2 first round picks and another recent top 10 pick for a guy who is maybe a max player out for an entire year with an ACL injury seems like a decent return. Throw in getting rid of Hardaway and Lee on top of it and I think we did ok in the KP trade.

Yeah, are we absolutely positive the Mavs could recoup two firsts for Porzingis at the moment? I think tons of teams would look at his $30M+ AAV/.506 TS% combo and be hesitant. If you’re counting on Kristaps Porzingis to improve as the season goes on, I have some news for you about literally every NBA season he’s ever played.

Still not upset about that trade. Of course in hindsight it would’ve been nice to extract more future value in exchange for not dumping the salaries. We also have no idea if that was available, and the front office can be forgiven for thinking a healthy KD + Kyrie was worth hedging a bit. If that was their worst mistake I’d be singing their praises.

Even with the approach they took, they could’ve easily recouped future value by taking on salary dumps. They didn’t, and that was very stupid, but it’s a separate issue–the trade opened that possibility and I pointed it out at the time.

The Knicks have been close in a lot of these games but they suck so they tighten up at the end and lose. If they were good, that wouldn’t happen as often. Good teams don’t stress out at the end because they know they can execute. The “blow out” comment is valid because right now the Knicks can only win if they are up by a decent amount as the game winds down. If not, they can’t execute.

So the possession isn’t worth more except that it is. Its all in your mind, ya dig?

But we shouldn’t pass judgement on KP until next season. Everyone knows it takes a long time to get shake off the rust. Dude missed an entire season. He’s been ok all things considered.

The Knicks didn’t get full market value for KP, or really anything close. They didn’t shop him correctly and acted stupidly and politically and impulsively in a way that really none of the front offices in the sport act. All the rest is noise.

They traded a very-tall, very-injured player with a career negative OBPM about to demand a $156M max contract who said publicly that he would not work for them anymore. I really don’t know how you can make this claim, even if what they got back for him was pretty ho-hum.

As for KP, I think him shooting 38% for 3 has more value than, say, THjr, because he has to be guarded by a big, opening up offensive reminding opportunities and/or the lane for easier drives. The Mavs have said as much, and I think you have to look at KP, whose usage is high, having more than a negligible impact on their all-time great offense.

On the other hand, it could easily be the case that concerns about dungeons and Fiz’s lack of creativity won’t be around for long. And furthermore you would really hope that they’ll be moving quickly after 12/15 to start dumping some of these vets and clear up the rotation a bit. For those two reasons I don’t think we need to view it as an either/or situation quite yet.

sorry, inter alia is a term of art (means basically “among other things”). Autocorrect capitalized Alia for some reason. Here’s the optimal stopping paper:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2363709

I still chalk all of your considerations up to differences in strategy, not differences in the character of what counts as an “important” vs “unimportant” possession (there is no such difference). No possession is “worth” more than any other possession in terms of the possible range of outcomes. Possessions might subjectively “matter” more (the last possession in a tie game will often determine the winner, which we all care about, of course) but the last possession is no more important, from a statistical point of view, than the first possession of a game. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t strategize differently–quite the opposite. But different possessions requiring different strategies does not entail that there is reason to weigh some possessions differently than other possessions in terms of their possible range of outcomes. We wouldn’t be able to trust per-possession stats at all if it were the case that possessions did not have the same range of possible outcomes–because then some ought to weighed more or less than others.

The Knicks were “competitive” yesterday in much the same way that a mouse is competitive with the cat that’s cornered it while the cat is still in “Imma fuck with you for a bit here” stage.