Knicks Morning News (2019.03.27)

just here to say i would trade knox for mikal in a heartbeat

The SI article makes no sense. If the Kings wanted to build around Doncic, why not draft him and then eventually trade Fox later?

They chose to stick with Fox rather than re-start with Doncic.

I mean, as a stats-based blog, surely we can agree that drafting players who are already good is more likely to get you good players than players who…aren’t good? Is that factorial? The guys most of us wanted last year projected to be good and in fact have been good, much better than Knox, and that’s not even taking into account defense, which isn’t measured very well by any metric. (The one place I align with Strat, making me believe more in KP’s impact than most here, is defense.)

At least Knox still has some trade value, unlike Frank.

Man, the Hawks are starting to maybe look a little less dumb. Imagine if they get Zion AND another top-7 pick (Jaxon Hayes?) They could become a serious threat over the years.

If you check back, I was also dead-set against drafting Knox. But I was also very adamant about not drafting Mikal. To me, the debate is very similar to the KP-WCS debate…low floor-high ceiling vs. high floor-low ceiling. Mikal definitely has a better likelihood of becoming a productive rotation player at this point. Knox has a dramatically higher ceiling. Is that even debatable?

At least Knox still has some trade value, unlike Frank.

Man, the Hawks are starting to maybe look a little less dumb. Imagine if they get Zion AND another top-7 pick (Jaxon Hayes?) They could become a serious threat over the years.

Their chances at Zion would have been the same with Doncic, but they would have had Doncic. Unless the top 7 pick is surprisingly amazing, Doncic is going to be worth more than Young + guys who are projected to go at around #7 this draft.

The fascinating thing to me is the faith both Sacramento and New York had on Fox making the leap this season. The interesting thing about Fox is that he had a major course correction in the second half of last season (I remember being really impressed by that at the time) but then he had an awful final month and a half (I remember being really disappointed by that at the time), so gotta give credit to both teams for still identifying his potential for making the leap this season (or, of course, you could argue that both teams were just shooting blind and happened to get lucky).

I mean, as a stats-based blog

…

…we should respond to the stats-based comparison made a poster with stats-based refutation. Statistically, Knox had the second-best 3pt% of any 19yo rookie with as many attempts. (and better than Mikal). He rebounded better than Mikal per 36, even though Mikal was not shooting much and should have had more rebounding opportunities, not to mention being 3 years older and theoretically much stronger and more skilled as a rebounder. Bridges shot .299 from 3 and 4.4 fouls per 40 as a freshman, yet now his role in the league is as a 3-and-D guy. As such, I’m waiting another year before being confident in comparing their career outlook. Based on stats. Really.

Knick fan not in NJ who thinks our rookies will lead us to a lousy lottery pick in 2019

Might be time to change your handle. It hasn’t aged well.

They chose to stick with Fox rather than re-start with Doncic.

Uhm, ok, but why not going BPA anyway? I mean, Bagley is much better than I anticipated, but I don’t see the sense in punting on KP + Doncic and selecting Bagley. Wouldn’t JJJ have made more sense anyway?

Might be time to change your handle. It hasn’t aged well.

For sure 🙂

I’ve noticed that for a while, but I’m waiting for the ping pong balls to actually fall. Then I will change it. I don’t want to jinx anything to do with the ping pong balls.

That’s fine. So long as you acknowledge that your choice is based on aesthetics, since Mikal has been a nothing player this year despite PHX giving up an unprotected #1 for him and playing for a 17-win team full of kids.

if you want to know whether i find mikal attractive just ask snowflake.

my take is that mikal is already a decent nba player. he’s a good defender, he gets a ton of steals despite being a low risk taker, which is impressive for a rookie. he plays offense like a traffic cone but that is not all bad, because he spaces the floor and doesn’t hurt you, a skill that is not something every player can just turn on. some players are just wired to say yes to their inner antonio blakeney. he is already more of a 3&D player than say, doston, even with his shitty 3p% because his defense is real and 3p% is noisy.

