2020-21 Game Thread: Knicks @ Hawks

I get so nervous for game time. PTSD that they get blown out and I get all sad and despondent and have a lousy night…

Go Knicks!

Let’s go Knicks!

ha KYN – i keep thinking this, it’ll be on my cable bill though which i won’t see for another 11 days…i tried streaming it for a couple of years, but – too many damn buffering issues with that…i like being able to record on my dvr and then fast forward…

if i remember right – you work in a warehouse kind of situation, don’t you?

how have things been going with the virus stuff in that environment?

lot’s of cars now in our parking lot…not so happy with that, but…

Speaking of injuries, MSG pregame just showed Mitch taking jumpers during warmups, with Obi working right next to him. Obi may not be ready for games yet — this afternoon, Thibs said of Obi and DSJ, “They’re doing a little bit but not a whole lot.” — but he at least wasn’t limping or looking significantly hobbled. Progress!

Alan:
Dante Exum just had to be helped to the locker room in Cleveland with a non-contact injury. Poor guy’s career is totally snakebit.

Which kind of injury? Ankle? Knee?
Really unlucky guy throughout his career.

i’m cool with the league pass this year…shit – i might actually tune in to some games come april or so if we can keep what we started going…

If you’re cool just check what you’re charged and why not choose the best package for you

geo: man, i go enough to worry about with all the inbound porn 🙂

i ain’t pressing my luck too much more with those “free” sites…

Fair enough haha. What’s the Rango line – “I tip my hat to you, one legend to another.”

I actually enjoyed Raised By Wolves, but I would caution you to approach it as cosmic horror, not sci-fi. The show does have an annoying tendency of seeding more mysteries than it is interested in dealing with, but the final episode sets up an interesting direction for season 2. Again, though, it is very much not a hard sci-fi series and has a rather mystical bent in the second half of the season.

geo:
i’m cool with the league pass this year…shit – i might actually tune in to some games come april or so if we can keep what we started going…

My stepkids’ older sis – the one who knows the Ball fam and thought we should’ve traded up in the draft to nab LaMelo – lent me her League Pass. So I get to watch my Knicks on my birthday today! Nice!

Nets gonna go 4-0 without KD due to quarantine

#So I get to watch my Knicks on my birthday today! Nice!#

You deserve a Road Win as a birthday gift!
Happy Birthday man!

Thank you Max and NYK

I spoke too soon: apparently there’s too many streams going on with the account i’m using… lol

Oh well – there is the Internet… 😉

This is some sloppy basketball.

Kind of funny that Barrett somehow has 4 rebounds and 2 steals in, like, six minutes on the floor.

The Collins/Randle matchup should be interesting. Both are strictly offense-only bigs but in somewhat different ways, so the battle for stat-padding supremacy between those two will be riveting.

How good IS Payton on defense anyway? Clyde says that is his calling card

Sad when Randle is your best bet for Ts.

Invisible sixth man is working again!

Omigod, a fastbreak basket

I went 10 years without seeing that happen to the Knicks

Felt like AAU

Who thinks the Nets are going to be watching tapes of how the Knicks are handling the Hawks?

Our offense looks pretty coherent. Of course it helps when Randle is hitting long shots as the shot clock expires

The hawks are, uh, not very good on defense

How good IS Payton on defense anyway? Clyde says that is his calling card

last year it seemed he gambled a lot on steals and his man beat him badly a bunch…he seems to be doing less of that this season…

Brian Cronin:
I see Trae is tired of the “But did Dallas really win the trade?” discussions, so he’s decided to silence it by sucking.

lol

Oh, I see, Trae was waiting for Knox to enter the game.

woah… rj might not play 42 minutes tonight… good thing with 4 games in the next 7 days….

are we playing Randle at center?

will someone on the 9 man coaching staff expla6to Randle that he should not lead the fast break….please

Welp… that line up DOES NOT work

Good time out. Payton needs to get his ass back on D

will someone on the 9 man coaching staff expla6to Randle that he should not lead the fast break….please

He really really thinks he should be able to.

This feels like playing the Warriors – 10 point lead gone in seconds

I don’t like “2 point land” and “3 point land.”

Mitch returned and so did the defense!

I think they didn’t credit Mitch with that block – I swear he’s blocked two shots but the box score is showing one.

3 more like this one and we get the W

Spellman and Luka are hanging out rumors say

Bad Mitch

Change the EDD in Reddish to UBB.

Are the Knicks over the limit yet?

I would like to take this moment to personally apologize to Austin Rivers for talking smack about him.

Knox can’t stay in front of his man … he’ll always be in foul trouble

If the Hawks win that trade it wont be because of Reddish

Reddish looks like he wants to show up big against his former Duke teammate tonight.

Agreed and Reddish is the last guy in the world you ever want to make press himself.

Feed Mitch!

The Knicks are reminding me of the Pacers game when they get hit but bounce back instead of fall apart.

geo:

whenever i read your posts i always get the impression that family and work are a super important focus in your life…that makes me smile…

seems like you may have gotten an early christmas and birthday present last year at your wedding…wishing you much happiness today, and throughout the year…

You are far too kind. Remind me to get you a couple of drinks when this COVID crap is behind us.

Not to sidebar too far from the game: family is indeed important, and now I have more of it. Good people too – that matters a lot. Work is important because I’m somewhere that has purpose (along with appreciation and decent pay/great benefits), and for many years prior to me being out here, that wasn’t the case.

Hawks are hot on offense to start the season. May be a game where the Knicks need to keep pace and then make a series of good stops late in the fourth. Let’s see if they have it in em tonight!

Trae a little out of control.

Trae a little out of control.

Seriously! But he’s one of those guys where he is out of control and then does rattle off, like, seven points in thirty seconds.

Randle doesn’t have the size to defend the rim but he’s otherwise playing pretty good defense?

Yeah, he’s having a great game.

I like that the Hawks are not shooting awfully from three, which would suggest it being unsustainable.

Pretty nice half by RJ.

At what point do we just say that Randle is really good?

I don’t know if this strategy of not shooting threes will work out long term against the Hawks, but so far, it’s working great.

Randle and Barrett playing some bully ball against these pipsqueaks.

Nice!

This is another game where the Knicks look well-coached and fundamentally sound. It would be nice to hit some threes but this team is downright watchable.

I mean Thibs kind of has been exactly as expected. Great defense, great effort, and plays his players too much.

Need a time out here.

Julius can eat up Collins inside all day but he’s gotta be smart about it.

Damnit.

GoNYGoNYGo – Tanking forever:
Is this the random-ass tweet?

Yes that tweet

Fun half but it looked like we ran out of gas towards halftime

They let it get away a bit there. Quick pace is ok but it got a little too wild.

Seemed like the Hawks made their move when Huerter was in.

So after watching what Mike Miller did last year after taking over and what Thibodeau is doing this year without an offseason and largely the same team, Fizdale never gets another job as a head coach, right?

Barrett playing well but misses too many bunnies.

KJG:
They let it get away a bit there.Quick pace is ok but it got a little too wild.

Too much paint penetration those last few minutes. On offense, we got decent looks but couldn’t get the ball to drop.

GoNYGoNYGo – Tanking forever:
Ankle sprain for Noel!all we need is some drama!

This coming out of nowhere feels like a coverup or him faking the injury. But whatever.

Pelton (paywalled):

As much emphasis as new coach Tom Thibodeau has naturally put on the defensive end, New York is still giving up the second-easiest shot attempts in terms of location, type and distance to nearest defender as measured by Second Spectrum’s quantified shot quality (qSQ) metric. Yet Knicks opponents are shooting an effective 53% when accounting for the added value of 3-pointers, the league’s third-lowest mark. That spread is unsustainable.

Really hope the decision makers, including the decision makers divvying out the minutes, understand this.

“Have you checked Hunter’s stats thus far this year?”

Yeah, i did when we reran last years draft and I was surprised by how solid they were.

And Thibs really does play guys too many minutes, doesn’t he?

Basically we have the starters (including a so so Bullock) a solid Rivers, a not so brilliant today Quickley and a useless Knox…
They’re playing with effort and commitment, but this doesn’t look promising.

Well we have another extremely winnable game on our hands…

Knox isn’t even useless when he plays like this. He’s a fucking net negative. The entire quarter was fucked from the moment he fouled himself out of it and helped put us in a very early penalty. They attacked him from the moment he entered the game. If the Knicks aren’t going to run plays for this guy to get him open looks at the 3 stripe or cuts to the basket then they might as well play Iggy.

I’m glad the Hawks got rid of that neon yellow and reverted back to their traditional golden yellow.

Barrett didn’t have his feet under him right for that last 3 attempt.

d-mar:
Idk I have a hunch Trae is gonna erupt at some point and we’ll be down 15.

13, dude

This offense is still primitive.

26 minutes for the bench in the first half on the last of a four game road trip isn’t a recipe for success.

If Frank were guarding Trae tonight it might have finely popped the Frankophilia bubble

Totally wrong lineup right now. Put Randle, Mitch, Rivers. Quickley and RJ on the floor.

