(Thursday, January 24, 2019 1:35:00 PM)
David Fizdale has been championed as a master communicator, a skill, he has said, that was enhanced after learning from the fallout with Marc Gasol in Memphis.
But when it comes to another European center, Enes Kanter, there have been major relationship issues.
“I wish they communicated with me,”…
(Thursday, January 24, 2019 11:40:00 AM)
Allonzo Trier apologized for a profane message on Twitter that included the N-word and threw teammate Tim Hardaway under the bus.
Trier, 23, who’ll probably hear from the league because of the language, responded to online criticism about his defense with the following DM to a Knicks fan:
“It was…
(Thursday, January 24, 2019 5:01:14 PM)
In an unsurprising development, the Knicks have made Tim Hardaway Jr. and Courtney Lee available via trade in advance of the February 7 deadline, three sources tell Marc Stein of The New York Times. The decision is largely financially motivated, Stein adds. We’ve assumed for months that Hardaway and Lee would be on the trade […]
[Sports Illustrated] The Knicks Have Hit Their Annual Rock Bottom (Thursday, January 24, 2019 3:28:32 PM)
It’s like a throwback to the Phil Jackson era.
[Sports Illustrated] Three NBA Trade Deadline Questions for the Knicks (Thursday, January 24, 2019 8:46:35 AM)
As a team that has committed so many offseason atrocities, how should the Knicks approach the NBA trade deadline? Here are three questions New York must answer.
(Thursday, January 24, 2019 10:34:07 PM)
There hasn’t been a more reliable NBA moneymaker for sports bettors over the past six weeks than the Nets. D’Angelo Russell and company take the floor again Friday at home against the Knicks (MSG, YES, 7:30 p.m.) Even with Wednesday’s non-cover vs. Orlando (a 114-110 victory as a 5-point favorite), the Nets are now 18-5…
(Thursday, January 24, 2019 5:15:01 PM)
Joakim Noah wants to set the record straight before he returns to the Garden. The veteran big man’s time with the Knicks came to a merciful end in October, but he wants fans to know his tumultuous time in the city was not the result of enjoying the New York City night life a little…
(Thursday, January 24, 2019 3:49:08 PM)
Enes Kanter has not stopped voicing his frustrations about a lack of playing time, but David Fizdale is not worried about it becoming a distraction. “What are we gonna do, lose some more games?” Fizdale, the coach of the 10-36 Knicks, said with a chuckle Thursday. “I shouldn’t make light of that. Sometimes you gotta…
(Thursday, January 24, 2019 11:50:13 AM)
Enes Kanter and Courtney Lee are not the only Knicks on the trading block. Tim Hardaway Jr. also has been made available in trade talks, the New York Times reported Thursday. The report said the team’s impetus for trading the guard would be “largely financial.” While Kanter has made no secret of his desire to…
(Thursday, January 24, 2019 10:27:16 AM)
Allonzo Trier sliding into a fan’s direct messages Wednesday on Twitter has the Knicks rookie in hot water. After a 114-110 loss to the Rockets, Trier tried to defend himself for not having better coverage on Eric Gordon, who hit the game-winning 3. James Harden set a pick on Trier, who slipped underneath while Tim…
(Thursday, January 24, 2019 4:38:11 PM)
Knicks rookie Allonzo Trier said he was “frustrated” and let social media get the best of him when he lashed out with a profane tweet after Wednesday’s loss to the Rockets.
[NYTimes] Nets’ Run to the Playoffs Hits a Snag With Spencer Dinwiddie Injury (Friday, January 25, 2019 12:56:42 AM)
The team’s sixth man is out indefinitely with a thumb injury, taking away its most reliable scorer off the bench.
[NYTimes] Knicks Make Tim Hardaway Jr. and Courtney Lee Available for Trade (Thursday, January 24, 2019 11:17:11 PM)
The Knicks hope to clear cap space to make a run at potential high-profile free agents this summer such as Kyrie Irving and Kevin Durant.