knox on the other hand is maybe the worst defender i have ever seen — yeah i really do think he is worse than steve novak. have you ever seen a player face the entirely wrong direction on defense as many times as knox has this year? he is the only player i can remember where you question whether he possibly has pulled out a map of the court and is briefly consulting it during play. he is a disastrously inefficient offensive player with a pass to do-something ratio similar to my capitalization to bad joke ratio. there are only a handful of players in nba history who have been worse than knox has been this year, all things considered.

if you say, wait but knox is a really young 19, i hear you. he does seem like he has a lot more room to grow into himself than someone like mikal, who isn’t very young and looks reasonably mature. but going from horrific to okay over 3 years isn’t worth that much to us, by that time he gets paid for being okay. if you think knox might still be so good that he’s even valuable as RFA rights then okay, but i don’t think that’s reasonable. mikal will likely have trade value to a…

Statistically, Knox had the second-best 3pt% of any 19yo rookie with as many attempts.

Question: are there more than two 19 year old rookies with as many attempts as Kevin Knox?

I mean, as a stats-based blog, surely we can agree that drafting players who are already good is more likely to get you good players than players who…aren’t good?

It depends if your goal is to draft the player that will be best in year 1 or year 5.

I see projecting improvement as a stats based activity. IMO, we should have stats that extrapolate current productivity and current age to the future so we understand the development probabilities better.

Then we should break it down and look for sub categories to refine it.

1. How athletic is the player on a scale of 1 to 10?
2. How intelligent is the player on a scale of 1 to 10?
3. How strong is the player’s work ethic on a scale of 1 to 10?
4. How old was when he first started playing basketball?
5. Does he have any distractions or mental health issues that could hurt his development?
6. What position does he play?
7. Is he still growing in height?
8. Is he especially weak or frail but very likely to fill out and get stronger?

You could on and on asking and more importantly answering questions related to the probability of future development for each player relative to his current productivity and draft the one most likely to give you what you want at that time – all based on stats. Obviously sample sizes for some things might be small and intuition would play a part, but the probability and extent of development is not random.

In the last thread I wasn’t making the case for Mikal over Knox. I was talking about valuing defense over offense.

I would have taken Mikal at the time because I was dreaming of a Frank, Mikal, KP lineup locking down on defense. I still think Mikal is eventually going to be a very good 3 & D player with at least some potential to expand his offensive game.

However, I also understood the Knox pick even though I didn’t really like it.

Management was probably shooting for stars and took the best prospect available to get lucky and hit a homerun. They also already had a couple of young players they hoped could grow into starting roles as SG/SF players.

At the time I called Dotson a “poor man’s version of Mikal”. By that I meant he could do similar things, but probably not as well long term. I think I was right.

If they told him to stand outside and shoot spot up 3s when he’s wide open from his best spots his 3p% would be higher.

Even though he’s not an elite defender, he’s a good defender.

However, they are trying to make him into a more complete offensive player. He’s creating for himself, shooting shots off the dribble, driving, shooting he’s not comfortable or really good at yet etc.. We’ll see how that all works out. But if all you want from him is 40% from 3 and better spacing, imo that would not be a problem. He could do that right now. I’d still rather have Mikal.

I was wrong on Trae Young.

I saw a kid that was going be a good playmaker, but a huge liability of defense, turnover prone, and an inefficient scorer for at least a couple of years if not long term.

He’s improving as a scorer so incredibly fast it’s hard to believe.

IMO, he’s a better play maker than Doncic and is closing the gap or going past him as a scorer. Doncic will rebound more because he’s a bigger player playing a different position and Young is the worse defender, but I don’t see Doncic as a good defender yet either. It’s getting closer.

It will be interesting to see how they develop and improve defensively (or not).

Question: are there more than two 19 year old rookies with as many attempts as Kevin Knox?