And what’s worse is right now, it just looks like the Hawks have more firepower than we do.

Payton can get into the paint, but without outside shooting it won’t open up enough options.

Truly one of the softest fouls I’ve ever seen called

Please try to run a play to shoot an open 3 with someone who isn’t Barrett.

Please.

We just don’t get enough stops … I see a tired bunch already. We have no 3 ball to get back more easily.

going 1-10 from behind the arc is no way to win basketball games.

Knox back in- We got this!

why no Quickley?

That was good hustle there to keep the possession alive by Randle.

Let’s agree to give up on Knox already. It’s time.

I would be content if I never saw Kevin Knox play basketball again

Knox is hopeless…send him packing with dsj…

My God Knox is trash.

Well we have the guys on the court now who can shoot from deep. Two good looking offensive sets that gave Knox good scoring opps. Too bad he goofed both of em.

The Infamous Cdiggy:
Well we have the guys on the court now who can shoot from deep. Two good looking offensive sets that gave Knox good scoring opps. Too bad he goofed both of em.

It’s really annoying that we waited this long to get that going though.

Knox still dead to me. But how can he shoot it that pure and then be such a donkey the rest of the time.

whirling dervish Randle is back.
.

Ntilakilla: It’s really annoying that we waited this long to get that going though.

I feel you – I mean there is some risk that Knox (continues to) craps the bed and Quickley doesn’t assert himself enough. But they’ve buoyed themselves a bit here.

Keep Knox!!!!

KNOX IS REDEEMED!

knox..said “face” to me after he hit dat

I did say four games for Knox

SWEET!

The flip side of playing this shit defensive team of scorers is that they can give up double digit leads real fast, as fast as they gain them.

The sinusoidal rollercoaster from Knox gonna blow my brain.
How could we be down by only four points?
They just refuse to roll over and lose!

Quickley is DEF growing on me

I don’t understand why Thibs never runs his offense to get Knox X amount of open 3 point shots when he’s in?

He’s good at shooting it and is worthless without it.

I take back my positive Knox comment…

What the hell is Knox doing on that foul?!

Q gotta pull the trigger when he has open 3s

It’s partially a shitty call but he even had another hawk helping him stay away !

Kevin Knox is infinitely infuriating. He passes up the 3 so Randle ends up taking it and then shits the bed on defense.

Need to get over hump here

As a referee, I will say that was absolutely not a travel. He kept his pivot foot

What a dunk by RJ!

Knox is so damn bad, holy shit.

Young is about as infuriating to watch as Harden is with the endless foul baiting

Elfrid is 6-18. Everyone else has shot well.

RJ!

Bruno Almeida:
Knox is so damn bad, holy shit.

Young is about as infuriating to watch as Harden is with the endless foul baiting

I’d like to punch Young, this call on Rivers was total bullshit.
In the previous thread I put the Over/Under for him at 15,5 FT… he’s at 14…

Brian Cronin:
Game of the season for RJ!

Yeah. His shot was not really falling early on, so he kept driving and now seems to have confidence to hit it from anywhere.

Who was it here that kept insisting the other day that RJ was the same bad player as last season??

Im slowly, slowly starting to unironically believe in RJ and Randle. Quickley definitely belongs too, kid is spicy.

Man, Young is very talented, but boy, he’d be hard to root for.

I am impressed with how well we’ve played without Mitch. We need to surround him with Randle, Barrett, IQ, and another shooter.

Don’t ever try to posterize Mitch, you fool.

Why do our guys refuse to take open 3s?

It’s headscratching.

I want to love Quickley but he needs to take that 3 there.

RJ and Mitch work so damn well together.

Great steal by IQ!

Quickley’s defensive effort has been so nice. He doesn’t have the size or much strength but he keeps grinding.

No way they over turn that

thibs drawing up another Randle 3 point brick from the top of the key

I dont know how you call a foul on Collins there. I mean, he had the ball. Is it a charge?

But not sure how they overturn it either.

I am never going to love Randle but he has played great

Quickley is so good at drawing fouls! Young was pretty stupid there, he had to know Quickley was trying to get the foul there.

quickly young’ed young

dominique correctly says quickley gave trae a taste of his own medicine

Huh??????????

MITCH!!!

I don’t think he changed his pivot foot.

Austin Rivers has been beyond clutch already for the Knicks.

With Gobert and Embiid playing his position I don’t think he’ll have a case, but Mitchell Robinson looks like an All-NBA defender.

Quickley with the sweet kickley to Rivers.

What a game.
These Knicks looks pretty good.

Too early to go with the Quivers nickname for this closing backcourt?

Another very enjoyable game. Can we hold on? IQ and Rivers. Randle and Mitch. RJ!!! This team is balling!

offense runs nicely with payton on the pine…

Mitch is simply a force. Wow.
And with IQ and Rivers and Randle, RJ too, they can score

our ball!

How in any real world where people play for championships did Austin Rivers have to take 2 non guaranteed years from the New York Knickerbockers?

It was a really weird contract.

How cool if Doc’s kid does well for the bockers?

Oh and they’re holding down a great offense.

Knicksing it.

What in the world?!

Thank god that three didn’t go in.

jfc

Dare I say that’s on Thibs. He took out his best ball handler

randle NEEDS TO GIVE THE BALL to a guard

Shoot Reggie into the sun

The Knicks need to cut that shit out immediately. Give it to Austin Rivers. He is your closer. Not Julius Randle.

ridiculous win. great defensive hustle by randle 40 plus minutes in.

This was a true display of coaching importance. It’s what I was saying early in the first. In a sloppy game, I’m always going to lean towards the team with the better coach, because they keep their team concentrated better. Remember the end of the Pacers game? Thibs makes the right calls and the other coaches, well, don’t.

Thibs. Do not put Bullock into the game over IQ. He is not a good player. He is not a good ball handler.

Are people really going to tell me the offense isn’t better with this kid out there?

IQ is our best 1-guard.

The end of that game was a lot to process.

Clyde’s call of Reddish’s wide-open airball 3 as a “UFO” was classic.

When was the last time a Knicks game just finished and we can’t wait until they play again??

This team man….

Randle is 100% leading the NBA in turnovers this year

DRed:
Randle is 100% leading the NBA in turnovers this year

You really think he can beat Russ?

E, two-way G-Leaguer:
Quickley 16 points on 7 shots in 19 minutes, including the entire 4th, plus-17.I mean ….

It looks even better when you consider that Elfrid Payton thought he was prime Andre Miller tonight or something.

This is the most fun watching the Knicks since the halcyon days of unicorn Pozingus. Thank you, coach Thibs

Quickley with only 1 steal and 1 block so obviously his minutes need to go elsewhere. Looks like he can shoot a little but athletically overmatched. Typical Knicks pick.

nicos:
Quickley with only 1 steal and 1 block so obviously his minutes need to go elsewhere. Looks like he can shoot a little but athletically overmatched. Typical Knicks pick.

lol

E, two-way G-Leaguer: They junked the primitive offense and things literally immediately changed.Plain as day.

I was told that two games of preseason basketball didn’t prove anything about the offensive spacing though. Glad to see Thibs got a clue by the late 3rd.

EPIC

Sorry if someone mentioned this earlier in the game thread, but I thought of everyone here when Mike Breen brought up how the spacing is different this year and it’s a big part of why the Knicks are able to get into the paint!

I also loved the small ball lineup with Quickley and Rivers at guards and Randle at the 5. Poor man’s GSW “lineup of death”?

Also I know you guys hate +/-, but Payton -11, Quickley +17!!!!

Goddamn it Rockets!

Funny how everyone is talking about how the small lineup late in the 3rd and most of the 4th quarter is what won the Knicks the game and why did Thibs take so long to go to it when in the 2nd quarter he went to the exact same lineup and everyone here was killing him for it cause they struggled a bit.

It’s not the “small” lineup. It’s the lineup with competent guards.

Obi is like an afterthought…

Quickley doesn’t look like a real PG to me.

Personally, I don’t think it matters all that much as long as we are getting good spacing and penetration either driving or dumping the ball into the post. We are getting our assists by committee. To me, we are playing a superior game of basketball this way anyway. The only problem is that Randle is a little frustrating as a point forward because he holds the ball at times and almost always commits 1-2 really boneheaded TOs per game. If he would hold it less, dribble it less, and do a little better with the TOs, he would be playing great basketball. When you are being asked to do as much as he is you are going to have more TOs than someone that’s just spot up shooting or whatever, but he’s still a little over the top.

I think we need an upgrade over Bullock in the starting lineup. I don’t want Burks in that job. I’d rather Burks score off the bench. I’m not sure who it should be but we want a defender that can shoot the 3.

It’s hard to believe we are 4-3 doing it mostly on the road while so short handed some nights. The coaching and attitude of the players has been awesome. It’s nice to have a TEAM.

