he’s any lower than some of the guys mentioned in the thread like D Lo and Kyrie who are way less proficient passers and probably like 2/3 pg 1/3 sg.
Sadly, I think that’s our best case scenario
So what I took from this thread is that Hubert has a friend that eats vaseline, thank you all.
on the PG thing, I think it has always kind of been like this. Take a truly great, like Hakeem for example. No one would ever think of him as a PG, but for Houston’s offense he was a “shot creator” in the sense that he was unstoppable at the post and could break down defenses, and was also great at passing out of those situations. He wasn’t a guy like Jokic who plays much more like what we perceive as a Point Guard, but he could break defenses down with his actions on the court, which is the “role” in itself. The same goes for a guy like Bird or Duncan, for example, what they did was create plays where the defense either can’t stop them or they had to devote extra resources to slow them down. So what I’m seeing is that NBA teams are more comfortable allowing non-traditional players to do the PG traditional duties more often, but a part of what we perceive as the PG duty has always been a part of the game for most of the truly greats.
Who pissed in your bowl of Vaseline
Spinning gold thread today…
Frank Bortles has a nice ring to it.
The offensive line analogy is teammates to whom the PG passes but can’t shoot thereby not showing how effective he could be from an AST% perspective which is a PG’s primary responsibility.
IMO, it’s a double edged sword.
There are so few guys like that, should you have one and he gets injured or even in foul trouble in a close game, there’s almost no chance you have someone that can slot into the role coming off the bench and limit the damage. Even if you have a traditional PG on the bench, the rest of the team is not built for that. You’d be taking a smaller player that had an important non PG role (like floor spacer defensive stopper or whatever) off the court too.
Brandon Ingram continually fools me.
Coming out of college, I thought he looked like a good prospect. WRONG. He looked awful as a rookie, not only putting up poor box score numbers but in general looking uncoordinated and weak. After that first season I was convinced he was a bust. WRONG. He improved a lot in his second season, and was a pretty solid contributor for the Lakers. He seemed headed in the right direction: scoring efficiency was up, he was playing some valuable defense, and he even looked much better eye-test wise. He looked much more athletic and engaged. He was on the way up. WRONG. This year he’s a whole different kind of awful than he was his rookie year, this year he is a stoned sleepy kind of awful rather than an “I don’t know how to use my limbs” kind of awful.
i am starting to worry that kanter has worked so hard on his post nba wwe heel persona that he will put himself in harm’s way just to prove to doubters that erdogan really is a murderous thug
I was actually making three points:
– PG draftees have been awful the past 10 years. Get this: out of the 2005 draft, three PG’s had a WS/48 above .150 before they were 25, 2006-4, 2007-1, 2008-2 , 2009-4, 2010-0, 2011-2, 2012-0 (Lillard never qualified), 2013-0, 2014-0, 2015-1 (Delon Wright?), 2016-1 (if Simmons counts), 2017-0, 2018-0. Granted, the later year draftees haven’t had a chance to hit 25 yet, but many of those before did qualify before they were 23.
– PGs are drafted too early, as discussed above
– Our speculation of PG’s SUCKS, we seriously don’t know what we’re talking about when we talk about Ball, Fultz, Mudiay, pre-draft. This goes for all players, but PG’s especially.
@69, yeah Ingram is weird. his outside shooting last year always felt fragile but he was still a 20 year old who could get to the line get to the rim and finish at the rim. plus he passed a little. the trade value charts of ingram and Jaylen brown look like homebuilders in the aughts
in the past i was never that tempted to subscribe to the espn insider stuff – now that they’re calling it: espn plus, looks like they’ll be using the newly acquired ufc television rights to make the subscription more appealing…
i actually like watching him play, but, looking at his stats – he doesn’t really seem to do much well…
i was surprised to see he’s only 6’9″…i’m not sure in what role he would excel at out on the court, but, i’ve never felt like the lakers were using him correctly…
the lakers without james, rondo, or kuzma are really bad…
doing some reading on kanter today, i had totally forgot – he doesn’t have a valid passport to travel anywhere (other than canada it seems)…doesn’t make that turkish prez any less a maniac, but, he can’t travel…
Almost all NBA players’ listed heights are with shoes on, which adds 1-1.5″ to their actual height. I think Ingram is a legit 6’9″ without shoes. Kuzma is 6’8″ without shoes. Donovan Mitchell was 6’1″ and change at the combine, but I’ve never seen him listed under 6’3″.
well, that sucks…
Ingram looks awesome sometimes. He’s a Durant/Giannis-level freak, but he just happens to score about 80% as effectively as they do. So you get the highlight-reel shit, but less often… which is still fun to watch, unless you’re a Lakers fan who likes watching Ws.
