(Wednesday, May 22, 2019 9:43:00 AM)
With the top three picks in the 2019 NBA draft seemingly set in stone, a dozen or so players are vying to be selected in the remaining seven spots of the top 10.
Jarrett Culver, a sophomore guard from Texas Tech, is projected as a lock for that group. Culver helped the Red Raiders to the national…
(Wednesday, May 22, 2019 9:53:18 PM)
Knicks president Steve Mills offered some insight into the Kristaps Porzingis trade at a fan forum today, saying the Latvian star provided the team with an ultimatum and was very unlikely to re-sign this summer. Mills’ comments are captured in a video tweeted by #Knockstape of a JPM speaker event that Mills and GM Scott […]
(Wednesday, May 22, 2019 1:00:37 PM)
The Pelicans still hope to convince Anthony Davis to stay in New Orleans. “We feel confident that we can create the right, and are creating the right, environment for Anthony,” Pelicans top executive David Griffin said Tuesday.Those hopes aside, it’s fair to assume at this point that Davis remains committed to leaving the franchise.The Knicks, of course, will be among the many teams interested in trading for the big man this summer if he wants out of the Big Easy.
[Sports Illustrated] Knicks President Claims Kristaps Porzingis Demanded Trade or He’d Return to Europe (Wednesday, May 22, 2019 7:32:45 PM)
Knicks president Steve Mills claimed that Kristaps Porzingis gave New York seven days to trade him or he’d leave the NBA and return to Europe.
[NYTimes] Knicks President Claims Kristaps Porzingis Demanded Trade or He’d Return to Europe (Wednesday, May 22, 2019 7:32:45 PM)
Knicks president Steve Mills claimed that Kristaps Porzingis gave New York seven days to trade him or he’d leave the NBA and return to Europe.
[NYTimes] Josh Hart Talks Down on Analytics and Inadvertently Shades New Lakers Coach Frank Vogel (Wednesday, May 22, 2019 3:59:31 PM)
Josh Hart doesn’t want a 45-year-old who loves analytics and hasn’t played basketball at a high level telling him how to play.
[NYTimes] Giannis Antetokounmpo’s Representative Rips Drake for Trash Talking Bucks Star (Wednesday, May 22, 2019 1:37:38 PM)
Georgios Dimitropoulos had some words for Drake’s conduct during Game 4 between the Bucks and Raptors.
[NYTimes] FS1’s Chris Broussard Responds in Kevin Durant Texting Feud (Wednesday, May 22, 2019 1:24:18 PM)
The feud between Kevin Durant and FS1’s Chris Broussard is continuing to heat up.
[NYTimes] Steve Kerr and the Warriors Are Finding More Strength in Numbers Than Ever (Wednesday, May 22, 2019 12:44:12 PM)
Steve Kerr has leaned on his bench more than usual with Kevin Durant, DeMarcus Cousins and Andre Iguodala fighting injury. With the NBA Finals approaching, the Warriors are living by their strength in numbers moniker.
[NYTimes] What the Bucks and Raptors Have to Do to Make the NBA Finals (Wednesday, May 22, 2019 11:48:49 AM)
Toronto and Milwaukee have won two games apiece in their conference finals matchup. Here’s a look at what each side will have to do to advance to the championship round.
[NYTimes] This Warriors Playoff Run Will Only Add to Stephen Curry’s Legacy | Open Floor Podcast (Wednesday, May 22, 2019 11:08:06 AM)
Stephen Curry has taken his game to another level since Kevin Durant went down with a strained right calf. This Warriors run will surely secure his legacy.
[NYTimes] Warriors Owner ‘Confident’ Team Can Re-Sign Kevin Durant, Klay Thompson (Wednesday, May 22, 2019 8:37:43 AM)
Warriors owner Joe Lacob on KD and Klay Thompson: “I am confident about (signing) both of them”
(Wednesday, May 22, 2019 7:40:11 PM)
Ja Morant hasn’t heard from the Knicks since meeting with the team in Chicago last week at the draft combine. He also hadn’t visited New York before Wednesday, and coming from Sumter, S.C., before playing at Murray State, a school of roughly 11,000 in rural southwestern Kentucky, it was an adjustment. “I’m from a small…
(Wednesday, May 22, 2019 7:23:57 PM)
The man who recruited RJ Barrett to Duke said his best attribute is his “competitive streak.’’ Jeff Capel, a former Blue Devils assistant and now head coach at Pittsburgh, said he feels Barrett’s game translates better to the pros than it did in college. “I think the kid is a winner and he’s a competitor….
