SNY.com: Knicks’ Dennis Smith Jr. says helping RJ Barrett win Rookie of the Year is one of his season goals

Yeah, it’s been bad enough having to grimace every time Chapman comes in to pitch, knowing the circumstances under which he first joined the Yankees. That German is now involved in a domestic incident is a huge bummer. The Yankees have been my sports refuge of late, not only because they’re better than the other teams I root for (like the one that brought us together here), but because, Chapman aside, I don’t have to spend a lot of time thinking about toxic ownership, CTE, bad behavior, etc.

Taking the discussion back to DSJ, like Brian says, offseason talk doesn’t amount to much. But it’s nonetheless promising that Smith’s publicly stated goal isn’t about his own accolades, but setting up a teammate. The kind of mentality you want out of your point guard, whether or not this guy is good enough to live up to those words.

Supposedly he did it at the CC Sabathia dinner – in front of Joe Torre, who happens to have founded the “Safe At Home Foundation”, an organization that is combating domestic violence. Talk about stupid.

Yeah. I think German needs to be put on ice for a bit.
No. The Yankees are NOT in trouble…yet. JA Happ, Severino and Montgomery are all still in the pipeline for starts. It’s not ideal to lose a 18 game winner, but it is what it is.

I wasn’t expecting much from German anyways. He was, at best, going to be starting Game 4.

I know I need to not get fooled by talk or workout videos or FIBA performances. But outside of the larger media saying this off season was a failure and bringing up old history with Derrick Rose, I’m getting A LOT of positive vibes from within the organization right now. Talk is cheap but everyone is saying the right things and there’s a lot more of it than in years past. The vets brought in are talking about playing their roles, guys are talking about coming off the bench, young players are acknowledging what they specifically need to work on, they’re working out and scrimmaging together. I just have a good feeling about this season. It may not translate into the playoffs but maybe, just maybe, the culture is indeed changing. We shall see…

If the effort on the court looks anything like the comments DSJ, Randle, and Barrett have made this Summer, this could be a fun team to root for regardless of the record. Baby steps

How do you get something like this THAT wrong?

Sports writers racing to be the 1st on Twitter

I wasn’t expecting much from German anyways. He was, at best, going to be starting Game 4.

Probably, but I really liked the idea of him as a bullpen option, especially with Betances down for the count (which rips my fucking heart out for so many reasons, by the way).

Achilles injuries seem so arbitrary that I suspect there’s some genetic predictors at play. It’s the reason I don’t play my shitty brand of ball anymore. I have a few friends who have come back from soccer and rugby achilles tears and I never want to do that rehab myself. Really sucks for Betances.

right on, geo

geo, you are the man! whenever the kb knowitalls rile me up, you always bring me back down to earth. thanks, bro!

sorry (not really sorry) for being so needy at times 🙂

Given what Knicks fans have been through the last 20 years, we have to look after each other ha ha

Domestic violence doesn’t end with physical, or sexual abuse. Susan Forward’s Toxic Parents is a very good book on the subject. I highly recommend it.

Phil and Dolan an Mills got KP turned off on the Knicks. But it was Perry and Fiz’s job to bring him back and they couldn’t. That’s on them.

Of course we don’t know yet if maxing KP turns out a good thing. Failing to get him to want to be here is an organizational fuck up at a time when Phil was already gone.

I don’t wish anything bad on KP, if he becomes a top-5 player, so be it. Right now I’m excited about this current team and its future possibilities. We’re so much healthier right now than we would have been if we kept KP and had to build a team around him.

In that interview he said that there were two other incidents involving KP that management kept hush (fast forward to 47:25 on the recording).

I don’t mean to be that guy, but youtube is blocked at my office and I’m curious what these incidents are. Can you elaborate?

the sordid secrets are no doubt safely locked in the same vault containing the pictures of dolan applying alan hahn’s chapstick with his ass

The funniest thing about Strat’s shtick is, depending on what side of the bed he wakes up on, Phil is either the prescient genius who drafted surefire future superstar Kristaps Porzingis, or the prescient genius who knew Kristaps Porzingis was injury prone and overrated and thus tried to trade him.

Porzingis despised Phil Jackson. I don’t even list that when I list all of Phil’s fuck ups because 1) the list would get too long at that point and 2) Porzingis seems like a bad dude so I don’t particularly care about his judgment.

But if you’re someone who’s deeply upset about the Knicks ruining their relationship with Porzingis, Phil Jackson is patient fucking zero!

I love it when PT goes lowbrow…

Bought the Phantom Tollbooth for my son btw! Might wait a year, he’s only 5 but very excited for the moment. One of my favorite books as a child.

Domestic violence really bothers me too, partly b/c my mother claimed that my father struck her occasionally, inc. once when she was pregnant. My grandmother (mom’s mother) claimed she saw it happen once, and her story seemed credible to me.