Thinking more about the hypothetical Mudiay-Russell backcourt, THJ would start at the three with them. That might be fascinating to watch, in a tragicomedy kind of way.
Ingram just has this weird hangdog look about him this year. My smart Laker fan friends think he’s a bum.
What an underwhelming draft class, sans Zion..
Interesting tidbit on the Kanter/Turkey thing… Hedo Turkoglu works as a spokesman for Erdogan. Which is pretty surprising in and of itself and was calling Kanter out as being a liar about his passport situation and not going to London. Fuck Hedo Turkoglu I guess.
Will future people make the same face I sported seeing “Dan Roundfield” and “Bob Dandridge” when they see Melo’s name out there?
+ 1,000
enes hasn’t always been the easiest guy to root for this year, but, yeah – fuck hedo…
i’m still creeping along on trying to read player stats and pick out the pertinent numbers for identifying whether a player is playing poorly or well:
https://stats.nba.com/player/1627742/?sort=GP&dir=-1
he has a usage of: 23% with a ts% of 51%…that of itself isn’t terrible is it?
@85
It’s pretty bad when you consider the league average is usually around 53 and 55 ts%, it means he’s using more possessions than an average player but scoring less efficiently than them.
A 51% TS is pretty bad actually. League average usually is around 54-55%. At 51% he would be worse than the TS of our whole team (worst in the NBA) by 2 percentage points.
Edit: Bruno was quicker than me!
players with 500+ mins and 20%+ usg: 121
Median TS: 55.1%
Ingram 97/121
So if Knox has occasional knee soreness due to literal growing pains is playing him 35 minutes a night a good idea? Still if he grows another inch and adds 15-20 pounds of muscle over the next season or two he’s a legit 4 who can play on the wing (at least offensively). I’d still rather have SGA but the gamble of taking him over both Bridges seems a bit more reasonable.
thanks everyone…
okay i get now it now when jowles mentioned that: just happens to score about 80% as effectively…
as a general rule – i don’t mind numbers, it’s just that words are so much easier to deal with…
heck, i’ll be honest though – more often than not, making it through a daily thread here will require me to spend some time googling some of the words and references folks will write…
it’s funny, during some meetings if i’m looking around the room and come to the conclusion i may be the smartest one in there – i know we’re in trouble 🙂
As I said before, I think that the average IQ on this board is at the very least a standard deviation over 100.
Ain’t nothin’ wrong with that. When I read Infinite Jest, I kept as a bookmark an oversized notecard full of vocabulary words to look up. It was worth the price of admission.
kind of a funny story – i had a pretty good head injury during college – i remember being told afterward that my IQ had dropped by about 15 points (i don’t really remember being tested before the injury)…not sure if i ever got that 15 back 🙂
with never being sober and all – it’s hard to tell some days…
okay, i’ll now spend the next 15 minutes of my life learning about david foster wallace and infinite jest (what a great title)…
I want to live like geo
I don’t believe too much in IQ tests as I think intelligence manifests itself on a lot of different ways, and some of the most intelligent people I’ve ever met would never had good scores in traditional IQ tests, but yes, Id say there’s still a broad correlation between IQ and intelligence in general, when where talking about formal ways of thinking about the world.
I’m much more of a feel guy than a understand guy in life, which I guess makes it pretty weird how focused on advanced stats I am in regards to basketball, but oh well, I’ve given up on consistency quite a while ago in my life.
This made me have the epiphany that maybe THCJ is the 17th Myers-Briggs type.
Ain’t nothin’ wrong with that. When I read Infinite Jest, I kept as a bookmark an oversized notecard full of vocabulary words to look up. It was worth the price of admission.
it took me three months to read infinite jest, not including the 9 mos in between when i basically gave up in defeat for a while. i remember vaguely being embarrassed to take it anywhere (no kindles then) for fear of looking like the sort of db who conspicuously lugged around 7 pounds of dfw like a prada bag.
Kindle is a gamechanger for Infinite Jest, doubly so if you’re a subway reader. Not only is the physical book almost impossible to hold in one hand while gripping a subway pole, but not having to constantly flip several hundred pages to access the footnotes is a freaking god send. Every time I recommend the book (and it’s often) I add a disclaimer that you should really use an e-reader.
@95 “consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative,” according to Oscar Wilde.