(Wednesday, May 22, 2019 5:42:40 PM)
Knicks President Steve Mills said Kristaps Porzingis threatened to return to Europe if he wasn’t traded within seven days. “He … point-blank said to us, ‘I don’t want to be here,’” Mills said at a Chase Fan Forum Series on Wednesday. ‘I’m not going to re-sign with the Knicks and I’m going to give you…
(Wednesday, May 22, 2019 9:52:58 AM)
Georgia Tech shooting guard Michael Devoe knows how much his former Florida classmate RJ Barrett would love to play with his Duke buddy Zion Williamson in the NBA. Devoe also knows how much the Knicks need a player of Barrett’s ilk. Devoe, who led the nation in 3-point shooting percentage at Montverde (Fla.) Academy in…
(Wednesday, May 22, 2019 6:01:58 PM)
New information has surfaced in regards to the Knicks’ trade of their superstar forward Kristaps Porzingis.
(Wednesday, May 22, 2019 8:15:12 PM)
With the 2019 NBA Draft less than a month away, elite prospect Ja Morant isn’t looking to follow in anyone else’s footsteps.
(Wednesday, May 22, 2019 1:25:09 PM)
Warriors star Kevin Durant can be a free agent after the season, and the idea that he could team up with fellow free agent Kyrie Irving on the Knicks this summer has picked up steam since the Kristaps Porzingis trade cleared two max slots for New York. Here are the latest rumors…
(Wednesday, May 22, 2019 9:00:37 AM)
If the Knicks are only able to pair Anthony Davis with one max free agent, they could potentially acquire Davis into cap room without regard to salary matching. Pairing him with two max free agents would require both precise timing and salary-match considerations.
88 replies on “Knicks Morning News (2019.05.23)”
He refers to himself in the third person but also exercises self-acceptance. Never retire, Vince Carter. You’re the only non-millennial left.
If the Yankees played all their games against the Orioles, Gleyber Torres would hit 125 home runs.
Yes, that would be a terrible conversation. Because anyone who doesn’t think it’s the penultimate episode of season 3 (the one that features Avon and Stringer talking on the balcony after they’ve both betrayed each other, right before Omar and Brother Mouzane chase down and murder Stringer in the middle of an unfinished condo development that symbolizes the changing dynamics of Baltimore) should get off this forum immediately!
That would be a worse take than “but can Mitch play basketball?” and “was Wilt even that good?”
Honorable mentions:
– The season 1 ep where Kima got shot
– The season 2 ep that had Omar v Levy in the courtroom and where D’Angelo got murdered in prison.
– The Season 4 finale
If DRed was serious yesterday about Bill Russell, he’s lost my vote for GM.
But I don’t think he was serious. Not like James Bron about Wilt – hilarious.
Bill Bradley is an interesting question, though; so much of his game was mental, would he really not be able to play in today’s NBA because of physical limitations?
Edit: I am basing my question on his book A SENSE OF WHERE YOU ARE (which I read a long, long time ago, and I think was written with a real writer). He described weird exercises he would do to improve his peripheral vision, how many steps he could take at what speed on the baseline to be under the hoop, all kinds of stuff like that, focused on compensating for some of his physical limitations even then.
Just thought of the writer – John McPhee. Good writer.
I had a hard time getting through a bunch of McPhee books. Basin and Range especially.
Didn’t mean to start a conflagration there re Mitch. I love you Mitch.
Some might say this suit was a mistake. I say it’s one of his finest achievements.
https://deadspin.com/knicks-say-kristaps-porzingis-demanded-to-be-traded-or-1834974289
If Kyle Korver ,Steve Kerr and JJ Reddick can have long and productive careers in today’s NBA I’m sure Bill Bradley would too.
I get hot in a basketball sense in my mind’s eye watching Bradley chasing Jack Marin for 40 minutes a night on the baseline skirting Gus Johnson, Wes Unseld, Dave De Debuschere and Willis Reed screens…….
Nobody rocks a cow suit like Clyde 🙂
So, did Mills say at all why KP suddenly made his 7 day demand? Just curious. KP’s camp might want to just shut up at this time what with all the drama in his personal life.
So GS gets a nice rest before the finals.
We often talk about guys who wouldn’t be as good today but rarely the other way around. For instance, sometimes I think Anthony Mason could make All NBA teams the way basketball is currently played.
I might the other way on Mase. If he weren’t allowed to maul people like a rabid mastiff on defense would he be as effective? He did have a good set of offensive skills but I don’t know that he would have been stepping out and shooting threes.
Some people on this site have some serious reading comprehension problems. I’ll try to simplify this and spell it out for those people.
– First of all I said that Wilt was a unique freak by virtue of his combination of athleticism and strength. Nobody, not then, not now, not ever, had this combination at his level.
– He definitely could play in the NBA in any era at a high level because of that combination.