That is something that had been annoying me the last couple of years, as there has been a proliferation of younger players playing and so we keep getting stuff on Sportscenter or whatever that says “This is the first time a teenager has done X since Lebron.” Well, yeah, since it used to be that only guys as good as Lebron would play as teenagers!

Question.

Assume we pick Ja Morant at number 2 and then we don’t sign Kyrie or Kemba in free agency. Would there be anything wrong with keeping DSJ in that scenario? Its not like we have to start Ja from day one and if they were the only legit PG’s on the roster (no resigning of Mudiay), then it seems like there would be plenty of minutes to go around between the 2 of them.

@31

I think the main thing they saw in Knox is that if you give him the ball and tell him to get a basket, he can put the ball on the floor and create a decent shot in a variety of ways. The problem with Knox is that his efficiency on that shot creation is still WAY too low for him to do that for a good team. They are only allowing him to do it because we suck and they want him to get better at choosing the right shot, the right way to get his shot off and to ultimately to make them more often.

Mikal is not as talented in that way, however he does a few things really well already and sticks with what he can do. He adds massively more value on both sides now for sure and will probably get better yet.

We’ll see if Knox can eventually improve his shot creation, selection, and efficiency enough to become star offensive player, but he better because he sucks on defense worse.

Where are people getting the idea that Knox has some high ceiling? I don’t see that at all. To the extent he’s athletic, it’s not a very functional athleticism. He’s pretty uncoordinated with the ball. He’s not a particularly intelligent player. He has no NCAA pedigree to dream on. Seriously, where is the idea coming from? I see a player whose best case scenario looks like Ryan Anderson at this point, and even that feels like a true 100th percentile outcome.

Knox is competing with some of his teammates to be the worst player in the NBA, while Mikal is already more or less average. This is open and shut despite the age difference. Of course it would be different if Knox was worse than Mikal but showed plenty of positive signs, but anyone making the Knox > Mikal argument is basing it purely on age. It’s not very different from making a straight-faced Ntilikina > Fox argument.

@35

I think people are just looking at Morant’s assist% (which is only slightly higher at 50% than Trae’s 48%.) Comparing the two in terms of passing quality, I wouldn’t say that Ja is the better passer than Trae despite having a slightly higher AST% at the same age and a slightly better A:TO, more a different style of passer. Trae really was and is a wizard with the ball–getting passes in ways that you just wouldn’t believe. Ja is more like Westbrook where he racks up assists off the drive and kick due to his superior athleticism rather than, say, Curry or Paul or Rondo who makes passes that nobody else can see (not to say that those players don’t also take the ball downhill with extreme prejudice). They are both very good at passing, but I think Trae Young more often completes higher degree of difficulty passes than Ja does (with a very marginal increase in TOV%). I still like Ja better for other reasons, though, like his not-total-inability to play defense.

I think Ja is much better in the open floor and attacking before a defense is set. He’s good in PnR but not as advanced with his reads and feel in that setting or in the halfcourt in general as Trae. I’m not a believer in his current shot mechanics translating to the NBA. I think he’ll need to re-work that a bit to maximize his ability as a scorer.

Knox could elevate from worst in the NBA defense to merely bad simply by learning to stick with his man instead of loosing him every damn possession. It’s not clear that he has the capability to do that. He’d need to be able to track two things at once and he hasn’t shown that in any aspect of his game. If he’s driving he can track (sometimes) a single defender, but he struggles badly as soon as there are two between him and the basket, leading to a bad miss or a charge with disturbing regularity. He completely loses track of where his teammates are, to the extent that he never knows where any of them are other than the person who has the ball. On defense he tracks the ball. That’s it. Not his guy, not any other players on either team, just the ball. He follows his guy around the court with as much of a delay as it takes for a teammate to tell him to follow his guy. And for such singular focus on the ball he doesn’t rebound particularly well either as he doesn’t anticipate how other players are going to move. He occasionally boxes out, I will give him that. If he finds himself in a situation where he’s already directly between his guy and the basket, which is entirely dependent on whether his guy moved much or not.