I am not an avid poster on this forum, but I observe a fair amount of arguing about seemingly subjective comments. I suspect this is because the Knicks are not good and have not been good for a long while. Think of how fun this forum would be talking about winning, and clutch shots instead of hoping to lose supporting “the process.” One of the main arguments here seems to be if Frank will ever develop into a reasonable player for NBA competition. Tough to tell at this point.
My friend once stated to me in the 80s, “if a guy doesn’t break out by year three it ain’t going to happen” This was before analytics, and we used Scotty Pippin as the benchmark for that idea. We mostly used the eye test, and if the guy was scoring and playing meaningful minutes. Pippen was 22 in his rookie season and 24 in year three. I believe the 18 and 19-year old’s need an adjustment to the three-year concept and an opportunity to mature and grow into their bodies. They haven’t had an opportunity to compete and develop against their age group in college. Labeling a teenager as a bust is just not fair. These gangly kids are going up against grown men with bodies hardened by years in the weight-room and on-court NBA battles. Give them some time to figure it out. Patience.
That said, I think Mudiay does not know how to play basketball, and Frank lacks the confidence to compete at the NBA level. Can a 22-year-old suddenly acquire basketball IQ? Can we put Frank in the D-League where he can play 40 minutes a night and work on his confidence level?
And lets pump the brakes on Fizdale before running him out of town. Give him a chance to coach mature NBA players.
Not a big fan of 360-degree basketball dunking, but Zion’s dunk was so effortless, and he spun so slowly. His athleticism in that body is silly to comprehend.
While I was waiting for my first and last regular adjunct teaching job to start — hired in February for a May start, so, haha, no one would hire me for any meaningful work — I read Dostoevsky, Gaddis, Pynchon and Wallace in a hip bookstore-cafe in my hometown just to get out of the house. The ex-Brooklyn proprietors, whose smile was elusive to all but the NYC telecommuters who could match their selvedge denim stitch for stitch, nicknamed me “bible thumper,” which I later found out from friends who worked there. (They never cared to learn my real name, so not the friendliest interaction, there.) So yeah, the stigma’s real, and I know it firsthand, but also fuck anyone who judges the use of encyclopedic (etc.) novels for more than doorstops.
geo, if you want a taste of DFW without the commitment, read this essay:
https://www.scribd.com/doc/134106158/How-Tracy-Austin-Broke-My-Heart-David-Foster-Wallace
It’s about Tracy Austin, a former pro tennis player, who wrote an (apparently) awful autobiography about her career. Wallace’s thesis is pretty brilliant: that athletic genius is self-unaware during its own manifestation, and maybe that’s the reason that athletes resort to platitudes and other empty chatter in their post-game interviews.
I wish DFW had been alive to read Agassi’s biography. Clearly, that man was all up in his own head during his matches, so he provides an interesting counterpoint to the “Tracy Austin” thesis.
Yeah, we often engage in some arguments that one could find in first-year philosophy seminars: define the motherfucking terms.
We would have a lot more to talk about if the Knicks had a young star, or a contending core. I’m happy as long as it’s not endless chatter about hypothetical but imprudent multi-team trades wherein the Knicks shed salary commitments while taking back multiple draft picks, but YMMV.
howdy sly…
as much as i love me some me (and, reading my own words – yes, mental masturbation is alive and well when it comes to writing on forums) – i’m super happy when others kick in, particularly folks whom may spend most of their time lurking on the site (which, i myself did for many years)…
even during the knick’s brief hey day of 2012-2013, i’m sure there was plenty of griping and animus between posters…i just don’t think most folks come on the internet to share happy stories all the time…
there does though seem to be a lessening of the back and forth which used to take place quite often…we may just be losing most of the folks who would immediately turn right when everyone else would go left…
for some reason i seem to have an affinity for those kind of people…
definitely agree with your sentiments on mud, fiz and frank…as bad as i am with understanding player statistics, it does seem that frank’s numbers are really troubling for any future productivity in the league…i’m losing confidence in frank achieving success here in new york at the very least…
hmmmmm, patience doesn’t seem to go well with new yorkers…
So glad there are some other Infinite Jest fans out there in KB land. It’s my favorite novel of all time. I read it shortly after it came out when I was in my mid-20’s and it was the perfect book for sad, lonely, bong-ripping little shut-in 25 year old JK47. I’m an INFP in Myers-Briggs and Infinite Jest is pretty much the most INFP thing ever made.
22 years later I still find myself thinking about certain plot threads and characters in that book.
The DFW thing about the cruise ship, “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” is another really accessible and totally brilliant DFW piece. If you don’t like that, there’s no need to go any further.