By the time I was 7 they were divorced, and I don’t have any memories of seeing him be abusive. I’ve had no contact with him, due to other reasons, since 1982 when I was 19, and I wasn’t told about the abuse until a few years after that, for some reason, so I never confronted him with that.

I also always think about the potential impact on children in the relationship. That has to be pretty awful to experience. So yeah, no tolerance for this crap if it can be substantiated.

Yeah, even if DSJ is out of the league in a few years, the KP trade was still huge.

KP’s massive flaws have been outlined here plenty, and Mitch more than covers his best attribute (shot-blocking). Getting out of the very stupid Hardaway contract and getting 2 firsts back from a below-average team in a totally loaded West is huge, though.

I love Luka’s game as much as anyone here, but that alone isn’t enough to make that team good. If we can draft well over the next 3 years (big if) this team could finally go places.

I also always think about the potential impact on children in the relationship.

i always wonder for them poor folks whom get stuck with two shitty parents…that’s gotta be a tough hole to dig out of…

i haven’t really dug in to the subject of civil rights for a while, but, seems like kids are some of the last folks to get recognized in that light…

@44

i always wonder for them poor folks whom get stuck with two shitty parents…that’s gotta be a tough hole to dig out of…

Horrific in some cases. In my years teaching high school, I became aware of many such instances, esp. kids with parents with serious addiction issues. Your heart goes out for the kids, and you wonder how many can overcome such a harsh start to life.

RE Porzingis trade: the trade made me sad, but it makes sense and the return was good. If he gets his act together and becomes a legit star, it might hurt later on, though.

Bought the Phantom Tollbooth for my son btw! Might wait a year, he’s only 5 but very excited for the moment. One of my favorite books as a child.

mine is almost 3 yet i have repeatedly attempted to read to him from it. i’ve never gotten past three sentences. the only
book he hates more is ron baker’s opus you’re too big to dream mahleenkiy

Your heart goes out for the kids, and you wonder how many can overcome such a harsh start to life.

It can be done, but when you later find that success doesn’t make the anger go away, there’s a lot more work to do. Of course it always helps to have money – much easier when you aren’t contending with poverty, too.

Edit: books like The Phantom Tollbooth help a lot.

Hahn thinks the Frank should be in the starting 5 next to DSJr

what exactly would frank be doing at the 2?

he doesn’t rebound, penetrate, facilitate, or score…

I disagree with having Frank in the starting lineup but I think that it’s fair for the idea to be considered. That’s what pre-season’s for. This is not going to be a “tank” team. They’re going to battle for a playoff spot. What Hahn said about Frank at the 2 is that he should be paired with DSJr who’ll want the ball in his hands and that Frank would be a 3-and-D guy that stretches the floor and offsets Smith on defense.

BTW, one thing that hasn’t been discusses is the lack of rim defenders outside of Mitch. He’s the only REAL center on the team which is loaded with 4’s. That’s not to say that others can’t play that position, but when he fouls out (anyone want to predict and over/under on how many times that happens?) who do we have to protect the paint? I’m thinking that the name is Wooten. Maybe not day 1, but I would love to invite him to the block party!

lack of rim defenders outside of Mitch

Wooten is definitely there. I also think it’s why Thabeet made the training camp roster and has a shot of making the team.

Alternatively, they just slot Portis & Randle in together and try to outscore teams. I’m skeptical that it will work tho

“None of our guards pair well with Frank because Frank sucks and also all the other guards suck” is a pretty facile argument. Obviously all Frank talk hinges on the idea that he shows real improvement this year. If he doesn’t then, yeah, he still sucks and probably the only thing he pairs well with is a plane ticket to Europe to join his new team. The question at hand is “If Frank is good enough to be in this rotation, what’s the best way to use him?”

The other guards sucking isn’t a Frank problem and exists regardless of who starts at the 2.

I would like to give a DSJ-Frank backcourt a long look.

I expected DRed to know the title of Ron Baker’s children’s book but not you.

lol

As for good backcourt combos, our best backcourt player is probably Wayne Ellington, so we won’t have any good combos. We have to hope some of the young guys take significant steps forward.

My thing with Frank and starting is that one of their best stretches last year is when they started Frank and Mitch and then they proceeded to never do it again. I doubt it will work out better now, either (as “one of their best stretches” is, in and of itself, a stretch, since they were still pretty bad), but why in the world did Fiz just completely abandon it? Oh wait, I forgot, it got in the way of his “Mudiay-fixer” narrative. Never mind.

Various combination of Frank, Robinson, Dotson, and Vonleh were good.

Those were some of the best lineups they had all year. It wasn’t entirely their fault the team still sucked. When they were out the bench sucked.

That period was all you had to see to know that Fizdale/management are either full of crap when they say they want to emphasize defense or too dumb to see it was working better. The only other option is that they saw it was working better and purposely abandoned it because they might win some more games. I’m not giving them that much credit.