I guess Prichard wouldn’t have been a bad pick either…

Quickley at the point puts more playmaking responsibility on Randle and RJ or whoever the other guard is. I don’t think it’s as easy as saying he’s the obvious choice over Payton, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it is some nights. We should try him in some other lineups too-put him out there with Payton instead of Bullock and slide RJ down to SF.

I’m not sure why everyone is so down on Knox tonight. He wouldn’t be a rotation player on a good team, but he looks better to me. His starting point was just very low. But last year he improved his defense a bit and I think overall he’s a little better this year. It’s just a long path from where he was to becoming a solid rotation player. Give it more time. He’s not going to be star, but he can still be a good basketball player.

Deeefense: I’m not sure why everyone is so down on Knox tonight. He wouldn’t be a rotation player on a good team, but he looks better to me.

Thibs played 8 tonight. Noel was out. Burks and Obi are coming back. Something’s gotta give and Knox is the low man on the totem pole.

Getting excited about RJ Barrett…but trying to keep it measured.

I don’t even know what to say about Julius Randle. I thought he was an awful pick by the Lakers and never liked his game (although I did covet Larry Nance Jr.) He’s my least favorite archetype, the undersized PF, because even when they’re great (Barkley) or very good (Elton Brand), the defense tends to suffer. Yeah, Randle has too many turnovers and needs to stop handling the break, but otherwise he’s making me a believer. Thibs is clearly a damn genius.

The Infamous Cdiggy: Which is why I was on-board as soon as I read his draft profile. We can absolutely use a Lou Williams who can defend.

Yeah, a 90% free throw shooter who can get to the line and shoot 3s efficiently is always going to be useful if it translates to the NBA level, and so far it has been very nice. A Lou Williams who plays defense is an all-star player for sure, of course it’s early and IQ has a long way towards getting there, but the super early returns are quite promising.

I don’t even know what to say about Julius Randle. I thought he was an awful pick by the Lakers and never liked his game (although I did covet Larry Nance Jr.) He’s my least favorite archetype, the undersized PF, because even when they’re great (Barkley) or very good (Elton Brand), the defense tends to suffer. Yeah, Randle has too many turnovers and needs to stop handling the break, but otherwise he’s making me a believer. Thibs is clearly a damn genius.

What’s funny is that I loved him as a pick for the Lakers. I thought he was a steal. And then he was terrible. I then thought he would be a good free agent signing for the Knicks on a reasonable deal and then they signed him to a reasonable deal and he was terrible. So yeah, I have been in on Randle for a long time and he hasn’t given me much, so I was out on him after last year, but hey, he’s sure showing something now!

Maybe we all need is a good coach. Funny how we had horns, fisher, mr triangle and frizdale in the last few years

d-mar:
We have a back to back this Sunday and Monday. If Thibs plays Randle and RJ 40+ minutes in both those games then I’ll be worried.

Hopefully Burks and Obi are back.

“I went to the University of Kentucky and we play in front of 30,000 fans so no”

Immanuel Quickley just now when asked if he is nervous about playing in big NBA games

https://twitter.com/KySportsRadio/status/1346290049755848705

IQ is cold

Can’t get mad at the minutes Thibs is playing Randle and RJ when we have so many guys out. We had Iggy, Theo Pinson and someone named Jared Harper available.

During that sequence at the very end where the Knicks turned it over twice I actually thought, Cronin!

Check the tape but I think that was a very questionable time to write “Good Win”

These minutes totals are nuts. Fine, RJ is getting extra seasoning but we are going to run Julius Randle into the ground. NBA players shouldn’t be cramping in the first ten games of the season. Maybe he had to but it won’t end well.

The Julius Randle point forward experiments had some ups and downs. Him trying to get it over the timeline was a remote in the tv moment. But whatever, he’s playing great and I look forward to enjoying his play until he pumpkins.

It would be lovely if we could find a guard who combines IQs shooting, foul rate, and ft percentage with Elfrid’s obsession with dishing assists to the best lob target in basketball. IQ was great bit doesn’t have that much chemistry with Mitch.

It’s too early in the season to get frustrated with RJjs jeckyll and Hyde routine. Right?

Great win and I am happy about the flattening of odds so I can properly enjoy this one.

Finally, I don’t know how I feel about a guy comping himself to Lou Williams. The problem being I don”r think I have ever known how I feel about Lou himself

Totally wrong lineup right now. Put Randle, Mitch, Rivers. Quickley and RJ on the floor.

really nice early call jazzfunk…that turned out to do the trick…

Say what you will but Lloyd Pierce blamed the loss on those two Knox threes (or maybe one of Knox’s and RJ’s). That little stretch were Knox hit his two and I think RJ and Quickley had one each probably was the turning point- they looked tired and ready to pack it in and head home but that run definitely gave them a second wind.

Yeah, those were big threes by Knox. He definitely has had stretches this year where he briefly looks like a Knoxak out there. The problem, of course, is that he defends just like Novak. Possibly even worse, as he’s a bit harder to hide on defense.

I’m hoping it really is an injured ankle. The timing of that tweet, though, is super suspicious.

geo: 3 years at 10 million…that’s crazy…

I hope there’s nothing really going on between nerlens and thibs…no doubt thibs seems to come across as a cold hearted dick, but, if you wanna play, increase you value (without an outside shot, very difficult) and possibly win this year, gotta suck it up nerlens…

We really need Nerlens as a backup defensive presence. Randle has been good on D this year, but playing him at C for any extended stretch is not going to end well.

If Nerlens doesn’t work out, I guess O’Quinn is available… not sure who else we could pursue at this point.

Terrific job by Tom Thibodeau in finding the 113 points needed to win Fulton County, Georgia.
— Dolan J. Trump (@Dolan_J_Trump) January 5, 2021

Tweet of the year so far (okay, it’s only january 5th)

Randle played Good Julius, still sowsTOs around but he’s raised a couple of notches in def intensity and he’s rebounding ferociuosly. Couldn’t buy a three but shot really well from 2.

RJ has a good game all-around. for the second game in a row stayed in the flow and helped on the board with gusto. I think his steady defensive effort is underrated.

Mitch did intimidate everyone, I lost count of the shots he altered with his mere presence. He’s learning how to be decisive even with less blocks int the boxscore and how to play without fouling too much. Next game will be vs Gobert, a real litmus test for his growth.

Rivers is fearless, for the second game in a row he sank a three in a cluth moment. When he and Quickley share the backcourt the game feels completely different, it’s good to have two guards to be reckon with from 3 on the floor at the same time.

Quickley’ s FTs are a Supreme Court’s sentence, he plays like a 10 year veteran, takes shot with a swagger and try on defense. Is he a PG or a SG? Doesn’t matter, he’s a real player and that’s more than enough. I wrote some positive things about him yesterday and I was wrong, because he’s even better then I wrote.

Payton started well and the reversed to… Payton, unable to shoot and open the floor, Know sank a couple of very important threes at the end of the 3RD that cut ATL lead to 4. Bullock… let’s just say that I want Burks back asap.

Thibs is showing every single game what a real coaching staff can do. Was he perfect? No, but just like at Indy he was able to adjust on the run. Ask Fizdale to do the same and watch the look on his face afterward.

Is everything perfect? No, not even close, we’re still a bad team, but Injured players will be back and some players will be less squeezed.

We’re going to lose a lot of games, but I doubt it will be for lack of trying and for me is impossible not to root for this this guys.

For this team and fanbase it’s already a big progress.

The interesting thing about Randle is that in today’s NBA, he could be considered a dinosaur as a non-floor-spacing PF, or could be considered a mismatch (in a good way) because he will literally just beast a lot of teams that try to go small. There is no way dudes like Deandre Hunter (who looked pretty damn good last night) will be able to guard him. Even tall 4s like Porzingis have had tons of problems with him, and he just came off 29/14/7 against DPOY-caliber Giannis.

Meanwhile – (very) early returns on KD and Wall coming back from Achilles injuries — wow.
KD’s stats are basically indistinguishable from pre-tear, and Wall is averaging 24p 5r 7a per-40 with a (so far) career-high TS of 55.6 playing next to Harden.

The thing I see with RJ… and I feel like I’ve seen it mostly on this blog lately… is that we actually don’t really rag on him other than on nights when he’s shooting bad… the guy is out there playing 40+ minutes a game and he either gets resounding praise, or we’re mad at his FG%… sorta tells me that he’s probably doing just about everything else pretty damn ok… which has to be a good thing

If Nerlens doesn’t work out, I guess O’Quinn is available… not sure who else we could pursue at this point.

We preferably need a PF/C, but we do need another big man anyway. We could do way worse than KOQ.

Let’s think it through… Thibs gets this team to it’s ceiling and beyond… say it’s a playoff team, and maybe even one who can win a round if they get lucky… what happens next?

It’s hard to see how we capitalize on it in free agency in 2021 or 2022. And after that we’ve got to pay Mitch and Barrett, and either pay or move on from Randle, so we’ll eliminate our flexibility. We’re playing ourselves out of stud draft picks, barring incredible Giannis/Kawhi-like fortune.