I’m pretty sure that the occasional zone defense that Fiz has run is almost entirely about minimizing Knox’s failures.

All of which is to say:

2. How intelligent is the player on a scale of 1 to 10?

1. Ever notice that he has to re-tie his shoes more frequently than other players?

Ja is more like Westbrook where he racks up assists off the drive and kick due to his superior athleticism rather than, say, Curry or Paul or Rondo who makes passes that nobody else can see

I disagree with this. Ja has a great sense of timing on his passes, he doesn’t just make the right pass, he makes it at just the right time, which is very key. He has a great feel for passing the ball.

@48

That’s fair. His timing is superb, and that especially helps him in transition, where he’s a terror. But I think the larger point stands: More often than not he’s identifying and making the “easy” pass (not meant to be an insult but it’s far easier to do in college than the NBA) rather than creating the optimal look out of thin air like Curry, Paul, Jokic, etc. And I think Trae is more like the latter, though he of course also gets plenty of assists off driving and kicking.

What you take to be “better passing” is context-relative, but if we’re talking about the ability to successfully complete high-degree-of-difficulty passes, I think Trae is better on that front. There might be good reasons to say that Ja is the better passer if you value transition passing over halfcourt passing, though.

JK, DRed, thfh,
I think Knox is a better athlete than you are giving him credit for. He’s probably going to top out at 6’10” 230-240 lbs with a long, wide frame and runs and jumps very well for a guy that size, especially in transition. He gets fouled a lot for a 19yo guy who is tripping over his own feet half the time, which I think is developmental, not a congenital defect of some kind.

As to his defense, most 19yo’s will get torched on D by savvy vets. I agree that he’s been particularly bad, but it’s too early to conclude that he’s hopeless on that end. He seems to hustle and hit the floor a lot, and hasn’t gotten injured beyond the sprained ankles.

All I’m saying is that he’s done enough good things to take a wait and see approach. To me, he seems more like a gangly teenager than a finished product.

This goes for Frank too. I’m less pessimistic than JK47 et. al. and expect that he will develop into a decent 3-and-D backup wing. My point about him (and Knox) is that they were lousy picks in the mid lottery, but could develop into reasonably good players, depending on their ability to master a role. Frank was a terrible choice for a PG prospect. Knox was a more logical pick in that he is physically and skill-wise suited for a combo forward role.

I mean, as a stats-based blog, surely we can agree that drafting players who are already good is more likely to get you good players than players who…aren’t good? Is that factorial?

Well, that’s true, but as usual with statistics, there are many more variables that have an effect in the final result. So you could possibly try to refine the question:

Are already good, but older and less athletic (by some objective metric) draftees more likely to be good than bad, but younger and athletic ones?

Which would be a bit more difficult to answer. Let’s not forget that there were some “can’t miss players” that utterly destroyed their competition in the NCAA (Jahlil Okafor) that completely flopped in the NBA, which might be inherent to the variability of the draft, or might be correlated with some measurables.

the floater stuff does not work in the NBA, which was the knock on Knox to begin with. The problem is those are really the only shots he gets.

Honestly with the role he seems destined for he doesn’t really need to be a shot creator and he would be better off exorcising that part of his game right now. Lots of stretch-4s are near the very top of the league in terms of % of assisted buckets, with some up in the 90+% area. Their job is primarily to open the floor for others, and to take catch and shoot 3s. Knox is a capable 3-point shooter, more than capable given his age and size. If you can get him to the point where 8 or 9 out of every 10 shots he takes are assisted and like 75%+ are 3-pointers, you will have pretty much fixed his offensive game. Not made him into anything special, but stopped him from actively hurting you. Then from there maybe he can start to pump and drive and add in other elements. But I really believe the first thing the coaching staff needs to do with him is get him to play something akin to his true natural role as opposed to continuing to delude themselves into the idea that his future is as a high volume scorer.