Frank and Robinson should see a lot of time together. Vonleh is gone (because they are too dumb to see his value at that price) and Dotson will probably need a few months to regain his best form, but they should still try to focus on defense and team play.

The idea should be to get Frank and Robinson on the court with a few scorers that can at least defend adequately. Then you have an overall plus defense with stoppers inside and outside. Robinson won’t put up a lot of points, but what he’ll give you will be efficient. All you want from Frank this year is to wreak havoc on defense, make plays, & not be too much of a liability efficiency wise as a low usage scorer.

The issue is we don’t have quality scorers that can defend adequately unless DSJr steps up now that he’s healthy and finally in shape. Barrett will take time.

then either Barrett or Knox start at the 3

i would think that marcus will be our starting 3…after julius and mitch – our next best player maybe?

I like that their best backcourt player was waived just last year.

Not only that, but he was 31 years old when he was waived last year. And the Knicks had him when he was 26 years old and making league minimum, and they still traded him for Travis Outlaw, whom they then had to pay the Sixers to take.

The Knicks’ script really does write itself most days.

U guys r dumb

Laphroaig city

Getting there

Seriously, projecting lineups is useless, just too many unknowns.

Picking out the best Knick lineups of last year is like picking out which of Pauly Shore’s jokes are the funniest, or what is the best venereal disease, or what’s the best Kirk Cameron movie.

Just don’t switch to drinking bleach, please.

Picking out the best Knick lineups of last year is like picking out which of Pauly Shore’s jokes are the funniest, or what is the best venereal disease, or what’s the best Kirk Cameron movie.

Pass on the pauly shore joke.

HPV seems mild.

There was a trading places movie that Dudley Moore carried.

And my base Knicks lineup would be:

Smith/Payton
Barrett
Randle
Robinson

With Frank and Knox directly competing for the 5th spot in the lineup. Barrett could slide between the 2 and 3 to accommodate either.

That’s not the best lineup (any lineup with Morris would be better), but that’s the optimal developmental lineup that I’d like to see.

Mitch will hang on the weak side to get orebs and lobs. He won’t get in the way of Randle at all.

Dotson, Frank, RJ and Iggy will have to scrap for minutes. I predict that RJ is gonna have a very hard time adjusting to the size and speed of the NBA game.

I don’t have any special insight as to how the Knicks will delpoy Barrett, but I highly doubt they’re going to make him “earn his minutes” or whatever. That would be totally inconsistent with their approaches to their lottery picks of the past few years. Frank Ntilikina and Kevin Knox have basically been given all the minutes they can handle despite arguably being the two worst players in the NBA.

I understand the roster is a little deeper now, but RJ Barrett being benched in favor Wayne Ellington or whoever would be such a shit show storyline that I don’t think they’d want to go anywhere near it.

I have no idea if Barrett will start or not, but I bet he gets at least 1,500 minutes this season, and I’d probably take the over on that if given the chance.

If RJ stays healthy (and he seems durable) he’ll probably play 2,000 minutes. He’s not like Knox or Frank, he can actually already do some things at an NBA level.

There should be minutes for him at both the 2 and 3.

My comment re: lineups was about the start of the season. If RJ isn’t ready, he won’t play much.

HPV seems mild

It does til you get cervical cancer and can’t have any kids……

Barrett really doesn’t shoot very well from range or hit his free throws. So I don’t see the Pierce comparison. I can’t remember the comps but how about a Demar Derozan who can pass and rebound but not hit his free throws.

That wasn’t a very good comp…

@94 I mean, if you know for sure that Barrett can’t improve his shooting or free throw % then I guess we’re pretty much fucked

I can’t remember the comps but how about a Demar Derozan who can pass and rebound but not hit his free throws.

The best case of a Demar Derozan who can pass and rebound but not shoot as well is Dwayne Wade. But a more realistic case of that player is Lafayette Lever, who was a pretty good ball player in his day, but is largely forgotten about because he was understated.

Paul Pierce shot both free throws and three pointers like shit as a college freshman so there’s that.

i don’t like pp or derozan as comparisons bc those guys best qualities really revolves around an excellent combination of size, body control and fine motor coordination and that ain’t RJ. RJ’s defining quality might be his court vision for his size and athleticism, which wasn’t really what those guys were about when they were young. fat lever is even worse, his was in some ways the opposite of rj, especially on defense as a smallish guard with great instincts and hands.

i think the good rj scenario looks like one of the good sized pointy forwards who are not natural mid range killers (or athletic freaks like pippen drexler wade). like a combination of jalen rose and lamar odom. i’m worried he’s more like evan turner or iguodala without any of the the…err…defense but fuck that because it’s late september and for knick fans that’s the season of hope.

I agree on the savvy part, Pierce was actually a pretty dynamic athlete in college, but not enough to make much difference. Thing is, Pierce was more of a traditional “power” small forward with a pure shot and a million ways to score. My problem with RJ is that he presents as a ball-dominant facilitator but his ball skills are not great and he has serious issues going right. His shot is also mechanically unsound. Even in college, Pierce’s overall mechanics were rock solid.