[NYTimes] On Pro Basketball: To Learn to Win, the Denver Nuggets Had to Lose (Badly) (Thursday, January 24, 2019 6:12:47 PM)
A 31-point loss to the Golden State Warriors (which was more lopsided than the score suggests) could be a springboard for the Nuggets’ development.
[NYTimes] Rockets 114, Knicks 110: James Harden Scores 61 as Rockets Beat Knicks (Thursday, January 24, 2019 2:05:17 PM)
Houston’s star guard tied the record for most points by a visiting player at Madison Square Garden, clinching the victory with a layup.
(Thursday, January 24, 2019 3:48:00 PM)
Enes Kanter said he was told he would start against the Rockets last night. But David Fizdale has a different side of the story, saying nothing was ever set in stone.
(Thursday, January 24, 2019 3:23:09 PM)
Knicks rookie Allonzo Trier implied it was Tim Hardaway Jr.’s fault for not switching on a screen when Rockets’ Eric Gordon hit the game-deciding three-pointer on Wednesday.
(Thursday, January 24, 2019 4:37:41 PM)
The Knicks are actively shopping Tim Hardaway Jr. and Courtney Lee as they attempt to clear cap space for the summer.
(Thursday, January 24, 2019 3:12:00 PM)
The Knicks are tanking in impressive fashion, with their come-from-ahead loss to the Rockets on Wednesday night dropping them to 10-36.
(Thursday, January 24, 2019 9:53:24 AM)
Center Enes Kanter is growing increasingly frustrated at the Knicks after he did not play in Wednesday’s game against the Houston Rockets hours after he said David Fizdale told him he would start.
(Thursday, January 24, 2019 9:56:36 AM)
Trier was defending Eric Gordon when he got caught up in a screen and allowed the Rockets guard to drain the go-ahead three-pointer.
43 replies on “Knicks Morning News (2019.01.25)”
This is also the argument for maxing Porzingis, which is why we shouldn’t.
@1
That’s been my point too, I agree. People keep saying “but if he leaves we’re going into rebuilding again from ground zero?”, well, the wizards are currently 20-27 and en route to an absolutely inevitable ugly rebuild, they just delayed it for 2 seasons for the privilege to get a first round exit and this current mess of a season.
Ujiri did the most disrespectful thing you could ever do to a below-average superstar, telling DeRozan he wouldn’t be traded and then promptly trading him months later, and the Raptors have the most wins in the NBA so far this season. Only dumb GMs and owners are afraid to disrespect low tier superstars.
The spurs are pretty good though. But yea maxing kp could backfire if we don’t land a top fa.
And looks like kwahi is going to la la land since he bought a mansion there.
Derozan has been meh in SA but you have to hand it to Pops. He figures out how to put a winning product out there.
Kawhi is from LA. He’ll probably end up there but he might just want a house there too.
$13m is a lot of bread for a place you don’t intend to live in
Kawhi has a lot of bread. And a kid and a girlfriend. I don’t know how it works with NBA players. Don’t many of them have a permanent house somewhere for their family that they go back to in the offseason. Most of the league seems so transient, do people uproot their families every time they move to a new team?
@6
It really seems like he’s angling for either the Clippers or Lakers, but the house could mean only offseason stuff. I remember Melo bought a house in LA around 2010 while he was still in Denver, then came to the Knicks and re-signed here. We know so little of Kawhi that it could mean literally anything or nothing.
Ok, I totally share the concern about maxing KP, and the argument that just because we’d be starting again, doesn’t mean we should do it.
That said… maxing Kp at 25% of the cap when you have few other salary commitments beyond the following summer and a few cost controlled young guys is not an unthreadable needle in terms of building a contender.
Maxing Wall at 35% of the cap when his game is so based on athleticism and isn’t going to go anywhere but down, when you have $75m committed to Beal, Porter and Mahinmi – so 100% of the cap to four guys, none of whom is a true star and one of whom is Ian fucking Mahinmi – absolutely is an unthreadable needle and simply isn’t comparable to where we are. If we wait out Lee or trade him for space, and of THj opts out, we can absolutely add pieces around KP and a core of Mitch, Knox, Zo, Dot and this year’s pick. Should we do it? Maybe, maybe not. Is it Wiz level mismanagement to pick maxing him over losing him? It absolutely is not, in my view.