I met him once (still have my signed first edition of Infinite Jest) and I’ve never been so in awe of somebody in my life. I literally couldn’t speak, like words wouldn’t come out of my mouth.
Geo, at work it’s more important that you listen to people and understamd what they are saying before making your own conclusions than it is to be smart. Once you do that you are using lots of minds, not just your own. Based on your attitude on Knickerblogger, I am sure you are doing fine at work.
P.S., getting along with everyone at work is important too, of course.
And I say this from experience working in a tech industry where smarts are important.
Wallace was a great writer but an abusive shitbag towards women.
I read Infinite Jest on my cellphone so I wouldn’t be that guy on the train in Brooklyn reading Infinite Jest.
thanks jowles…working my way now through: https://www.scribd.com/doc/134106158/How-Tracy-Austin-Broke-My-Heart-David-Foster-Wallace
thanks jk47, i’ll give this a look next: https://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/HarpersMagazine-1996-01-0007859.pdf
it’s been a while since i’ve done some reading (although i am making my way through ‘fire & blood’ right now – but, that’s mostly for the dragon pics 🙂
Reminds me of a guitarist who wanted to join a band I was in way back in the day. Asked him to learn some cover tunes so we could just play shit to hear what he sounded like, and he said something like, “I don’t learn other people’s music. It stifles creativity.”
[confused Nick Young face]
i totally get the importance of listening to others…generally though – i’m smiling while grinding my teeth til it’s my turn to talk again 🙂
success, failure…eh, who cares – as long as i can get talk again…
@99
I absolutely love this quote, as Wilde is my favorite writer of all time. I go as far as defending the idea that he’s one of the most important modern philosophers, to piss off my philosophy friends, saying that if they read his theater works they would be able to skip most of what they read.
I just think that knowledge is non-linear and can come from a huge amount of different experiences, but basketball feels different to me because there are clear terms set: the game in the NBA has universal rules that are consistent enough for it to be possible to extract valuable knowledge from it by using statistics models and projections.
geo is a Knickerblogger treasure
i’ll tell ya jowles, considering the extent and knowledge which a lot of the folks have in regards to statistical analysis on this site – i think it’s pretty darn cool that by and large you can get in where you fit in here (***note to all you lurkers out there***)…i keep waiting for mike or brian to send me a note to at least try to stay on topic…
and, by and large i’m not the most social creature, so, it’s very cool to have a place to come and bemoan the knicks while actually learning shit beyond basketball…
Speaking of basketball, shall Sir and Lady Jowles beest in attendance at the Moda Center this evening?
@113
The thing is that you’re always respectful and super nice, so really the changes in subject are more welcome changes of pace than something disruptive.
The real disruptive people, aka the people who can’t understand that 1+1 equals 2 all day long, are what’s annoying to most.
271/299, but I also missed a couple of guys by spelling their names wrong and I had everyone from 1982-3 on (fuck you, fifth place in 1981-82, you were a terrible choice!) (except for 2005-06, because I just missed that I had an empty spot on the list. I thought I had it filled out. I would have eventually guessed the right guy for that spot).
Oh man, so much this. I get to one hand an entire library! Sometimes a piece of tech comes out that literally changes your life, ereaders were one if those for me.
I agree, though I’ll note that, as Amazon is trying to destroy the publishing industry that enables writers like DFW to find audiences, buying ebooks other places is better when possible. (Though it isn’t possible often because of stupid DRM.)
Agreed. Never had a Kindle, I started way back in the day with a Sony. Pretty easy to strip DRM though.
I struggled so hard with Glen Rice, but got back to 1980 pretty well. Totally screwed on 60s, though. I even missed Bill Russell, which would have added like 10 because he was real good at roundball. I think I was around 235.
Really cool find, that site took me down a rabbit hole for NBA quizzes.
I’ll say the past couple of years playing various NBA 2K iterations really helped me with this though.
I ended up with 292/299, mainly off the strength of playing with a bunch of classic teams and keeping track of MyTeam cards. Though I got lucky with “fifth place in 1981-82” because I was thinking someone else with the same last name. I blanked on fifth place in 1984-85 because I only remembered him from his late career.
Never let it be said that video games don’t teach you something.
It was nonsense that he was in the top five of the MVP balloting. He was a good player in the midst of his best stretch of his career, but yikes. He did have a really good season that year, so, like, top ten wouldn’t be crazy, but top five? Come on.
Huh, looking into it, he also made the first team All-NBA that year over Magic fuckin’ Johnson, so I guess people were just insane in 1981-82.
At least they didn’t name a fucking kicker the MVP, like the NFL did later that same year.