– He would not have been nearly as dominant on offense today as we was then. I will give you the definitive proof of this. He never once scored 30 or more against Kareem, His first 3 games against Kareem he scored in the 20’s and after that he averaged in the teens once Jabbar figured him out. Kareem was a better defender than people realize but, no Neptune, Wilt wouldn’t have snapped Gobert, TC, and Deandre in two. If you think guys he played against like Dukes, Counts, Imhoff, Bellamy were quality opposition, I’m here to tell you none of them would have made an NBA team in the 90’s onward. BTW Kareem torched Wilt in almost every game they played against one another; that cherry-picked video was very misleading.
– Wilt would have been an elite defender in any era.
– Regarding Mitch, which was in the context of him being a Giannis stopper, he has a certain unique freakish combination. What sets Mitch apart from Wilt and everyone present and past in the NBA is the time it takes for him to hit his apex once he starts his leap. I also believe Mitch gets higher elevation on his leaps than Wilt did. And no, I don’t give a shiite about Wilt in the high jump; I look at athleticism on the court in the flow of an NBA game.
If you want to argue any of the above, then fine. But stop all of the strawman crap.
What’s the over/under on Frank Vogel making it to Thanksgiving when scrubs feel free to throw shade?
https://www.si.com/nba/2019/05/22/josh-hart-analytics-coach-frank-vogel-lakers
If you kidnapped 14 year old Bill Russel and brought him to the present, you’d probably have a good shot at making him into a very good NBA player. If you kidnapped 24 year old Bill Russel and put him in an NBA game he’d be terrible. Modern NBA players are vastly more skilled than guys were 50 years ago. Maybe he could still be a good defender, but he’d have no idea what to do on offense and he’d get the ball taken from him whenever he tried to dribble in traffic. Pull up those black and white videos of Russell handling the ball and then watch Kevin Durant.
I don’t think it’s too complicated. He wants to win or at least be on a team that’s showing significant forward progress. He’s not thinking in terms multi year tanking and 5-7 year plans. He gave new management the benefit of the doubt. They blew the cap 20 million of cap space, took fliers with guys that can’t play, traded away his best friend, and were the worst team in the league. If that’s the situation you are in after several years you are going to want out.
The rumors about Frank wanting out are probably true too even though his agent is denying them. For two years he was a good soldier and did whatever they said, but they kept changing his role, gave Knox the longest leash in NBA history while putting him in the doghouse, and keep bringing in new PGs to replace him. Why the hell would you want to be on that team? They are screaming that they don’t value or want you all while you are trying to develop as a player.
The AAU system has essentially turned youth basketball into a full-time, year-round job. Centers are told to learn how to shoot from deep. Guards are learning the motion offense in middle school. How many Russell Westbrook-style guards existed in the 60s and 70s? How many 6’3″ guys were driving in the lane and stuffing it over 7-footers at the rim? How many 7-footers were told to regularly initiate a dribble-drive from 35 feet out?
Yeah. That handle, though. I just think of the one half season where Don Nelson ran the offense through him. That would work much better now.
Wilt used to play almost every minute of almost every game. By the time Kareem came along he was already 33, had a million miles on him, and was a shell of what he was at his best. That he could still hold his own against another player on the short list of greatest player ever is screaming that he would have excelled in any era at the peak of his powers.
@12 – Wow, what a dumb and unnecessarily critical thing (“You telling me that this dude that’s 45 that never played, doesn’t have an athletic bone in his body, gonna tell me how to play basketball?”) for Hart to say about Vogel. Until further notice, that’s your coach, dude. And until you accomplish more, his trip to the ECF supersedes anything you’ve done to this point.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that position. It’s true that if you literally lifted some of these guys’ games from 1964, they would not translate to the modern NBA. I just think that the first bit (about taking them at 14) is the fairer comparison. Taking Bill Russell after he’s learned to play a certain way for a decade, then sure, that’s going to be a bad fit in 2019. I think he would still be okay, but yeah, it’s a bad fit and he probably wouldn’t be, like, a Hall of Famer. An interesting thing about Russell, though, is that dude never stopped analyzing the game even after he retired. There’s this classic bit where someone asked him how he would have guarded Shaq (this was during Shaq’s prime) and Russell busted out this detailed answer that was really surprising in how much thought he had clearly put into it. So I think even thrown into the deep end, Russell would do okay.
@15
Agree. You can’t compare players from different eras.
Each generation benefits from whatever was learned by the prior one.
Is Carlsen better than Kasparov?
Was Kasparov better than Fischer?
Was Fischer better than Capablanca?
Who knows. All we know is that each learned from the masters before them (and now computers) so they probably play better now. But they were not necessarily intrinsically better. If you reversed the order and Capablanca was learning from Carlsen, Kasparov, and Fischer it would be different.
Same thing in basketball.