This isn’t the usual “to tank or not tank” argument… it’s *when* to tank or not tank. I believe the respectability rebuild is a valid path, but it needs to have a sterling free agent in mind, like a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

We should have been building something like this leading up to the Durant/Kawhi free agency period. We zagged when we needed to zig. Now we’re doing this when there’s paltry free agent classes coming up, and the best way forward is through the draft. We’re zigging when we should zag.

I know it’s nice to have good basketball, but is this the road to be on?

Quickley does seem to have a tendency to pump fake a lot, which is nice if he can draw a foul, but as opponents learn how he plays it becomes a liability. But then again, it’s his 3rd career NBA game so it’s a miniscule sample size.

The most exciting thing about Barrett is that there is a clear road map towards him becoming a very good NBA player: improve his 3 point shooting, continue to get better at the line and get there 6-8 times per game, work hard on defense. These are all realistic propositions, it’s not like Knox or Ntilikina that have to get better at 80% of what it means to be a basketball player to become good.

He’s already an above average rebounder, a decent passer and seems to understand the game well enough. That’s a good baseline to have for a 20 year old.

Let’s think it through… Thibs gets this team to it’s ceiling and beyond… say it’s a playoff team, and maybe even one who can win a round if they get lucky… what happens next?

It’s hard to see how we capitalize on it in free agency in 2021 or 2022. And after that we’ve got to pay Mitch and Barrett, and either pay or move on from Randle, so we’ll eliminate our flexibility. We’re playing ourselves out of stud draft picks, barring incredible Giannis/Kawhi-like fortune.

This isn’t the usual “to tank or not tank” argument… it’s *when* to tank or not tank. I believe the respectability rebuild is a valid path, but it needs to have a sterling free agent in mind, like a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

You are thinking “too much”. 🙂

We have no idea how good some of our young players are going to get yet, who is going to demand a trade and suddenly become available (or when), how we can use our draft picks to move up in a future draft, who will be available in free agency in 2022, 2023, 2024 etc..

We aren’t going to go from where we are now (a bad team that’s playing over its head so far due to great coaching) to contenders in a year or two. It’s going to be a process where we finally make the playoffs, have some success in the playoffs, are considered a team no one wants to play in the playoffs, to hopefully a serious contender. We are very young. It’s going to be years. The idea is to just keep improving the young players, keep improving the quality of the players on the team, keep improving the way we play together, and keep making ourselves more attractive, If opportunities present themselves we want to be in the conversation because we are good and have the assets to get a deal done.

Hubert, I just don’t think we should worry about it. The Knicks have sucked for 20 years. If the Thibs has set us on a path where we are a playoff team every year, good enough to get to the second round, our moment will come.

People are so obsessed with maximizing the potential ceiling of their team through lottery picks and lining up the peak windows of all their players that they would rather suck and get a lottery pick than be a competent, enjoyable basketball team.

Miami never tanks and just went to the Finals. The Lakers turned a team of first round picks that wasn’t even a playoff team (not all lotto picks, no stars) into Lebron and AD.

RJ, Mitch and Quickley are all under 22. That right there is you’re starting Center, SF/SG and SG/PG for the next 8 years. Randle is 26. You can resign him if you want or hope to develop Toppin as his replacement.

We have two first round picks this year and two in 2023.

The league is full of great players picked later in the draft. And when you have extra first round picks, you can always use one to move up some spots if there’s someone you really want to target. We also have lots of second round picks and our franchise historically has found great players later in the draft.

Every year there are superstars who want to get out of their current situations and teams looking to dump a star and start over.

The vets we have on this team besides Randle are all on super cheap contracts. The better we play, the more value our players have which means the more likely we are to be able to trade them for future assets or throw them into a trade for a star and the other team won’t feel like they’re getting garbage players. Then there is free agency. the better we are, the more likely we are to attract them at a good price.

Side note: if you told me 7 games into the season we’d be very satisfied with the play of our young guys and Obi Toppin would have nothing to do with it I would’ve been shocked. It sure would be nice if that guy could also be good!

With all due respect, the best way forward is to have a good basketball team, develop good players, and have a strong front office.

Yes and no.

Yes, that’s the best way to move forward. But the point isn’t to move forward, it’s to move forward towards the ultimate goal. You don’t want to move forward only to run out of gas 30 miles away from your destination.

The best way — no, the ONLY way — to reach the end is to have at least one top 10 player on your team. IMHO, a front office’s first and only job should be figuring out how to acquire one without giving up the farm.

I believe in the respectability rebuild. I’ve advocated for it in the past. I just think it needs to have a free agent in mind. Right now, players are taking themselves off the market. And there’s a reason for it… revenues are going to dwindle, and 30% of the cap ain’t gonna be what it used to be. We’re likely headed towards an interruption in the era of “there’s a new batch of superstar free agents every two years”.

Timing is everything. This is not the right time to try this strategy. But I don’t think the Knicks think like that. Forward is enough for them.

Definitely sad I missed out on this one last night.

One thing I haven’t seen commented about that I think is important: Most of our wins have been close games and that’s great for building confidence in the young guys. You need to learn how to play in close games to be able to eventually win in the playoffs.

Bruno Almeida: The most exciting thing about Barrett is that there is a clear road map towards him becoming a very good NBA player: improve his 3 point shooting, continue to get better at the line and get there 6-8 times per game, work hard on defense.

Yes, and I’m becoming increasingly confident he will get there. I see some leaps in RJ Barrett’s future.

It truly isn’t a “Should we be optimistic or pessimistic at this stage of things?” discussion until Jowles turns up to ruthlessly mock the optimists for paying too much attention to small sample sizes. Until then, it’s all for show.

The debate is not tanking vs. non tanking.

The debate is tanking for a single season when it seems appropriate (which imo we did correctly to get KP and then to get RJ when KP got hurt) and then using all means available to improve (including draft) vs. the 76ers model of actively trying to be bad for several years to maximize picks and draft position for as long as it takes to get some stars.

You can do it either way.

There are no guarantees either way, but one is certain to take 6-8 years to draft and develop the right kids (and could be even longer if you draft poorly like some teams). The other can turn it around faster with COMPETENT management, development, and coaching.

I prefer the latter and I think we may finally have the right management and coach in place to pull it off. We’ll see.

With all due respect….competent play is the goal…for now. You have to crawl before you can walk and there is not a single championship team that goes from bottom dweller to championship contender without going through the necessary steps in between. Worrying about a theoretical ceiling that this team has in a few years at this point is ludicrous. Worrying about being too good to get a top lottery pick is a loser’s mentality. I’m tired of being losers. Ask Sacramento how all of their lottery picks have worked out. Is Philly a sure fire contender after processing? The only reason they were a shot away from being a championship team is because of Jimmy Butler, who bailed on that team cause he saw they weren’t legit.

And every year stars want out. You have no idea what RJ Barrett’s ceiling is. Or Quickley. Or Toppin. Or how good our 2 first round picks next year will turn out to be no matter where we draft them. You have no idea what magic our FO will pull with FA signings or trades once we get to the level of legit playoff team.

Quit lamenting over lotto picks other losing teams get to pick. There is no one way to build a contender. Worrying about it now when we’re just starting to put together a competent basketball team is so foolish.

I also think it’s premature to worry about our draft position at 4-3 with a pythagorean record of 3-4, the number of picks we have in this draft insulates us a bit from the harshness of picking outside the top-10, and if you stay flexible and keep accumulating assets there’s a good chance you’ll be rewarded with something like a surprise trade request.

This is what I’m holding out for. Seems like 1-2 superstars demand a trade each season and the best way to get them is with a package of 1sts and/or quality young players. If the Knicks keep accumulating assets (like trading Burks for a late 1st at the deadline) they’ll be in pole position to scoop up a disgruntled star. This seems like a more viable path than relying on FA’s or getting lucky in the lottery.

The Knicks are probably trying to take the Utah Jazz model (which is why we stole their top scouting executive and their player development coach) and pull it off with the big city pull that SLC would never present. We already have the 3rd overall pick from the 2019 NBA Draft on our roster, and he’s beginning to look like a real stud you can build sustainable success around. I’m already salivating at the idea of IQ, Cade, and RJ at positions 1-3, but a guy like James Bouknight or Ayo Dosunmu could be sitting there in the latter half of the lottery as well.

You have to believe in the formula if you’re Leon Rose. You let Walt Perrin identify the talent, trust Kenny Payne and Johnny Bryant to develop the talent, and get Tom Thibodeau to scheme up gameplans that put them in position to be successful. If that means we’ll be drafting later, I hope it also means we’ll be getting guys like Jrue Holiday instead of Jerian Grant, OG Anunoby instead of Iman Shumpert, Shai Gilgeous Alexander instead of Kevin Knox, and Luke Kennard instead of Frank Ntilikina.