KP is both endowment effect and sunk-cost fallacy in action. Tolerance for loss is perpetually low for teams of struggling franchises.
You know the anime technique where a character is so overwhelmed by emotion that his eyes well up with tears?
That’s how r/Sixers have historically talked about Fultz — like he’s their BFF and part of a Super Friends group that has lots of inside jokes and good times and memoriez. He’s a #1 pick who looks like he might be the bust to end all busts — somehow worse than Bennett and Bargnani and Wiggins, which is a feat!
Some dipshit on the internet told me that if KP were healthy, this team would be .500 and in the playoff hunt. That’s how delusional this fanbase is, on the whole.
I’m not saying that there’s no way that KP earns his max. I’m saying that Bruno, as always, is 100% on-target in that there’s an overwhelming majority of fans that would rather lose the next four seasons to capped-out sub-prime max KP than roll the dice on an extended rebuild. And that’s one of many reasons that we can’t have nice things, and probably won’t sniff the playoffs until 2023.
Is it possible for them to sign Kawhi outright, then trade Ball/Ingram/Kuzma with picks for AD this offseason? They’ll have about $42M in space this year (no options, all expirings) so I’m wondering if they can go over the cap to trade for Davis’s rights.
@9 – don’t get me wrong. On balance I’m in the camp of offering KP a sub-max deal and taking our chances that he walks. Just saying $25m to 23yo kp on this roster and $37m to 28yo wall on that roster aren’t equivalently stupid.
The real frustration for me is that we didn’t need there to be this much risk on the KP decision. If we’d rebuilt on a pro Kp timeline and put a strong developmental coach and a good PG around him, and kept him away from mentors like Melo and rose we could probably be a lot more certain of his value now. Instead we have no idea, and because of the timing of his injury, no prospect of trading him for the value he is perceived to have. It’s a shit show.
@11
Oh, it’s certainly a lesser mistake, and one that has a chance of not being a mistake after all if KP proves eventually he was worthy of it. It’s just that it seems that fans and franchises have bought in to this idea that players are in control and franchises need to scramble to build around them, so if Wall / Wiggins / DeRozan / Blake Griffin / KP wants a max, you have no other choice besides giving him the max, when I think that’s a load of crap.
I can see LeBron, Curry, Giannis or Anthony Davis being in control of their destinies and being able to coerce franchises into doing whatever it takes to keep them or sign them. But I’ll never think those guys who are barely top 25 or 30 players in their absolute best form should be treated in the same way.
@10
Kawhi’s max with the Lakers would start at 30 million as he’ll be in his 9th year next season, leaving 12 million in cap space, and Davis makes 27 million next season, so yes, that works, as Ball + Ingram + Kuzma amounts to about 18 million. They could even do it without including one of them but adding Wagner, Bonga or Hart.
Agreed. $46M to a 32-year-old athleticism-first PG with a career average TS% of .519 is horrendous. He’s always been a good offensive player despite the shitty efficiency — he’s a very good distributing PG — but there’s nowhere to go but down for him. Maybe he breaks .540 TS% after the surgery and maybe he’s just a 24th percentile scorer for the rest of his career. (That’s what he is, right now.) I wouldn’t pay $40M AAV for that scratch-off.
538 has him with the following WARP for the next five years:
4.9
4.2
3.4
2.9
1.7
Their 90th percentile projection is that he’s worth about 8 wins next year, and as high as ~5 in his final year. That is really, really, really bad at $46M.
It’s too bad we can’t work something out with KP where he comes back with a 2 year contract with a team option on year two at the max. They would never try to do something like that though.
John Wall’s first contract wasn’t bad. I’m not sure if Washington got full value for the money, but Wall was good those years. His problems (he’s not a good shooter and he turns it over way too much) persisted and he was aging out of his prime, which made his current extension a really bad decision. That doesn’t mean we should max porzingis, but the situations are not equivalent. And I know I keep beating this long dead horse, but Kristaps doesn’t need to develop any new skills to be a productive player. (assuming he’s relatively healthy)
If that’s the case, then most of the league believes they have him on their team and have invested money in him, because most of them would give him a max.