I think Hart’s comment was douchey no matter what. However, I also don’t think it was meant to be about Vogel at all. I think Hart was speaking in general terms and people are just using it to make it seem like he took a shot at Vogel. Also, not for nothing, while Vogel obviously knows analytics (and he specifically said he would use them in the Laker’s offense), that’s not really his hallmark. He’s more like a traditional defense-first coach, like Jeff Van Gundy.
I haven’t seen anyone make this connection, but Porzingis desperately wanting out of New York sure seems to line up timetable wise with him being accused of rape. Obviously getting out wouldn’t do much to obstruct any law enforcement investigation of a crime that serious, but it makes sense that he’d want a “fresh start” (for lack of a better term, feels pretty weird calling it that while talking about something so macabre) regardless of his guilt or innocence.
I’ve mentioned this to you before and received no response, presumably because it destroys like 5 of your favorite narratives, but both Zach Lowe and Ian Begley have reported that most of Porzingis’ grievances dated back to the Phil regime and Perry and co. just couldn’t clean them all up in time for his free agency.
He wasn’t prime Wilt but he wasn’t a shell of himself. Look at his stats. He kept himself in fine shape and played 45+ mpg against Kareem. The other thing is Kareem was 22-23 so Wilt’s experience should have offset at least in part some of the decline in their battles. The bottom line is that Wilt would have had some difficulty scoring against 7 foot long semi-mobile centers in today’s era. He had the natural strength (Rodman-like) but not the weight and girth of Shaq to be the dominant offensive player he was in the 60’s.
The conversation yesterday was about athleticism rather than skill. I think Bill Russell would be plenty athletic for the modern NBA. If you plucked him out at 24 I agree he’d be unskilled. But I think that’s kind of a strange counterfactual relative to just growing up and developing in AAU.
Russell was an amazing defender. And he won a lot of games at every level. He appears to have had a rather high basketball IQ. I suspect he would have been like a Kevin Garnett/Dennis Rodman hybrid on defense and a Tyson Chandler on offense.
To revisit the “can Mitch…you know…play basketball” point, I once had an online argument with a guy who was gaga over Nerlens Noel in Philly. He would bring up these analytic numbers Nerlens was putting up which, projected out, would have made Nerlens literally the greatest defensive player in the history of the NBA.
My response was that rather than being better than Bill Russell and Ben Wallace COMBINED, Nerlens analytical numbers were probably distorted by playing almost exclusively non-competitive minutes for a dumpster fire of a team. I think time has shown I had the better of that argument.
Mitch showed some really nice flashes but so has a legion of guys who turned out to be journeymen NBA players or worse.
Mike
This is just nuts… if 24 year old Russell morphed into 24 year old Capella’s body it would take Mike D’Antoni about 3 seconds to pull him asside and say, “Pssst, Bill….. instead of setting a million screens to free up Sam Jones, Hondo and Heinson for 18 foot jumpers, now when you screen for James Harden, he attacks the basket and lobs the ball to you at the rim!!! Ya think you can handle that big fella?”
I heard this fella Isaac Newton was good at…
Have you guys seen the april fools joke ernie johnson played on shak, where they listed the 10 greatest centers in history, and by the time they got to Jack Sikma at 8, ahead of Shak, it looked like Shak was going to throw up? then it was shak at 9 and brad miller at 10? Imagine Shak’s face if Mitch Robinson was on that list.
@23
I hear what you are saying. I think everyone knows Wilt wouldn’t average 50 a game or score 100 in the modern era. The point I am making is that the dude was incredibly athletic and had WAY more skill around the basket back then than a guy like Mitch Robinson has now but people are frothing at the mouth over Mitch and trashing Wilt. That’s crazy.
@27
I lost my breath I was laughing so hard.
@25
Here’s a list of guys who averaged over 2 steals/36 and 3 blocks/36 in a season (over 1000 mins played):
Hakeem
David Robinson
Nerlens Noel
The only thing that keeps Noel from being an all NBA defender is injuries and his ridiculous foul rate. His play hasn’t deteriorated from his Philly days, he just hasn’t improved in those critical areas. So far Mitch has been healthy, but he too will have to watch his fouls. There really is no reason to expect his great defense to disappear, if healthy.
My God!
You realize the 71/72 season where Wilt snuffed Jabbar out in the playoffs Wilt was 12 months from retirement and IT WAS JABBAR’S BEST STATISTICAL YEAR OF HIS ENTIRE CAREER?????
34.8 PPG with 16.8 rpg…. it was the prime of prime Jabbar and Wilt dispatched him mano a mano.
Look at Mitch’s game logs this past season. He played well off the bench and as a starter, with some of his best games coming against playoff teams (TOR, DEN) towards the end of the year. Not seeing your argument at all.