From the time we first drafted Barrett I thought it was pretty clear the only thing between him and becoming an all star was a 3 point shot and defense. He was immediately kind of crafty around the basket, could create his own shot off the dribble, was not afraid of the big moment, could pass and make plays better than the typical SG/SF and rebounded well for the position. I was a little worried about defense, but he showed last year that wasn’t going to be an issue. It’s a matter of patience for him to develop the skills he already has and use them better. To take that big leap though, he’s needs to be more reliable from 3 (and of course better shooting around him will specifically help him get to the basket)_ There was almost no way he was going be a bust or bad player unless he was a terrible defender (which he is not). When people were talking him down, I thought hat was crazy talk. It was way premature given the position he was in last year with no space and terrible coaching as a rookie.

Ask Sacramento how all of their lottery picks have worked out. Is Philly a sure fire contender after processing? The only reason they were a shot away from being a championship team is because of Jimmy Butler, who bailed on that team cause he saw they weren’t legit.

Well, Sacramento would probably feel a lot better about their position if they outsourced their 2018 big board to the median Knickerblogger poster, and Philly is 6-1 with the 2nd highest SRS in the league despite Colangelo taking a battering ram to their position.

Ball and Ingram are good players. Are they considered superstars? How long have they been in the league now?

I have no idea where you’re going with this. It seems fairly straightforward to me. They are good players who the Lakers got at the very top of the draft. They were able to make them key pieces in the AD trade because they are good players. If the Lakers had lower picks they might not have gotten good players.

swiftandabundant: Worrying about a theoretical ceiling that this team has in a few years at this point is ludicrous.

If you wake up on a sunny Saturday morning, but the forecast says 99% chance of a thunderstorm in the afternoon but clear skies all day tomorrow, would you pack a picnic basket and take your family to the park on Saturday, or would you wait a day?

Your attitude is the equivalent of being at the park on Saturday, reveling in a moment of sunshine, saying “this is great, worrying about rain is ludicrous,” while the storm cloud begins to gather above you.

My attitude is “maybe we should wait until Sunday.”

To be clear, I intentionally chose this analogy because forecasts are often wrong. I am playing a dangerous game with probability. It may be better to move forward with an improbable plan. Saturday could be a great day, and maybe it’s better to have two nice hours and get rained on than to wait a day and your plans could get ruined by something unexpected.

There is something to be said for simply moving forward. It’s a macho, alpha male style… “we’ll smash any obstacle that comes our way.” But that’s not me. I’m a meticulous path plotter. And I just don’t see this one getting to the end.

Hubert’s point is that you should aim for a top 1-2 pick this year – and so in order to do that, you probably have to rehire Fizdale, trade Mitch/RJ/Barrett/Randle, play Knox/Harper/Iggy/Payton, and even THEN, you only have a 27% chance of a top 2 pick. It’s just not tenable.

Meanwhile, even if you trade all our good players, the chances you’re getting an unprotected #1 from a team likely to be bad for any combination of them is probably very low.

We should probably wait until we have a good basketball team before freaking out about it. We’ve gotten lucky with teams shooting poorly against us. Randle isn’t going to hit 40% of his 3s all year. Immanuel Quickley is probably not going to finish the year out with a 796 TS%. We don’t have a good traditional point guard, etc. We might be better than we expected though.

To be clear, I intentionally chose this analogy because forecasts are often wrong. I am playing a dangerous game with probability. It may be better to move forward with an improbable plan. Saturday could be a great day, and maybe it’s better to have two nice hours and get rained on than to wait a day and your plans could get ruined by something unexpected.

There is something to be said for simply moving forward. It’s a macho, alpha male style… “we’ll smash any obstacle that comes our way.” But that’s not me. I’m a meticulous path plotter. And I just don’t see this one getting to the end.

Are you meticulously plotting us into a plan that has a really low chance of working out?

As far as I can tell, and maybe djphan or others can help with this, even in what is considered a really good draft, there is probably only 1 even sub-Lebron-level franchise changer in this draft – Cade Cunningham. Evan Mobley looks like a really nice player, but he’s a center that doesn’t pass like Jokic and doesn’t have the physical upside of AD. Jalen Suggs looks nice but isn’t Chris Paul. Everyone else is probably at best a 2nd best player (ie. maybe a top 20 player, not a top 10 player) on a good team, which is great, but isn’t likely to be the 1st best player on a good team.

We are not Indiana or Memphis or Utah. Players will want to play here. Free agency is still a possibility even if the 2021 class is soft now, and without a doubt, trade is a possible route to a true #1.

A couple of posters are missing a key point. Strat, rama, swift, et al are saying this team will be attractive to free agents. I agree. But you’re not doing the next step, and looking at the free agents likely to be available.

My whole point was that this was a very good path to be on when the free agent classes of 2021 and beyond looked robust. Now all those guys are lining up to sign extensions before the cap shrinks, and you’re acting like they’re still gonna be available.

Frank: Are you meticulously plotting us into a plan that has a really low chance of working out?

Nope.

I know I’ve typed a lot so I forgive you if you overlooked something I said, but way up there I said that all successful paths to an NBA championship have one thing in common: a top 10 NBA player.

What I’m saying is that the first thing we need to do is plot a path to that player. That’s a plan that historically has a really high chance of working out.

My opponents in this argument are saying “just move forward, play competently, let the rest take care of itself.” That’s the path that has a really low chance of working out. There is a chance, I’m not denying it. It’s just very improbable.

I wonder how many games it takes before the “we’re lucky because our opponents are shooting poorly from 3” narrative becomes “our opponents are shooting poorly from 3 because of our defense…”

some of it may be real, but a big chunk of it is the plainly luck. we know this because the absolute best teams in 3p% allowed for each of the last 3 yrs have sat around 34pct we are currently at 29.5pct. and we know that 3pt is extremely volatile in modest samples like 7 games.

Glad to see Hubert’s joined the band on wondering about the path forward. It’s like we spend all of our time around here cosplaying GM and then at literally the very first sign of some kind of development we all have to abandon that and just revel in the improvement from putrid to kind of not terrible/OK.

The road forward to me in to phase out Payton and Randle and just ride with the youngsters and wherever it takes you it takes you. If it takes you to the lottery, great, you have a lottery pick; if it takes you to the playoffs, fantastic, you have a young home-grown nucleus that’s already playoff-caliber.

This doesn’t mean literally never playing Payton or Randle, but it does mean taking away their main roles in the offense as the guys trying to get into the paint and spreading and modernizing the offense like we saw in the Final Five preseason and the fourth last night. If he accepts that he’s not going to be a frequent ball handling point forward, Randle has usefulness. He was waving off IQ last night and that’s just not right and has to change.

I just can’t get down with tanking the way I used to after watching Zion Williamson and Ja Morant go to teams that went 33-49 and had the 8th and 9th best lottery odds that year, the Lakers with 11th best odds got the 4th overall pick, and then the Charlotte Hornets with their 9th best lottery odds ended up picking 3rd the following year. No matter how you slice it, losing on purpose isn’t an apt strategy since those odds got flattened. I absolutely love the NBA draft and that rookie scale contracts are your best opportunity, but I also won’t be crying if we end up with Moses Moody at 7th overall instead of Jalen Suggs at the 2nd or 3rd overall pick.

Frank: Hubert’s point is that you should aim for a top 1-2 pick this year – and so in order to do that, you probably have to rehire Fizdale, trade Mitch/RJ/Barrett/Randle, play Knox/Harper/Iggy/Payton, and even THEN, you only have a 27% chance of a top 2 pick. It’s just not tenable.

Yeah, that’s not my point.

I’m trying to figure out what this front office’s end game is. Right now, I think it’s just “get to the middle and pray.”

And I understand why a lot of people would be ok with that. Last night was really fun. I was legit jumping off my coach. I’m just trying to see where this can go.

LOL only Knickerblogger fans can see their Knicks go 4-3 playing exclusively playoff caliber teams and worry about the ramifications of not tanking for an extra season upon a hypothetical title run down the line.

I should also add that while the free agent class next year and the year after may not look as good as it did a few months ago, we are only a few years away from dudes like JA, Zion, etc…becoming free agents.

Maybe Zion would want to come to NYC and team up with his old Duke teammate in a few years. Maybe Ja wants out of a small market in a few years and come to the big city. Maybe things fall apart in Dallas and Doncic wants to come to NYC? There is a whole new generation of young players in the next 3 to 6 years who will be stars and who might want to leave their current situations. And if we’re good, they will consider us. And if we have Thibs coaching us, we can most likely expect a base level of competency that will make us attractive.

I’d love a lottery pick. Maybe we get it when Dallas misses the playoffs and none of this matters.

“Crow is delicious!”

Watch it, buddy.

Early returns seem to be in, and while Randle is playing out of his mind, Mitch is Mitching, RJ is showing a big jump, and Quickley has us all warm and fuzzy, the early MVP of the season clearly is… Invisible Sixth Man!