RJ is very young, built like a brick shithouse, and seems like a hard worker, so I suspect that he will improve in all areas. He’s probably going to be a better passer and similar rebounder and defender compared to Pierce, but The Truth was a pretty special scorer and clutch performer. I’d need to see a lot more from RJ to entertain such lofty comparisons.

it’s late september and for knick fans that’s the season of hope.

that just might be the saddest thing I’ll see all day…

@107. Surprisingly, not the Knicks

I think it’s easy to believe Randle’s shooting is real bc he’s improved every year he’s been in the league. It’s not like he’s been the same every year and last year he had a better year. He’s progressed nicely from season to season going back to his second year. Don’t count his first Cause he played so little due to the injury.

Also, if defenses start playing up on him when he’s shooting from deep, he can still punish them by rumbling past them and scoring inside. So even if he is guarded more closely from deep, it’s not a lot of good options for the defense with this guy (plus he’s a decent passer).

I guess you could say I’m high on Randle!

WTF Giants!!!

This is the worst defense I’ve ever seen on a giants team.

Of course they were great after this, mike Evans notwithstanding.

Jones’ early experience as a pro suggests he will be much better than his statistical production in college indicated he would be. Happy to say you were right that we should have waited.

Not sure why you keep beating this Mel Kiper drum. It’s quite the straw man.

I still think if Gettelman loved Jones he should have taken the stud from Kentucky at 6 and figured out a way to have traded ahead of the redskins. The point is to build a good team, not overpay for a good QB. There’s holes all over the field that could have been filled with the assets he squandered.

You earned the right to brag about Jones and Gettelman has earned enough to let us see what he does next year to fix the defense. But let’s not go overboard. This team is still pretty far from good. But it’s a great day for hope.

I came for the Daniel Jones comments.
It’s only one game but some people need to re-think some of their previous negativity towards Jones perhaps

The g men turned a new page today. Jones was better than I can remember Eli playing in what feels like forever.

Even if we lost that game it was a success.

bust!

Look, on the topic of Jones, and specifically whether or not people like me should have waited before we panned the pick, you win, by knockout, in the first round.

I don’t know why I’m the only one eating crow, and sure AF don’t know why other people are chiming in to gloat on your behalf. But I couldn’t have been more wrong, and I couldn’t be happier about it. I’m not even going to play the “let’s not overreact to one game” card, because it’s already pretty obvious.

Delighted that I was wrong about Daniel Jones. Thankfully, football is a lot less predictable than basketball. Hooray interaction effects!!

Now if only I could be wrong about Ntilikina…

Fun fact (kind of):

35% of all the players that have ever played 2500+ minutes and have a negative ws/48 have played for the Knicks in recent years.

And to that, Frank Ntilikina and Mardy Collins appears next to each other on the list. They have pretty much identical career stat lines across the board to this point. We barely wrote about Mardy Collins at all while he was here. Maybe it was because he wasn’t a teenagers, so we didn’t have the guise of youth to cling to. Or maybe it was because Collins was drafted at the bottom of the first round, where Ntilikina should have been. But for those of us old enough to remember the Mardy Collins era here at knickerblogger, it was also a time of flailing desperately for false hope and relevance, yet we put none on the tallish, positionless, poor shooting, enigmatic superscrub that ended up getting traded for a guy with a broken heart that the Knicks still took despite his failing his physical and never stepping on a basketball court again.

Daniel Jones looked great yesterday, and that’s awesome for the Giants and their fans. Still, you always have to wait for NFL defenses to get tape on a guy before you can say he’s legit. When defensive coordinators start disguising looks and delaying blitzes on him, the Giants will know what they have in Daniel Jones

And you don’t think the Tampa DC was doing that yesterday???? They sacked him 5 times and knocked him down 11 times, no? They stopped the Giants running game cold and put him directly in the crosshairs and he put up 32 points on the road under duress. They knew a rookie was playing and they had all week to scheme to confuse him but they didn’t confuse him now did they….

Watch more football. I’m guessing this is disgruntled JETS …. jets, jets, jets fan who hasn’t seen Sam Darnold look that good a single day any day in his life 🙂 🙂

This Mariota kid is the real deal and that’s a fact

This Mariota kid is the real deal and that’s a fact

You actually sifted through 4 years of box scores to find an loltastic comp???? My compliments…..

Anybody check out the Frank interview w/ French Knicks Pod?

Podcast host: You did not have the feeling of being restrained by the injuries and your situation in NBA?

Frank: Not at all, I am very happy to be a Knick and I believe in the Steve Mills project.
The last two seasons, it was very clear that the goal was to play as much as possible the young players of the roster to develop them.
This year, we will surprise the entire NBA, as I did with the French team at the World Cup.