Porzingis definitely wasn’t happy under Phil. He’s sort of on record as not being happy about the way Phil treated Melo, didn’t go to an exit meeting, and then Phil publicly talked about trading him because of injury risk and how he wasn’t ready to be the #1 player on a good team yet (all of which he was right about). That had to infuriate him even more. KP also seems to have a huge ego. That’s a major reason Phil is out. That has little to do with why Porzingis wanted out almost 2 years later.
KP was fine for quite awhile after that. Then the team went from bad to worse, they didn’t want to extend him etc.. These guys are not thinking about long term win curves, lottery odds, the probability of getting star in each slot, or any of that. They want to win and they want to win quickly. It’s the same thing with all of them. The team was getting worse and he had no confidence in management. So he wanted out.
I love the fact that we washed our hands of a guy, and can debate in hindsight….do you think the rape allegations were on his mind when he demanded a trade and tried to hold us hostage, while he was also quite injured? its even better that we traded away that drama AND THJ’s contract
Link? I did a cursory Google search, but couldn’t find this.
I don’t want to keep taking the anti Mitch position because I love him. I just think the hype is beyond the reality at this stage. Playing well as a starter across a series of games is a very good sign, but you won’t know where he really is until the other team is focused on stopping him by taking away the lob and has the players that can do it. When they do that, to continue being effective he has to have other skills on offense. He doesn’t…at least yet. There will still be nights when he has a favorable matchup or the defense is not equipped to stop him and he’ll do great as is. But when the serious basketball starts there will be fewer of those nights.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVcAazaigiQ
The other guys should have done a hot-take style bit where they pretended to justify the picks ahead of him. Still funny. They show his reactions near the end.
Stop your hysterical inaccurate ranting. In all of their playoff matchups, Kareem averaged 29.7 and Wilt averaged 15.9. In the 71/72 playoffs to which you refer, Kareem averaged 25 and Wilt 22 but Wilt played more minutes. That’s “snuffing out”? Even M Bunge would wince at that logic. Wilt himself is on record saying he couldn’t guard Kareem. But that’s not even relevant to the main argument which was this: Wilt averaged a bit above 20 against a long 7 foot semi-mobile center like Kareem and yet you argue on offense he would have snapped in 2 the likes of Gobert/TC/DAJ/Marc Gasol?
Coach or not, it’s just ignorance. These guys refuse to understand that describing production is not the same as producing. Basketball Reference cannot teach a person how to execute a hesi pull-up jimbo to perfection. It can tell you how often a person’s put the ball into the hole when he tries it.
Someone go tell Akhil Amar that he doesn’t know anything about constitutional law because he’s never argued it in court. Or, hell, from the world of sports: the man who has never kicked a ball but is in the Pro Football Hall of Fame for teaching others to do it better.
It’s just a symptom of the anti-scientific, anti-expert sentiment in our brave new world.
-High volume, middling efficiency scorer
-Serious injury concerns
-Deeply troubling off-court conduct
The dude is such a walking Knicks checklist, we must be living in the only universe in which we didn’t sign him to a 5/$161M deal
IMO, the problem is the disconnect between players that don’t want to admit that math wizs can help them get better and math wizs that don’t want to admit they don’t understand some of the subtleties of the game that go into the numbers on their spreadsheets.
Personally, I think that’s starting to change.
Years ago I used to read advanced stats blogs and forums and it was pretty clear some of the math guys were so young they hadn’t watched all that much basketball and didn’t really understand the game. Now many of those same guys are older and understand the game a lot better. That makes them more capable of using math to describe reality and improve players and teams.
there it is, Mr. Jackson
hard pass on this argument today or any day forever
Hey ptmilo I recall you offering to grab a drink before I moved to Chicago. That move date is July 1st–idk if there’s a PM function on here or whatever, but if your schedule permits we should figure out a date and grab one.
Also yes, Wilt and Russell would be great in any era, that much is clear from the analytics I’ve seen and the tape I’ve watched to see just what they could do. But I think we’re undervaluing the Goberts/Gasols/whatevers of the world. They’d be all NBA players in any era at their peak, just like Wilt and Russell would. Quality is quality even assuming wild time travel-related counterfactuals. I’m not entirely sure why this is a discussion. That said I still think Wilt is a tad overrated (i.e. top 5 or top 7 rather than top 3 all time), even if he did everything he did in Converse All-Stars.
While I’m not sure I buy Bron’s argument, Mitch really does jump way faster than anyone I’ve ever seen, without losing too much control–and the same goes for his second and third jumps. That’s why he blew away the previous record for 3pt shots blocked. He’s a special athlete. Is he gonna be Wilt or Bill Russell? Maybe not. But would I trade him for AD? That would give me pause, and in the end I’d probably pass, because I value long-term success more than anything else.