DRed: That those are the only two guys on the team who have shown they can regularly get into the paint and spread the ball around is one of the problems with our team.RJ has looked better at playmaking this season than last, which is one of the most promising things about the early season so far.Rivers and Frank have a bit of playmaking ability.Idk, maybe you could cobble together a small ball offense out of say Mitch, RJ, Frank, Austin and IQ running Mitch pick and rolls with shooting and secondary playmaking around it.

Spread the floor and run RJ/Mitch and IQ/Mitch pick and roll. At that point, Randle becomes secondary and you barely need Payton. The “let’s bomb the paint and turn everything into a mosh pit” offense is unsustainable and primitive and we saw that — yet again — last night. Under no circumstances should that be even the near-term future.

swiftandabundant: I should also add that while the free agent class next year and the year after may not look as good as it did a few months ago, we are only a few years away from dudes like JA, Zion, etc…becoming free agents.

they’re becoming restricted free agents. We’re not getting Ja or Zion via restricted free agency.

One guy we could get in restricted free agency played last night, though. The Hawks don’t seem to want to pay John Collins fair market value. A good asset-multiplying move could be to auction Randle off following a strong season, and replacing him with the younger, floor-stretchier Collins.

This occurred to me as I scrolled through this extraordinary thread.
The Knicks beat the Pacers, Cavs, Bucks and Hawks, all good teams, playing strong D.
But the tankers out there are commenting on the tank…

Thibs already has shown he can develop our young players, which bodes well for when Toppin returns.
We have seen improvement out of Barrett, Robinson, Quickley, and even Knox. Randle is playing at another level. Alec Burks and Austin Rivers look very solid. I don’t see any problems from Noel. We are still suffering a kind of PTSD. We see something that triggers us…and we’re off to the negative races.

This doesn’t feel like fool’s gold, like Stat’s huge season start, or Linsanity. It feels like this team has a plan. It feels like this coach understands how to run a team and has the stature to hold players accountable. This team doesn’t collapse at the first sign of trouble. I had a feeling that Thibs would change the nature of the team, that they would reflect his toughness. It is playing out that way. MSG will be a tough place for teams to play this year.
We have a potential DPOY (Robinson), a possible first or second team all star or two (Robinson and Randle) and maybe a potential rookie of the year or at least a stable of very young, potentially very good players. I know it’s early. But none of it feels fluky. When Thibs says Robinson is on the rise, when he says IQ and Alec can shoot, you can cash it.

Ntilakilla:
LOL only Knickerblogger fans can see their Knicks go 4-3 playing exclusively playoff caliber teams and worry about the ramifications of not tanking for an extra season upon a hypothetical title run down the line.

No one is saying to “tank.” I personally am saying I don’t ultimately want marginal wins on the backs of mercs. I wouldn’t count last night’s as that, although I would like to see reality and actuality faced and the offense and personnel turned into what it was in the fourth quarter. The constant arguments about Elfrid Payton just need to be put in the rear view mirror. You aren’t accomplishing or winning anything with the guy. He’s pointless.

But none of it feels fluky.

According to my back of the envelope math if the Knicks were 20th in 3 point shooting against instead of 30th we’d be 28th in Net Rating instead of 18th. And that’s not even accounting for any positive spillovers from having your opponents miss shot after shot (i.e. more transition opportunities to keep our offense afloat).

I don’t think people are registering the extent to which the only thing in the Knicks start that has mattered in terms of driving winning is our opponents missing 3s.

How soon we forget what marginal wins on the backs of mercs really means. Remember when we sold the house for the corpses of Camby, Thomas, Sheed, Kidd, KMart, etc. to grind out one second-round exit?

But like, we’re missing 3’s sometimes too, right? If our opponents are bound to hit more of their open 3’s, aren’t we as well?

You miss open shots sometimes. Its part of the NBA. We missed a ton of shots against The Raptors. Does that win not count for the Raptors? Nope. Its a win for them and a loss for us.

When you play good defense, your opponent will miss more shots. They will even miss shots when they’re open because you’ve made them work for it and even on possessions where the defense isn’t good and they get that open shot, they’re more likely to miss it because they’re surprised that they’re open. If a shooter gets an open shot and hesitates or thinks about it for even a milisecond, that can make them miss a shot they would normally make. If you play great defense to open the game and they miss lots of shots early, they can get into their heads the whole game. If you make your opponents work hard on offense the entire game, they could be tired later in the game and miss open shots.

Apparently this concept is really controversial.

Frank O.: Are you suggesting the Knicks D has nothing to do with opponents missing threes?

No, not nothing, which is why I regressed them only to 20th instead of to league average. But okay, assume the Knicks are an elite team in terms of shutting down opponent 3 point percentage. I don’t personally buy that at all and if you look for season to season trends in the stat you’ll have a very hard time coming to any conclusion other than opponent 3 point shooting is basically randomness, but just assume it. As ptmilo pointed out above the % our opponents are shooting isn’t even comparable to what 30th in the league looks like over a full season – last 3 years 30th in the league has been right around 34%. If you regress the Knicks even just to that level instead of 28th in Net Rating they become…27th.

Again… saying the Knicks are winning when opponents miss threes in today’s NBA is like saying the Knicks only win because they score more points. I mean, come on. The three is ubiquitous. Of course the Knicks win when opponents miss threes…

This year, the three makes up points scored 34.2% of the time on average. Last year the average was 32.8%. Three of the Knicks wins were against teams in the top half of the league in scoring associated with the 3.

of the teams the Knicks beat, 3 point scoring makes up 35.5% of their overall scoring. Knicks get about 30% of their scoring from the three.

The Knicks currently in this small sample are ranked sixth in defense in the NBA in terms of points allowed.
They are ranked No. 4 in terms of 3 pt allowed. Source: https://www.lineups.com/nba/team-rankings/defense
They rank 3rd in terms of opponent FG% and 1st in opponent 3pt%.

Again, small sample, but ball don’t lie.

thenamestsam: No, not nothing, which is why I regressed them only to 20th instead of to league average. But okay, assume the Knicks are an elite team in terms of shutting down opponent 3 point percentage. I don’t personally buy that at all and if you look for season to season trends in the stat you’ll have a very hard time coming to any conclusion other than opponent 3 point shooting is basically randomness, but just assume it. As ptmilo pointed out above the % our opponents are shooting isn’t even comparable to what 30th in the league looks like over a full season – last 3 years 30th in the league has been right around 34%. If you regress the Knicks even just to that level instead of 28th in Net Rating they become…27th.

Frank O.:
Again… saying the Knicks are winning when opponents miss threes in today’s NBA is like saying the Knicks only win because they score more points. I mean, come on. The three is ubiquitous. Of course the Knicks win when opponents miss threes…

This year, the three makes up points scored 34.2% of the time on average. Last year the average was 32.8%. Three of the Knicks wins were against teams in the top half of the league in scoring associated with the 3.

of the teams the Knicks beat, 3 point scoring makes up 35.5% of their overall scoring. Knicks get about 30% of their scoring from the three.

The point you’re missing is 3P% is a noisy stat. It’s very easy to have 4 games of your shot falling while the other team’s doesn’t. That could be great defense, that good be great luck.

If the Knicks are holding opponent’s 3P% to a league low level after 50 games, you can be damn sure everyone here will attribute it to defensive scheming.

Frank O.:
The Knicks currently in this small sample are ranked sixth in defense in the NBA in terms of points allowed.
They are ranked No. 4 in terms of 3 pt allowed. Source: https://www.lineups.com/nba/team-rankings/defense
They rank 3rd in terms of opponent FG% and 1st in opponent 3pt%.

Again, small sample, but ball don’t lie.

If the argument you’re trying to make here is “the Knicks D has been really good statistically therefore we should believe the incredibly extreme opponent shooting #s we’re seeing” you have the causality there entirely backwards.

Is a 4-3 record after seven games for this Knicks team really all that surprising?

Seems to me that it’s pretty much in line with what most folks here were expecting from a Thibs-coached team. From the moment he was hired, the general consensus was that Thibs is a “win-now” coach who would go balls to the wall to squeeze every possible victory out of a decidedly mediocre roster. Seven games in, that forecast appears to be well on track given the unsustainable over-reliance on his two most productive players (JR & RJ who, absurdly, lead the NBA in minutes played) Couple that with the fact that many of the league’s better teams (ie those that made the bubble last year) are still dealing with the after effects of coming back from the shortest offseason in NBA history and are likely treating the first month of the regular season as a glorified preseason. So a 4-3 record looks to be just about right.

Sure these seven games have been a whole lot of fun but it does have the feel to me of the November KP season in which the Knicks also posted some improbably fun early wins against superior competition. I suspect it won’t be long until this all comes crashing back to earth, much as things in that season did. I’m skeptical that Randle the Candle will continue to burn this brightly for another 60 games, particularly not at these minutes. And unless RJ’s TS% magically everts to above his mean, then I’m not really seeing how he might carry this team to all that startling an improvement over the Mike Miller Knicks. The wild cards, of course, are Obi & IQ. If they go on to outplay the rather meager expectations we had of them on draft day, then this team could conceivably find itself on the fringes of the playoffs/lottery. Is there any doubt as to which way Thibs would lean should that come to pass? This is precisely the worst case scenario that some of us had envisioned at the time Thibs was hired.