The Steve Mills Project… THE STEVE MILLS PROJECT…

Nothing like a throwaway line from a French podcast to get your blood boiling on a Monday afternoon.

I don’t think that Jets fans give a rats ass about Daniel Jones.

They don’t, per se. But there was (and still is) a woefully misguided narrative that the Giants would regret passing on Sam Darnold for Saquon Barkley. This narrative was a point of pride for some Jets fans (not all, and I imagine DRed, for instance, doesn’t give a damn about such nonsense).

I may have been dreadfully wrong about Daniel Jones, but I was on the right side of the Saquon Barkley/Sam Darnold argument (which flies in the face of your Mel Kiper narrative, Bob). I like Darnold and think he’s a very good QB prospect. But I think he’s the kind of QB prospect that is available at the top of most drafts, not some special can’t-miss QB that needed to be drafted at all costs. I would never have passed on Barkley for him, positional value be damned. And it didn’t take long for the Giants to find a comparable QB prospect, so I think Gettelman comes out aces on that one.

Passing on Darnold for Barkley sure as hell isn’t as bad as passing on Mahomes AND DeShaun Watson for Jamal Adams (who I love to death), I’ll say that much.

^ Those are the things Gettelman still deserves some grief on. I think it’s misguided to give someone credit for “not getting cute”.

If you want Barkley, make it look like you want Darnold, get some extra picks from the Jets.

If you want Daniel Jones, don’t tell the whole world about it leading up to the draft, and when Josh Allen falls to 6 you can pick up 1-2 more picks from a team right behind you that wants to move up.

If you don’t want to sign Landon Collins, franchise and trade him instead of letting him walk for nothing.

If you want to move Odell Beckham, don’t zero in on Cleveland because you think Jabril Peppers is the one thing you need in the deal above all else.

Those 4 mistakes equal about 7-8 decent players on rookie contracts you could have added on both sides of the ball. There’s no way to make up for that in free agency or with Daniel Jones. That’s value that you lost forever.

You actually sifted through 4 years of box scores to find an loltastic comp????

Hell no. I googled something like good rookie quarterback debut and the mariotta game was in the first result

I am looking forward to the takes when Jones goes for three INT and a fumble next week, because he’s a rookie and this is the NFL, where, for one, Cam Newton wins an MVP and turns into Jeff Garcia the following season.

Looked like it was an exciting game and all, but anointing St. Daniel seems a bit premature. Almost like watching 60 minutes of FIBA play and claiming that the worst rotation Knick in memory has turned the corner toward his Bruce Bowen moment.

Jones looked good. I remember one bad decision in the first half that should have been picked off, but otherwise he was very impressive. Id be excited if I was a giants fan.

If you want Barkley, make it look like you want Darnold, get some extra picks from the Jets.

Mac was a lousy GM, but not sure he would have gone for that. I recall reading at the time that the Jets liked 3 of the QB that year, so they traded up (and overpaid, frankly) from 6 to 3 to guarantee that they got one of those three (probably Mayfield, Darnold, and Rosen, since those guys were reputed to be the most “pro ready”). Mac might not have been duped again.

Edit: ah, post 151 got in ahead!

the way us giant’s fans are going on about daniel jones you’d think we were as desperate as them poor knick fans are for any positive news at all…kind of like frank doing okay in the fiba tournament…

second or third team all nba maybe for frank this year…

don’t forget, when it comes to being a knicks, mets, giants, jets fan ya gotta aim low – cuz them franchises are all riding shetland ponies in terms of performance…

i’m just not that into the NHL or MLS…i have no idea how those NY teams are doing…

I forgot how much I hate Mondays in America during football season.

I am looking forward to the takes when Jones goes for three INT and a fumble next week, because he’s a rookie and this is the NFL, where, for one, Cam Newton wins an MVP and turns into Jeff Garcia the following season.

I’m fairly certain I already said he’s likely to wet the bed or than a few time. He has relatively poor wide outs, and zero running game to work with for the next 8 weeks so none of that would be surprising.

However anyone who has ever watched a pro football game and has the least bit of objectivity has to feel awfully good about the 6th pick in the draft.

I don’t follow football at all and have no dog in this fight but your argument can’t possibly be that citing one month’s worth of good performance is cherry-picking and therefore unreliable, but that a single game’s worth of good performance on the other hand is a valuable signal. The level of cognitive dissonance is…something.

What we really should be discussing is how the Giants would be 0-3 and the Jets would be 1-2 if it weren’t for the ineptitude of 2 kickers…

Anointing him a great QB is obviously premature and not many people are doing that without admitting that they’re getting carried away.

But it doesn’t take long to separate a guy from the likes of Blake Bortles, Johnny Manziel, Ryan Tannenhill, Jake Locker, Mark Sanchez, JaMarcus Russell, and all the other bums we were afraid he might be. That in and of itself is worth getting excited over. If he has a few terrible games, it isn’t going to change that.