Also, the whole “garbage time star” canard is just that: a canard. There’s a couple of Sloan studies related to per 36 numbers and play off the bench, and in most cases players replicate their bench production when given starter’s minutes against starter lineups. The times they don’t are generally when they have a weird, Cole Aldrich like inability to run for more than fifteen minutes at a time. Mitch clearly doesn’t have that. We got a top 40 player in the NBA in the second round, and he’s 21. He’s not a garbage time star–he ate Jokic and Plumlee’s lunch last time they played Denver. He literally left Luka and Harden confused after blocking step back 3s. The dude is legit–he’s the apotheosis of the Capela/Chandler kind of player. And that’s if he stays exactly the way he is now and never, ever gets better. Sign me up.
Did you spend any time at Wages of Wins back in the day?
Some of those guys probably watched 100 games of basketball in their entire life. They had no idea what they should even be trying to measure let alone measure it properly. Then they had the gall to call hall of fame coaches idiots for not playing some highly rated scrub, usually a year before the guy was in the G league or Europe riding the bench there too.
The math gets you to answers quicker and more accurately, but you have to know the right questions to ask.
They wanted to offer him an extension, but the type that Embiid got with injury protections. KP wanted a full max. Bondy reported this and his only good reporting of his life has come through his connection to KP’s camp, presumably dumb idiot brother wannabe Ari Gold superagent, Janis.
I agree with this which is why I have no clue why this needs to be debated. He didn’t trust them, they didn’t trust him or his idiot brothers, and rather than keep trying to mend the fence he asked out and the Knicks obliged. Blame Mills for giving Hardaway the contract he did and limiting the cap flex, but Perry made the right moves when he came in and if KP didn’t trust him so be it, he took a pound of flesh from Dallas in that deal. Good riddance.
This is really the baseball sabermetric argument all over again. “These nerds with their spreadsheets ain’t never played the game and I learned it from Old Hoss Clybourne and I think he knows the game better than your slide rule.”
A lot of the old farts who “played the game” had wrong ideas about things. Like if you have Sandy Koufax on your team and he has a sore arm all the time, make sure you start him 40 times a year and also make sure not to keep track of his pitch counts and let him pitch 350 innings, because that’s what the great Tommy O’Keefe did in my day and that’s what a starting pitcher is supposed to do.
It took FOREVER for that kind of dogma to die in baseball. You still have dummies like Mickey Callaway who refuse to understand relief pitcher leverage and think you only use your best reliever in the 9th inning and only if it’s a save opportunity.
I’ve been having this argument since 1987 when I read my first Bill James book. James might be a clownish old fool now, but he really changed things, him and his disciples. The story has a happy ending: the guys with the spreadsheets won.
They are usually given starter minutes when their skillset and stamina warrants the promotion.
Granted, the gap between G league and pro or college and pro is a lot larger than starter and bench, but I’d still way rather be guarded or have to guard a bench player than a starter. It’s a matter of how much the difference is and not whether a difference exists. It will also vary from team to team and matchup to matchup. The aggregate data will not suffice.
Setting aside KP because of the specific risks associated with him, sometimes the right move is not the best long term mathematical move if it drives away your best players now because they are not interested in 5-7 years from now. You have to weigh both.
Kind of crazy that 3/5 of the second team All-NBA are free agents at the same time.
1st Team All-NBA
Greek Freak
Harden
Paul George (over KD)
Curry
Jokic
2nd Team All-NBA
KD
Kawhi
Lillard
Kyrie
Embiid
3rd Team All-NBA
Gobert
Westbrook (huh?)
Lebron
Kemba
Blake Griffin
@47
It’s a lot harder to tease out the values in basketball than baseball because we don’t have good publicly available stats on individual defense and each player’s individual stats and VALUE are impacted by their role, the skill and roll of teammates, the system they play within, and how much attention the defense pays to each etc… to a greater degree than in baseball. Those impacts (other than defense) may not be huge in most cases, but they make a difference and that’s why we endlessly debate certain players here.
@51
Sure, but the nerds won in basketball too. Threes and dunks rule the day, despite the efforts of a certain mustachioed hippie who was goink to show the league that the game was better in the old days when all you needed was pinch post passing and Carlos Castaneda.
Advanced basketball stats have a way to go, agreed. They’re still useful. I know for damn sure I understand this game a lot better now than I did before the first time I logged onto Knickerblogger.
@50 – The 2nd team All NBA would give the first team a good run that’s for sure. To your point Brian, yeah that is pretty crazy that three of the 2nd team are free agents. If they all leave their current teams that will be quite a seismic change for the league next year – I for one hope they all do go somewhere else. Like how about Kawhi to the Clippers and KD and Irving to our NY Knicks – not likely but possible according to multiple sources.
Picture Draymond Green guarding Wilt down by the basket – Yes Wilt could absolutely play and excel today. So could Bill Russell and Bill Bradley because, you know, they were really good at basketball.