Ntilakilla: This is the smartest part of your post. The rest is noise.

And I changed it. I changed the word certainty to precision. You can make predictions with extreme certainty. I’m going to slide into Margot Robbie’s DMs later to prove it.

But boiling this down to the Knicks win because the other team has a bad 3point shooting night seems pretty flimsy.

We beat the Bucks because they shot like 15% from 3 and we shot 60%. The Cavs game was similar, but they might not be a good team, so that one might not be as flukey. (we also turned the ball over a ridiculous amount in that game) The way I look at it the Knicks should be 3-4 instead of 4-3, which is pretty meaningless.

DRed: We beat the Bucks because they shot like 15% from 3 and we shot 60%.The Cavs game was similar, but they might not be a good team, so that one might not be as flukey.(we also turned the ball over a ridiculous amount in that game)The way I look at it the Knicks should be 3-4 instead of 4-3, which is pretty meaningless.

We shot 3-36 vs. Toronto and were in the game until midway through the 4th Q.

Is a 4-3 record after seven games for this Knicks team really all that surprising?

Did anyone here pick us to beat Milwaukee, Indiana, Cleveland, and Atlanta? If not, and you know its probably not, we can indeed say a 4-3 start is surprising. I sure as Hell didn’t.

Z-man: We shot 3-36 vs. Toronto and were in the game until midway through the 4th Q.

Don’t you understand? Flukey 3 point shooting only counts when the Knicks win not when they lose.

Yeah, I would have guessed we’d beat one of the Cavs or the Hawks and one other, but if you’d told me we started 1-6 I wouldn’t have been surprised at all.

Seems very strange to me that people can actually spin what’s happened so far this season as a negative. There’s more to the game of basketball than positioning yourself for ping-pong balls: the young players are getting minutes, most are improving across the board, and the team is clearly playing with more spirit and coordination than they have in several years, all of which can only be positives for the players we hope to see here in the coming years. I’m usually against a super-short rotation, as it reminds me of an assistant coach across the East River whose existence makes me want to pull my hair out, but the season is going to be so weird with injuries, covid protocols and the shortened schedule that I’d be surprised if we didn’t see a good amount of minutes from everyone we want to see by the time the season is over. Let’s go Knicks!

thenoblefacehumper: This is really all that needs to be said right now. We are having a purely theoretical argument. My hunch is we finish with a win total in the high 20s, which is more than the low 20s I predicted before the season but probably doesn’t move the needle on our lottery prospects much.

Yes and no. It’s not really a theoretical discussion entirely (or, I’d say, even mostly) because Julius Randle’s trade value is never going to be higher than it will be between now and March 25. So a tough, unavoidable decision is 2.5 months away, which means it has to be in the planning stages and the thought stages now. The can can’t be kicked down the road, nor should it be. You either have to fish or cut bait on the idea of building your team around JR, point forward for the next 3-5 years at something at or not all that far south of max money. There’s no getting around it.

Just modernize the team, the offense, and the personnel on the floor and let the chips fall where they fall. We’ve seen it in action and it looks very promising. I’m not quite exactly sure how that is somehow thought of as the abnormal and mosh pit Elf ball seen as the better normal.

Mike Honcho:
How is it controversial that the Knicks have disproportionately benefited from flukey three point shooting by our opponents? No one’s saying that all our play in the last few games is a fluke, just that we’ve gotten more than our share of luck in that particular area and that that probably has something to do with us being 4-3. It’s not a personal attack or doomsaying, merely an accurate observation.

I think what bothers people, at least what bothers me, is this idea that the shoe is going to drop off the other foot because our 3PT FGA is inordinately low without an acknowledgement of the role that improved team defense has played in that development. Going into the game last night, the Knicks ranked inside top-10 in Contested Shots and top-5 in contested 3-point attempts. Are we benefiting from some luck on the 3 pointers? Sure. But a lot of it is also because we’re providing the context for that luck to happen. So even if the percentage of opponents 3 pointers made is higher than it should be, the basis is still there for us to benefit from one of the better 3 point defenses in the game.

Yet when I raised the point that we were ranked inside top-10 in Contested Shots and top-5 in contested 3-point attempts a day ago I get told that its too soon to bring these stats up. It’s so wacky and self-hating how this blog is sometimes. It’s actually going out of its way to in the opposite extreme of anti-homerism.

lol two posts saying the same thing right before mine

Deeefense: Without a deep dive into the data, it’s hard to pin down how much was good luck and how much was defensive scheme and actual defense.

Pelton had the data. There’s a site that does a pretty good job of analyzing expected percentages based on the variables you’d expect them to be based on. Teams are shooting significantly lower than those expected percentages. In Pelton’s words, the spread is “unsustainable.”

Point being, this isn’t empirically unknowable or something we have to guess at. The only wiggle room is whether the variables are being applied sensibly and there’s no real reason to expect they aren’t.

Deeefense: Without a deep dive into the data, it’s hard to pin down how much was good luck and how much was defensive scheme and actual defense.

There’s more to 3 point defense than just not allowing open 3s or taking away the corner 3s.The very smartest teams know the exact spots each player is better or worse from and try to steer them to the bad spots.So maybe a guy is 38% overall, but from a few spots he’s 33%. If you are helping push guys like that to their bad spots, it’s not luck that they are shooting worse than expected.

Unfortunately, I have no clue as whether we are doing a good job or not, but I’m pretty sure a guy like Thibs understands this and has the data.

It seems like a big part of the problem here is that as soon as someone says the word “luck” people assume that you’re writing off the results entirely or saying to ignore it completely. Nobody is saying that. But as has been said several times now league worst in terms of opponent 3 point percentage is typically around 34% and the Knicks are currently below 30%. So either the Knicks have completely revolutionized how teams defend the 3 point line, or they’re benefitting from some degree of luck.

I agree with you that disentangling what portion is luck vs. good defense is probably not possible given the sample size, but we can say that even if they were at that 34% mark their results would look dramatically worse. Maybe they’re capable of beating that 34% mark over a full season, it has been done before. But given that we’re talking about 7 games if the question is “Is this a once every few years level of good 3-point defense team or is there a significant degree of noise” I know what I’m betting on.

I just can’t get down with tanking the way I used to after watching Zion Williamson and Ja Morant go to teams that went 33-49 and had the 8th and 9th best lottery odds that year, the Lakers with 11th best odds got the 4th overall pick, and then the Charlotte Hornets with their 9th best lottery odds ended up picking 3rd the following year. No matter how you slice it, losing on purpose isn’t an apt strategy since those odds got flattened. I absolutely love the NBA draft and that rookie scale contracts are your best opportunity, but I also won’t be crying if we end up with Moses Moody at 7th overall instead of Jalen Suggs at the 2nd or 3rd overall pick.

Like I said before, there is a viable path where the Knicks improve substantially but still miss the playoffs. The flattened lottery odds makes this path considerably more desirable – albeit still luck-reliant. That said: seems to me the team may have a multi-tiered plan for player development regardless of where they draft that doesn’t rely on them nabbing a top-3 pick (as much as we’d all would love that).

I’m trying to figure out what this front office’s end game is. Right now, I think it’s just “get to the middle and pray.”

Look, I know we’re all used to various degrees of incompetent management. But that’s not what this current iteration has shown so far. And are you asking the endgame for this season, or overall?

It’s not really a theoretical discussion entirely (or, I’d say, even mostly) because Julius Randle’s trade value is never going to be higher than it will be between now and March 25. So a tough, unavoidable decision is 2.5 months away, which means it has to be in the planning stages and the thought stages now.

Flawed thinking. Julius Randle’s trade value will definitely be higher next season if he keeps up his play. An entire season of new and improved Julius Randle will be much more attractive to a contender rather than guessing whether he can keep it up after a few weeks into the season. Also, any contender trading for Randle will likely be capped out already, so having him locked up for 2 seasons vs. 1 at his current salary is not going to matter much since any team willing to trade for him will likely go over the cap to retain him anyway. Morris on a one year didn’t hamper the Knicks from getting a good return. Same goes for Randle, potentially.

Yet when I raised the point that we were ranked inside top-10 in Contested Shots and top-5 in contested 3-point attempts a day ago I get told that its too soon to bring these stats up. It’s so wacky and self-hating how this blog is sometimes. It’s actually going out of its way to in the opposite extreme of anti-homerism.

what’s so self-hating about it? that we’re not taking overly rosy pictures about everything we’re doing?

it’s healthy to be real about stuff…. not everything has to be ken and barbie play basketball….

if any of it isn’t true.. then provide an argument.. show evidence.. don’t take what ppl say at face value… do the work and drive discussion…..

if you want someone to drive a cheerleading squad then you know where you can find discussion like that… this is probably not the right place for that….