@163 – not a bad comp. I ran their comparison in basketball-reference.com and Blake has the advantage (I compared their year-5 numbers – Randle age 24, Blake age 25) in advanced stats. VORP 3.6 vs 1.9, OWS 6.6 vs 4.2, DWS 2.4 vs 1.9. Blake is the better defender.

Basketball Reference comparison of Randle and Griffin

Young Blake was a guy who used his elite athleticism to generate a shit ton of high percentage baskets.
Randle has to work a lot harder to get his points.

It’s unusual, to say the least, for a QB to look great in his very first game and never achieve a productive level again.

Eh. Mariota had, as previously discussed, an impressive debut, and he’s mediocre at best. Charlie Frye had a strong first game and turned out to be garbage. Browning Nagle went 21-37 for 366 yards, 2 TDs and no interceptions. Anyone can look like a world-beater for a single game, and the fact that it comes in a QB’s first one isn’t necessarily an indicator of anything.

That said, Jones looked even better than he did in the preseason. He was never going to maintain that absurdly high completion %, but he never looked rattled despite his two tackles playing like turnstiles, and what he was able to do with his legs (which Shurmur clearly kept under wraps in the summer) was a revelation compared to our beloved slowpoke Eli. It may be that Jones’ college numbers were so pedestrian because of how bad the talent was around him relative to their competition, and that he defies QB analytics models. I sure hope so. It would be nice to see something good happen to this team, even if it becomes a feather in the cap of our blowhard caveman of a general manager.

sure there are some blake/randle similarities but there are also big differences. blake was a much, much, much more explosive player than randle at this age. he was a guy who could dunk 200 times in a year but whose efficiency was hurt because he took so many long 2s which he only converted at about the hi 30s. some of that was bc he played with jordan a lot (but it didn’t change much when jordan was out) and a lot was just bc blake had too much talent for his own good and so dribbled a lot and took a lot of 20 footers bc he could do that better than most 250lbers who could also posterize a sedan.

so it’s been kind of a natural transition for him now that he only dunks every other game to flip to a guy who takes 7 3s per 36 and gets 5.5 to 6.0. aging would have looked relatively worse for him except it happened while the nba learned that 3 is more than 2 so he shifted all those 20 footers to 24 feet while giving up only a few points of accuracy, and that’s free money.

randle obviously can do some things on the outside, despite being a massive spinning bull of a person, so they have that in common. but he’s not as slick as blake and you already see him putting up pretty high turnover numbers before he gets up to the 5-6 assist pointy forward type numbers. but size and strength don’t age as badly as explosion and randles’s not been as injury prone so maybe he won’t have to make such a dramatic switch. i’m suspicious of randle ever being able to pull off 31 year old blake, i.e. with that proportion of perimeter playmaking and shooting, but hopefully he won’t have to for a long time.

on defense they have a lot in common, but not in a good way. i thought blake looked better on d last year than he has in a while but that’s not saying much. randle actually has better timing, he just needs an alarm on that clock.

I always thought Blake would be a good value at a better salary but was never work max money and risky on a long term deal. That’s why I’m excited about Randle contract. It just seems like a great value contract or a guy that puts up the numbers he does. And I agree with the durability issues. Neither guy should be your best player, but at this price, Randle doesnt have to be your best player.

Now back to my Randle-Griffin comparison in @111, any KNICKerbloggers have any thoughts on the matter?

Young Blake Griffin was more like Barkley or Shawn Kemp, in my opinion. Randle’s game looks a lot more like Paul Millsap’s to me. He can finish above the rim, but there’s more an emphasis on body control, pacing and touch around the glass. Lots of 8-foot floaters and finger rolls around the rim. Randle seems pretty good at drawing contact on layups through hesitation moves, whereas young Blake would just go up and challenge anyone.

While I don’t think the two players are similar,…

I think that strictly statistically speaking (per 36), it would be hard to find two players that are more similar during their age 24 seasons. They have almost identical FG, FGA, ORebs, DRebs, Assists, Blocks, TOVs; Advanced stats-wise, they have very similar to near identical TS%, FTr, OReb%, DReb%, TRB%, AST%, STL%, BLK%, USG%, TOV%.

I don’t get the difference in WS48 and BPM stats is it due to Blake’s TS% of .583 being better SD-wise compared to league average (.541) in 2013-14 than Randle’s .600 vs. league average (.560) in 2018-19. Or maybe it’s an accumulation of marginal differences in several stats (assists, steals, turnovers). But I don’t get how anyone looking at these numbers could conclude that they are not similar in terms of statistical impact.

the biggest difference is the extra .6 TOV which, bc TOV are especially costly (can’t be rebounded and convert into higher opp ppp) turns randle’s TOV adjusted TS into only 4 points above league average vs blake at 43 points above league average (alternatively you could say randle was 22 pts above and blake was 69 pts, depends on how you define it, but either way the gap is very big). the second big difference is the steals which the bpm regression weights pretty heavily.