Jowles, thanks for that link! The Jack Sikma ploy was hilarious. Conjures up memories of Downtown Freddie Brown:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ti6TKPUvb1o
Anybody think/fear that, if indeed KD and Robin come here, that the Knicks might reach out to Melo on a vet min. deal as a bench guy? Melo gets to chase a ring and do a “homecoming” thing and all that.
Would Melo’s ego allow him to even be a bench guy, or has he learned his lesson?
Might or should?
No God! please no!
Carmelo is retired, I assure you. If they sign him to play a single minute in the NBA, they’re far dumber than we could possibly have imagined.
I’m still trying to figure out how Morey’s proprietary analytics led him to give a valuable roster slot to him. I just don’t see how they couldn’t find an older, defense-first NCAA player at the rookie minimum to step in and spend the regular season learning how to guard NBA players, especially if ownership was sensitive to luxury tax dollars.
Hope it really chaps KD’s ass that Curry is 1st team all nba and he’s not even tho they play different positions.
I’d rather have Kawhi than any other 1st teamer except maybe Giannis.
much to my surprise – i’m really enjoying all the wilt, kareem, and russell talk…it’s been fun to read…
man, this is just beautiful:
“You telling me that this dude that’s 45 that never played, doesn’t have an athletic bone in his body, gonna tell me how to play basketball?” Hart asked.
no doubt if i was a young 20 something, i’d be thinking the same thing (of course, it shouldn’t be true – but, it’s an understandable sentiment nonetheless)…maybe cuz of all their young guys that’s why kidd is there…one of the things i’m looking forward to the most next season is watching the lakers continue to crumble…
that’s cool to see gobert on the 3rd team and jokic on the 1st team…yeah, i don’t really get the westbrook placing at all…can’t think off the top of my head who i would place before kemba and blake, but, not sure on them either…
damn, lebron may not even be a top 10 player anymore???
Well, LeBron missed a bunch of games, mailed it in on defense and his team didn’t reach the playoffs.
Numbers aside, you could have made a case for Siakam, Butler, Harris, Aldridge or Middleton ahead of him for this season.
Now, an engaged LeBron is an entirely different thing, even at 35.
Yeah, just wondering if the team might do it for PR or whatever. Or, they might even think he could be a useful bench piece. I don’t WANT it to happen!
Absolutely. And athletes don’t want to be told what the limits of their ability are. It’s exceedingly rare for, say, guys like Vince and Dirk to be open about the difficulties of playing at an advanced age. Just remember the infamous “ayyy P” video if you want to see an example of an athlete believing that he exists outside of the aging curve.
There are obvious limits for young-player hubris — a 6’4″ wing is not going to demand that he play against opposing centers, for example — but part of what can make them great is the fearlessness to not listen to people who say “no.” That said, sometimes, like w/r/t Josh Smith’s 3-point shot, it makes them terrible.
The force of baseball analytics means you either play by the math or you get slapped around. And given how tenuous future earnings have become, you see some open eyes and ears around the league regarding optimized play, it seems.
Ah yes, the Efficient Market Hypothesis. As we all know, NBA coaches are abundantly rational actors. 30 out of 30 demand that their teams exploit 2-for-1 opportunities, for instance. Since they pass that very-simple math test, it stands to reason that they make complex player-evaluation and roster decisions with near-perfect efficiency as well.
I still can’t believe LeBron could have joined up with Simmons, Embiid and a bunch of excellent outside shooters but chose Ingram, Ball, Hart and Kuzma instead. If he’s pissed off about dropping to team 3, he has no one to blame but himself.
And yeah, he’s still real good at basketball. But he’s 34.
To be fair, though, thinking of yourself as a luminous egg is super helpful in the pinch post.
You think the Lakers would trade Lonzo in order to move up one spot in the draft and get Barrett? He’s lost his shine over there and LA probably overvalues Barrett like the rest of the NBA does (ie as a superstar prospect rather than merely a very good prospect). Obviously you make that trade if you think Culver is remotely equal, but has LA demonstrated any marked interest in RJ? I’d take Lonzo and Jarrett Culver over RJ Barrett in a heartbeat, even with Kyrie and KD possibly coming.
Gutted the team to force a trade six months early, received a huge, undeserved extension with a NTC and trade kicker, forced a trade when he was (surprise!) unable to get the team out of the lottery, got traded for Dennis Schroeder (lol) and chaff after he was one of the worst starters in the league, flailed on his new team in his new “Olympic Melo” role (which should have been the ideal situation for his many ruruland-alleged gifts), got cut after TEN GAMES, and found himself with literally no team willing to take on his prorated vet’s minimum contract. Not as a starter, not for “instant offense” off the bench, and not even for coaching young players.