I don’t think Kawhi buying a house in San Diego means anything.
Is he really going to drive 120 miles everyday to practice?
He did college in San Diego and probably has his ties there.
Oh, the house is in San Diego? I thought it was in LA. Yeah, then there’s the college connection and all.
Yeah, as Bruno outlined in @12, it’s not about Porzingis and Wall being equivalent errors. It’s about a prevailing logic that shouldn’t exist. Teams shouldn’t feel pressured to overpay productive but not elite players the max out of respect.
If we are going to spend 46 million on anyone it should be Masai.
I don’t know. Them putting Hardaway on the trading block, officially or not, signals a few positive things and signals away from a few negative things we’ve been assuming.
I honestly don’t know what they’ll do with a lot of things this summer
If there’s little-to-no risk of age related decline during the contract, the John Wall comparison doesn’t make much sense. Overpays are bad in and of themselves, but it’s when they’re combined with age related decline that the contract becomes a true anchor (with some notable exceptions who are sooooo bad that their age is nearly irrelevant e.g. Maple Jordan. KP isn’t in this category).
It’s the reason the Joakim Noah contract was such a killer, whereas the THJ contract might just be able to be worked around.
I continue to think a KP max is a better outcome than him walking for nothing, but re-signing him to a sub-max deal or trading him for multiple assets are the best case scenarios.
Say a team is willing to take THJ and give back expiring(s) to match, but it wants the Knicks’ 2020 first rounder unprotected. Do you do it? If not, what protections would you want on the pick? Would you give Knox?
@22
Agree, but there’s an injury risk factor with KP, too. Very tall and already a major knee injury plus some other lesser stuff.
Absolutely not
This team is overwhelmingly likely to be bad in 2020. Not sure I’d trade the 2020 second rounder unprotected.
I will happily trade an unprotected first rounder once we have Anthony Davis, Kevin Durant, and Zion Williamson on the team.
Nets fever spread to Chris Herring…
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/remember-the-brooklyn-nets-theyre-good-now/
I wonder what the odds on Durant to Brooklyn are.
Here’s one snippet that highlights my main issue with Fizdale:
It was the same when we had D’Antoni here the first time. You don’t have to have talent on the roster to begin installing sound strategies and principles. Atkinson got to it on Day 1. Fizdale keeps saying these guys are too young to understand any of the stuff he wants to install and that’s why there are no evident principles beyond “be aggressive”, but that doesn’t pass the smell test.
Having a really good coach like D’Antoni was a double-edged sword for the Knicks, though, as he was so good that he squeezed enough extra wins out of them that they ended up picking #6 and #8 in what turned out to be some pretty darn good drafts at the top (Westbrook, Harden, Love, Curry).
We could offer less than the max to Porzingis (let’s say a contract like Antetokounmpo), and match any offer that he receives from other teams. I dont think he would take the qualifying offer, specially coming off an injury.
The media might make a big drama out of it while it lasts (maybe Porzingis doesnt sign the contract until September) but it would be worth it . Even better, you send a message to the rest of players not to take anything for granted. Only in the case we managed to dump Lee and THJ and signed KD, I would be cautious and offer the max outright to Porzingis.
This is true, but still.. I’d offer what is necessary to keep him, hopefully not a max or at least one with a bunch of injury caveats. Then, if we get lucky and draft Zion we see where it goes. If we don’t then trade KP for picks/kids.
Giving away picks because of a stupid dream that the Knicks might entice a couple of max guys this summer to what is credibly the worst team in the NBA is as dumb as thinking the Bargnani trade was a good idea.
For argument’s sake, lets say we trade KP, Frank and Knox and wind up with Zion and some other young players. Let’s further say that Zion is a good player immediately and a stud in 3-4 years. What’s to prevent Zion from moving us down the draft lottery going forward and the team accumulating a bunch of over-hyped disappointments like KP, Frank, and Knox right after him and burying him in a cesspool he soon wants to leave before we are any good? There are plenty of examples of that.