But Randolph signed a 6 year $85,000,000 contract when he was 24 years old, which was a max contract at the time and goes to Z-Man’s point about the relative value of a guy like Randle.

Personally, I hated Randolph and his game and wouldn’t want to relive those knick years at any price, but if you can get a more likable, easier to root for, and equally valuable player at half the cost, then, yeah, that can be a pretty useful player, if not terribly exciting.

(Randolph ranks in the top 20 of highest paid basketball players ever. His agent is definitely worth the max, whoever he is.)

Z-Bo was never known for his jumping ability. I think his vertical leap was 10″

Paul Millsap is a really, really good player. If Randle can become Millsap, that would be fantastic. (But Millsap was a good defender, and, from what I’ve read here, Randle is not.)

@186 +1
Millsap was a reallllly good player.

Owen, Melo’s numbers are indeed interesting. He dunked a shitload in his first 5 years in Denver (peak: 165, age 21), then had a precipitous drop-off. His high with the Knicks was 34.

Dunking is a young man’s game. As these guys age and get used to the rigors of a full season, they realize that cutting down on the dunks preserves their energy.

Dunking is a young man’s game. As these guys age and get used to the rigors of a full season, they realize that cutting down on the dunks preserves their energy.

I think that depends on the dunking and the dunker. Guys like DeAndre Jordan are fine with high dunk rates. Guys like DSjr and Donovan Mitchell are not. Randle seems pretty selective, his dunking seems to be at a sustainable rate, mostly in transition, straight-line drives and weak-side alley-oops. None of the Andrea Bargnani variety. I expect that he will hang around that 8% rate for a while.

I just think the physical profile that Randle has can burn out quickly, especially given all the punishment you take playing down low. But I don’t know, just a subjective assessment. It won’t be a problem for this contract I agree.

I think that depends on the dunking and the dunker. Guys like DeAndre Jordan are fine with high dunk rates. Guys like DSjr and Donovan Mitchell are not.

Good point.

Roll men, like Jordan and Chandler, don’t tend to drop off. It’s less taxing on a big man with a clear path to the basket than on a wing player who usually needs to challenge a big to dunk.

To your point, though, I think comparing Randle’s dunk rate at age 24 to LeBron’s career mark is misleading, as LeBron spends 82 games mostly in energy conservation mode. I don’t know where you get dunk rate stats. Can you isolate LeBron up to an earlier age? Or can we compare Randle to players at his position?

Generally speaking, I feel like Z-Man is having the same kind of epiphany I had when I did a deeper dive into Randle’s stats last week: “holy shit, this guy is better than I realized.” I think we’re all going to be very pleased with this signing.

As I said recently, considering they will be playing the same position, we should view this as replacing KP with Randle at a fraction of the cost while picking up three quality assets and dumping 2 toxic ones. It’s a tremendous feather in Perry’s hat.

EDIT: and even if, as PT Milo suggested above, his shooting turns out to be a mirage and we’re stuck with the next Greg Monroe, at least it was a manageable contract. Worth the risk.

longevity in the nba is really just tied to how good you are… and how good you are depends on how many things you do well….

randle currently can do a lot of things well… he’s just not a great defender…. and for a big that’s ok… but it just means you need other pieces around you to mitigate that.. anybody can have a short prime…. webber was one of the most talented pf’s and his lasted like 3 or so years… but randle isn’t some flash in the pan… he’s not enes kanter…. and it’ll be apparent in the first game you see him….

Randle is a very good offensive player around the basket that can rebound and make plays at a decent clip level for a big. He would have been the perfect running mate for KP, but he’s not on the same level as KP.

KP is an IMPACT defender inside.

Randle is a liability.

They are on different planets on that side of the ball.

KP can also spread the floor beyond the 3 point line at high efficiency making it easier for inside players to get to the basket and grab offensive rebounds.

KP has obvious injury issues, still has to get a lot stronger so he can rebound and finish inside better, and has a lot to learn on offense to improve his efficiency. But if KP stays healthy he’s going to become a star two way IMPACT player in two years or so. The injuries are the “BIG IF”.

Randle is marginal starter on a very good team despite being way further along in his physical and basketball development than KP. He’ll start for us, well, because we are the Knicks.

He’s a variation on Kanter, albeit one that’s trying to improve his shooting range. He’ll be less of a liability inside defensively if playing PF with an elite rim protector like KP or Robinson. If he stretches his game out, he should be a very good fit teamed with Robinson who can hide his weaknesses on defense. If not, I’m not sure how much value he’ll add, but the boxscore will look very pretty.

I think we’re all going to be very pleased with this signing.

I was going to say everyone except Strat but figured I could just wait a few minutes.

It’s hard for me to find statistical evidence that KP’s *overall* impact, factoring in both sides of the ball, is better than Randle’s. They seem to impact the game equally. Once has a massive reputation that earned him a huge payday based on potential, and the other got paid what he deserved.