One thing I do like about Knox is that he has a good feel for changing speeds which makes up for not having an elite first step. You can especially see this in transition where he’s been really good at taking the ball off of the rim and going coast to coast not by flat outrunning people but by taking his time and then accelerating as soon as the defender starts to get his feet set. He’s not nearly as successful at it in half court sets because his handle is so shaky but if he make some progress especially with his left hand it should make a big difference. He already leads the Knicks in fouls drawn (mostly because he’s played the most minutes but it’s still a good sign) and as he gets stronger I think he’ll wind up getting to the line at a pretty good rate. As long as he gets his three point % up into the 37/38% range I think he’ll wind up at least an average TS% scorer with the potential to be solidly better than that. Is that going to be enough to make up for being sub-par to terrible in rebounding, playmaking, and defense? Doubtful, but I don’t think it would take a miracle for him to be a decent starter.

Yeah, it’s not necessarily a modern thing to draft teenagers, but teams used to bring them along slowly but now they let them play a lot more right off the bat, which is why you keep seeing stuff like “Player X is the first teenager to get Stat X in a game since Lebron!”

It almost certainly has to do with the decreased amount of control teams have over players. The aforementioned Rashard Lewis, for instance, only played 145 minutes total in his first season when he was 19 years old (Knox broke that total in his eighth game, and that’s with him getting hurt in one game and playing just five minutes in it and then two other games when he was returning from the injury and they “slowly” worked him back into things with a five minute game followed by a ten minute game).

Guys:
I don’t like the way the discussion is now focused on Culver, Barret, Ja, everyone but Zion.
A few assumptions on my part:
1. The NBA rigs the top draft lottery position
2. Cavs benefited from it after LeBron left a few times as compensation from above.
3. NYKs benefited in 1985-Ewing
4. Silver is fearful of another “frozen envelope” exposing the rigging; accordingly, NYKs will NOT win first pick
5. We NEVER move up, so we will get pick 2 or 3.
6. Zion is the closest to a sure thing in this draft; NYKs cannot miss out on him, so I’d offer whatever combination of picks and players except Mitch to move up and get him.

don’t bogart that joint my friend, pass it over to me

i honestly don’t see how ppl still see upside with knox… he’s been bad… he wasn’t all that great at kentucky either…. and he’s failing for the same reasons…

where exactly is this outsized athleticism? he’s not exactly blowing by ppl consistently.. he’s not exactly flying down the court… he’s not exactly elevating over ppl to finish… i mean one handed floaters from 5-8 ft out is what pg’s do…. does anyone get the impression that his defender is having trouble when guarding knox? he has the occasional interesting moment but for every one of those there’s like 50 other times where he’s flipping the ball at the hoop from behind his head in a panic if the defender even so much as gives him a stern look … is that what upside looks like?

and that’s not even getting to his statline…. it is quite disastrous even when omitting his 2p fg%… and when you do it very much looks a lot like steve novaks…. if you account for his 2p fg% he’s in territory where he probably won’t even reach that level of play….

he handles the ball kind of ok for his size… when he can load off two feet and looks at the rim for a full five seconds he could probably throw it down strong…. he has good range on his shot…

but seriously… that’s about it… am i really missing anything? if you just scrutinize him beyond the tape measure it’s pretty apparent that he is not capable of being what ppl think he’s capable of…

I heard that Ernst’s administrative assistant has Berman on speed dial.

Hawks will stick their claws in the hardwood right about now. The schedule will help them not win but if they keep on with this lunacy they shut one/two down.

@71, Donnie, just engaging in a little hyperbole. The point I was trying to make is that if the NYKs don’t get the first pick they should pull out all the stops to trade up and get Zion. The dropoff is that large.
Of course a strong team in NY benefits the league. I’m sure Stern thought he was straightening out the NYKs when he brokered the hiring of DW years ago.