You would think a group that believes KP is not worth a max contract given his production to date
(even though we was considered him a long term project coming in), thinks we should more or less dump Frank (another long term project), and thinks Knox was a bad selection (he sucks on both ends so far), would at a minimum better appreciate the risks inherent in the draft and the potential for being buried in lottery hell for a decade or more building that way exclusively.
This is kind of my point about the draft too.
If you draft a star initially, it quickly moves you down the draft and makes it harder to get the 2nd and 3rd star. If you draft poorly, you get another shot at it, but you still suck and it’s a year, two or three years later until you strike gold. Then you are right back to the 1st scenario.
There’s no perfect solution, but we are actually in the sweet spot right now.
We blew up the team a few years ago and drafted a project (KP). There are risks associated with him reaching his potential, but we drafted better than we should have on merit last year because he was out and we’ll have another shot at a star this year because he’s out. We are short circuiting the efficiency of the system. Now it’s on us to take advantage of the injury.
That’s true Brian. And Fiz has been great for the tank, no doubt! Nothing about Fiz indicates he’s holding back all his lessons til the tank is over.
This brings me back to a point I bring up often. People want a team to suck so bad that they get a top pick but then somehow catapult to instant playoff team so they don’t feel like they lost out the next year on a top pick. But teams don’t just go from being horrible to awesome most of the times. Usually they go from horrible to kinda bad to kinda good to good to awesome.
Look at The Kings. Fun team this year! Fox took that leap forward and now they’re a 500 team. Good for them! The Kings have been awful for years so its nice they’re a fun, young team. But they could very easily miss the playoffs this year. Should their fans be upset that they aren’t bad enough to have a shot at Zion to pair with Fox? Is their franchise stupid bc they didn’t continue tanking this year?
The Nuggets weren’t a playoff team the last few years. They were in that no man’s land. Should their fans be mad at those lost chances at a top pick when they’re 2nd in the Western Conference now?
Sure, you want a top pick to get a shot at a superstar. But even if you get that star, you still have to build a team. That means developing players and going from shitty to kinda shitty to average to good. There are exceptions, of course, but usually improvement is a gradual slope up, not a straight shot to title contender.
Oh yeah, true, Fiz is likely just not in that higher tier of coaches like D’Antoni or Budz, but I think he might still turn out better than Woody and Horny (and I think he’s already definitely better than Fisher).
I dunno, Fisher is hard to evaluate. He was a rookie coach with a lousy team, an aging pseudo-star and an overbearing GM pushing an antiquated system, yet he still managed to have his team at .500 past the halfway mark of the season until Melo stepped on a ref’s foot. Go back and read those threads from January…
Fisher tried to fuck the girlfriend of one of his players. I think that puts him at a very weird level of bad. 🙂 He’s now trying to scam players with predatory loans. He’s probably just an awful person (which says a lot that Kobe has said that Fisher is the best friend he’s ever had in the NBA).
I’m curious, who would max KP, as long as the contract has strong injury protections? Who would not?
For the record I would.
I am totally ok with Zion having a season long case of mono.
I need a very specific explanation of what the injury protections look like. And I need to know whether we get the #1 pick.
Yikes. I’m not even sure I want to hear about that.
90% of the problem with the triangle was calling it the triangle. My knowledge of the triangle is limited, but I see the the Warriors and Spurs doing triangle motions constantly. Both teams stress player movement, ball movement, and don’t run plays through a dominant PG.
On the Warriors, Durant and Green run plays as often or more than Curry. All they’ve added was 3 point shooting because they have great 3 point shooters.
The Spurs are constantly taking mid range shot shots, but they make it work because they get really good ones off ball and player movement.
I’m not even sure it was the system that was the problem in NY. It was the perception and players we had. You need more guys like Frank (with a shot lol) and fewer guys like Mudiay, Hardaway, Trier, and Knox.