If I’m building a team, I don’t want the better player, I want the better player with respect to how much cap space he’s taking up. And to me, that’s Randle by a mile.

Strat’s obsession with KP is a little weird given his stated preference for high-IQ, team oriented players. KP is allergic to passing the ball and takes all sorts of dumb, selfish, low-percentage iso shots and generally sees himself as “the man” and acts like a diva. I don’t really see how that fits in with the platonic ideal of a player that Strat seems to value.

Maybe it’s just because the mustache guy drafted him and all draftees of mustache man must be considered great players, even if said mustache man ran KP out of town which was Steve Mills’ fault somehow.

Yeah, hell with that TS% and rebounding, Randle is a very, very bad defender and very turnover-prone…kind of like James Harden and Nicola Jokic.

Kind of like James Harden, but playing a different position and not being one of the best offensive players in NBA history.

Maybe I’m delusional, but I’m feeling not horrible about this team and it’s future. Now if we can just get rid of Dolan…

I find myself feeling generally upbeat, too.

There’s still a ton of work to do. But I think we have at least three young pieces in place (Randle, Barrett, Robinson) that I think can be part of a good team in the future.

We have some scratch off tickets in Knox, Trier, Smith, Payton, and Brazdekis that could pay off.

And PICKS! We have surplus of draft picks! I’m not saying it’s a good time, but it’s nowhere near the worst time to be a Knicks fan. There’s definitely an uptick.

KP can also spread the floor beyond the 3 point line at high efficiency

What does this even mean? Despite the good 3pt shooting KP’s efficiency is still mediocre.

I know that you argue DAL/Carlisle will cut back on the bad mid range shots so KP’s TS% will improve. But I would still be nervous about KP’s lack of production around the rim for a 7’3 guy. He doesn’t leverage his size enough to get easy buckets and hasn’t shown any propensity to bang down low. Not sure if his lack of strength is the only reason either. Rookie Mitch was a beanpole just like KP and still managed to score a bunch around the hoop.

I don’t trust the gnostics of September

One thing I’m not sure of: do we have a better outlook today than we would have if we had signed Kyrie and Durant?

Fuck yes. There are three main ways the Nets can go with the Kyvin Durrving era:

1) Their current role players and young’ns develop like crazy, Kyrie stays healthy, Durant comes back the same explosive sharpshooter he’s been for like 13 seasons, and they are a top-2 powerhouse in the East starting in 2020, while the Sixers lament their pisspoor, short-sighted management over the last couple seasons; the Bucks fail to keep the role-player glut intact and see Giannis superheroing the team to 55 wins and a threepeat of Conference Semis losses; Miami cries itself to sleep as it realizes it’s traded for Chris Paul’s hilarious max and will be paying a 30-something Jimmy Buckets to spray Cristal all over the world’s hottest Latina women on the average weeknight; and people completely forget that the Boston Celtics even exist. Oh, and maybe Mitch wins DPOY and R.J. turns into prime Wade.

2) They realize it was a giant fucking mistake to sign an aged, injured guy (already on the decline!) to pair next to a malcontented weirdo and blow it all up for a haul of assets as oversized as KD’s risk-laden contract. This seems like career suicide for Sean Marks, even though Joseph Tsai might have this month made himself the smartest owner in American sports, so maybe the case could be made. But probably not.

3) Most likely to my mind? The Nets struggle in the mid-40 win range and they start mortgaging virtually all of their future assets to make a big splash during trade season. And that maybe gets them up into the 50-win club, but certainly far short of the 57+ you’d expect from a contender.

#3 is the one that would worry me most if I’m a Nets fan. And since I’m a Knicks “fan,” I can sleep at night knowing that we’re probably not trading the 2023, 2025 and 2027 1RP out of…

One thing I’m not sure of: do we have a better outlook today than we would have if we had signed Kyrie and Durant?

Fuck yes.

This take is legitimately wild to me. I don’t think signing Durant was any kind of slam dunk – THCJ is right that the injury/age combination is legitimately terrifying. It’s a massive roll of the dice on him coming back healthy. It’s also important to remember that if he does come back healthy he would have been by a not insignificant margin the best player to ever suit it up for the Knicks, and that a 100% Durant + Kyrie is a legitimately championship worthy 1-2 punch. Now even in this scenario you may not win the title – you still need to maximize the fringe talent and get your fair share of luck, but you’re in the mix.

And now here’s the real key – we did basically nothing of value with our cap space instead. If you want to argue that we might have theoretically been better off with an optimal use of the cap space than with signing Durant, okay, I’m willing to hear you out. But if you’re trying to convince me that I should be happy to have Bobby Portis+Marcus Morris+Wayne Ellington instead of Kevin Durant I’m not buying that for a second. Sure, you’ll tell me that in two years those guys will have expired whereas Durant would still be on the books, but I’d rather roll the dice now with legitimate championship upside than kick the can down the road two years with no real plan.