And if that weren’t bad enough, here’s the final nail in his overrated career’s coffin:
-Allen Iverson, Nov. 2018
So yes, he’s dead and buried. I really want to believe Perry is smarter than to ignore all of the above, which is objectively true.
It’s crazy how little competition Lebron had for that third team slot. The only player to come close to him was LaMarcus Aldridge!
I like the idea. It’s not that I think Barrett is bad, but getting two good players instead of one is very tempting. I doubt the Lakers would go for it though, even though it probably opens up more cap room for them.
I imagine that they are roughly 3000% trading that pick for a veteran player. So unless they think that Barrett would give them a better chance at getting, say, AD, then I doubt they’d trade Ball just to move up a spot.
Ball’s got two years left, right? Only problem is that there are still no shooters. The PG problem is gone, though, and Ball would be nasty with Mitch.
Ummm…. when the greatest offensive player get “Spaldine” tattooed to his forehead on three consecutive plays, yes… that is being snuffed out at crunch time.
Also… Cuz pointzz! I’m pretty sure Wilt was OK at scoring in his day…..
This entire nonsense was engendered by a myopic comment that Mitch is some sort of one of a kind/never seen before athlete. That is just false.
Stuff did actually in the world happen in the world before 1990. Guys like Wilt, Russell, Connie Hawkins, Elgin Baylor and Oscar would be the brightest stars today.
No mystery how Westbrook made All NBA again this year. He’s a big name and he averaged a triple double again this season.
my sister was real big in to native american culture back in the 70’s and turned me on to this when i was young – i ain’t gonna say i took all that don juan stuff as gospel, but, i was a little let down when i finally realized it was all “just” a story (and, what a cool story at that)…as i got older and learned who carlos actually was – that was another letdown…
In the mean time the Raptors and Bucks are in a series again and tonight is a big game.
The problem with trial and error learning is that it takes forever to observe and see what’s working best. You are never going to measure some things as well or as quickly from experience and intuition as you can with math. Coaches have obviously learned a lot from the math revolution in recent years.
However, when you are claiming some hall of fame coach is an idiot for not playing a player that’s been riding the pine for 3 different teams, was soon drummed out of league, and is now riding the pine in an even weaker league, it’s not all those coaches that are wrong. It’s your understanding of the game and model.
Melo’s career is imo simultaneously the most underrated and overrated basketball career I can think of.
He started declining a few years ago as the injuries piled up and has almost nothing left now. Everyone except for him and his most die hard fans seems to know he’s done. I’m not sure why the shell of what he was is a conversation when his peak was a very good #2 option with a bad basketball IQ masquerading as a #1 option.
Not even sure what the argument was there about a 35 year old Wilt matched up against a prime Kareem. Best to not probe further I suspect.
The funny thing about baseball paring on overuse of pitchers is that it isn’t even clear how well it’s working. It’s a terrible career choice, these guys go down all the time, so randomly. Innings and pitch limits have to be helping but people are also throwing a lot harder, which increases injury risk. The attrition rate is really incredible.
And I am not sure it was really altruism that drove the chance anyway. I think you could also argue that the growing awareness of the second and third time through the order penalty and the rise of the bullpen ace has been more consequential than anything else in driving the trend. Which is something that came straight out of a spreadsheet.
Go Bucks
That 2nd team all-NBA guy Kawhi Leonard is killing it
It’s official Kawhi is the best player in the NBA
I still think of him mainly as a defensive force, but, slowly got used to him being able to shoot, but, kawhi running their whole offense, every possesion, is anazing…
at the beginning of the series I thought the bucks had the best player…
Pretty much, and that’s why his career is going to be largely forgotten.
Kawhi is really something else, what an impactful player on both ends. I hope he stays healthy if they get to the finals. The Bucks role players are getting outplayed by the Raptors, and that’s a big big issue for the Bucks. They can’t win if those guys are non threats and the Raptors can collapse on Giannis every possession.
The Bucks must feel like the Knicks did after game 5 in 1994. Up 2 in the series, then down 3-2 after the home loss in game 5. Will they respond? It’s been a good playoffs this year, I hope this series goes 7.
The knicks were up 3-2 in 1994
The knicks lost game 5, courtesy of Reggie Miller’s 25 pt 4th quarter in front of spike lee in the ECF. They licked their wounds, went back to Indiana and won game 6, then returned to MSG to close out the series.
@83
Maybe so, but the 2-3-2 format in the NBA finals meant both games 6 and 7 were road games.
#NeverForget
@83 oh, you’re talking about the finals against the rockets. Sorry, I was talking about the ECF against the Pacers. (I was writing in context of today’s ECF game 5, sorry to not be clear)
No prob, got it. Heady times!
@85 I railed against that format for years. It meant that in a close series only one team had a chance to close it out at home. Glad they finally fixed that.