Good thread here on Thibs’s scheme to take away corner 3’s:

https://twitter.com/DallasAmico_/status/1346526825913016321?s=20

Strat, what are you doing with Randle between now and March 25?

I’ve been the biggest Randle defender on forum since he joined the team. Just a couple of weeks ago everyone hated his guts. I kept saying he was a good player that struggled last season because of the lack of spacing, bad coaching, and being thrust into roll of #1 option where he was getting double teamed. Suffice to say I think he’s good player. I still don’t think he’s an ideal fit next to Mitch and I have no idea what we have with Obi yet.

Obi came in as a good offensive player that was weak on defense. A couple of his strengths on offense were leaking out in transition and being a stronger and better athlete than kids several years younger than him. That doesn’t exactly translate well to the pros. He could turn out to be a mediocre offensive player that can’t stretch the floor out to the NBA 3 point line and that can’t defend or he could be a lot better. Obviously I have concerns. I’d like to see Obi for a couple of more months before deciding what to do about Randle.

djphan: what’s so self-hating about it? that we’re not taking overly rosy pictures about everything we’re doing?

it’s healthy to be real about stuff….

Um, isn’t the fact that the Knicks ranked inside top-10 in Contested Shots and top-5 in contested 3-point attempts also real stuff, too? Where is the discussion on that? Because all I am reading here is why these wins aren’t statistically legitimate according to the probabilities without a consideration what they mean in the context of an improved team defense.

E, two-way G-Leaguer: 3 pointers taken: dead last in the NBA

Do you really want our brick throwers shooting a lot of 3s? lol

The idea is to take what the defense gives you from among your strengths. If a guy is wide open, especially from the corner, he’s going to shoot the 3 pointer. But we don’t need guys like Payton, Randle, and RJ hoisting up tough ones. If Quickley is as good a shooter as advertised and he’s still passing up on open 3s and taking mid range shots, we can start criticizing. Until then we are going to try to create wide open ones, try to get corner 3s, and whatever that ends up being is how many we’ll take. When we have some guys knocking down tougher ones we’ll shoot more of them.

How is it controversial that the Knicks have disproportionately benefited from flukey three point shooting by our opponents?

idle, spurious speculation is a big part of what we do here

Because we have no idea if they missed these open 3’s because they just happened to miss them or because The Knicks are playing good defense? Because in our 3 losses we also shot poorly from 3 (even for us?) Because in the modern NBA when all teams take a ton of 3 point shots every game its now normal for this to happen to all teams?

Here’s another way to put it. Can you go through every game that has been played this season by every team and find all the games where the victories can be discredited because the other team missed open 3’s? You can’t. Did we miss some open shots in the games we won too? So if the other team made their open shots, couldn’t we have made our open shots too in this alternate universe?

The Honorable Cock Jowles: idle, spurious speculation is a big part of what we do here

so is knee-jerk hyper-cynical straw man beating

After years of sucking I’m going to be a cheerleader and I’m gonna rag on people who are wet blankets until we start sucking. Just because this is a stats based blog doesn’t mean we have to be debbie downers all of the time.

Knicks. Humor. That’s 2/3 of the description of this site. Stats is not all that this blog is about.

Our incredibly low opp. 3pt% is because our opponents shot incredibly badly in three of our games. The first Indiana game, the Bucks game, and the Cleveland game. We lost the Indiana game, we probably got lucky with the Bucks game, and the Cleveland game was kind of a mess and Cleveland is bad so I don’t want to say for sure how that “should” have gone. In our other 4 games, our opp. 3pt% is low but not in a flukish way. Indiana shot 38% from 3 in our win, Atlanta 33%, Philly 35.5%, and Toronto shot 33%. Those do not seem out of sync for a team like ours that does look like it has a legitimately good defense.

On the flip side of the Bucks win is the Toronto loss in which we got super unlucky from 3.

So while I agree that we probably should be 3-4 it is not strange to outperform your expected W-L by one game, especially in smaller samples. We have also played a difficult schedule and our bench has been decimated by injuries over the last 5-6 games, missing 3-4 rotation players every game.

With that said, I would not be surprised if we fell back to Earth, but so far I don’t think you can simply chalk our success up to luck.

Ntilakilla: Um, isn’t the fact that the Knicks ranked inside top-10 in Contested Shots and top-5 in contested 3-point attempts also real stuff, too?

We’re 2nd in opponent 3 point attempts and “top-5 on contested 3-point attempts”. That kind of sounds like a more complicated way of saying we’re contesting an average to below average percentage of our opponent 3 point attempts but just giving up a ton of them.

ummm didn’t he just “show it” by saying that the Knicks are contesting shots at a very high rate? lol

he didn’t… you’re assuming contesting a high amount of shots will result in a record breaking opp 3pt%….

and as thenamestam pointed out… volume #s don’t mean much…. and are actually outright misleading if we’re also leading the league opponent 3pa….

Kind of seems like the various camps are talking past each other a bit here.

Welcome to America these days. 🙂

Things are almost never 100% one way or the other or we wouldn’t even be debating them. We’ve probably had some good fortune in some ways, but we’ve also been pretty banged up with injuries. The key is we are playing better on both sides not just in terms of the stats, but in terms of effort, the way the ball is moving etc.. The numbers will eventually settle somewhere and we can try to figure out the reasons as we see more.

swiftandabundant: Because we have no idea if they missed these open 3’s because they just happened to miss them or because The Knicks are playing good defense? Because in our 3 losses we also shot poorly from 3 (even for us?) Because in the modern NBA when all teams take a ton of 3 point shots every game its now normal for this to happen to all teams?

Here’s another way to put it. Can you go through every game that has been played this season by every team and find all the games where the victories can be discredited because the other team missed open 3’s? You can’t. Did we miss some open shots in the games we won too? So if the other team made their open shots, couldn’t we have made our open shots too in this alternate universe?

You did a better job answering him than I could have done.

Knicks are also #1 in SOS. They’ve also seen the best bigs in the East while playing a new system. They out-executed both Atlanta and Indiana down the stretch and played legitimately good 4th quarter defense in both. Could the wheels totally come off? Yup. Three starters with sub-500 TS% does not a good offense make. Defensively we’ll see- the three point defense is unsustainable but they’re playing a new system so you’d think they’ll make improvements elsewhere. I’m guessing they’ll be a middle of the pack defense and in the 20s on offense and we’re arguing about whether we should tank the last month or chase a 9/10th play-in game.

he didn’t… you’re assuming contesting a high amount of shots will result in a record breaking opp 3pt%….

No one is assuming it. Everyone here admits that the FG% on 3 point shots allowed is probably too good. The point is what the baseline for falling back down to Earth really is. If we’re defending 3s like a top 5 defense in that department then we’re also still pretty damn good at it on top of being very lucky. Yes, we’re lucky and good. This isn’t a controversial statement in any sane sports blog where fans celebrate team positives and the good fortune it brings. But here, on Knicksblog, we have to belabor how things will inevitably fail without acknowledging the sustainable aspects of what this team is accomplishing. I can’t say I understand it but I suppose everyone has their reasons for believing we can’t have nice things.

UGH. More expansion. Can’t they just relocate the Pelicans and fucking Kings?

Report: Seattle and Las Vegas expected to bid for expansion teams with price possibly starting at $2.5 billion each https://t.co/UcBxetsb8G— NBA Central (@TheNBACentral) January 5, 2021

Overall it’s just a small sample. Our schedule has been extremely tough, and in terms of raw # of 3PA taken by opponents, we’ve also played very high 3P volume teams — Toronto leads the league by a mile with 50% of their shots being 3’s, Milwaukee is 7th, Atlanta 10th, Indiana is average at 15th. So 5 out of the 7 games are against high 3P volume teams.

Game 1 – IND had 3PAR 36.2% (lower than their season average which is 40%)
Game 2- PHI had 3PAR 35.2% (37.6% season average)
Game 3 – MIL had 3PAR 40% (43.8% season average)
Game 4 – CLE had 3PAR 36.4% (31.3% season average)
Game 5 – TOR had 3PAR 62.3% (49.9% season average)
Game 6 – IND had 3PAR 59.5% (40% season average)
Game 7 – ATL had 3PAR 35.6% (42.4% season average)

What does this tell us? Basically all the 3 pointers-against is skewed by 2 games — TOR and IND. In 4 of the games we held teams to well below their average 3PAR.

In terms of the 2 games – Toronto is an unbelievably high volume 3 point shooting team, 1st by a mile in 3PAR. And the 2nd Indiana game it seems it was the strategy to let guys like Oladipo and Turner shoot from outside while limiting Indiana’s inside game.

Overall – it’s just too small a sample to really know what the shot location stuff means

Max: It’s a money grabbing move, sped up by the effects of the pandemic.
Money from expansion fees are not share with the players, it go right in the owners’ pocket.
And the Union just could not say no, because it means 30 new full time jobs available.

I wonder if Cuban is going to give the NBA the same self-important lecture he gave the NFL back in 2014 about how an implosion is imminent and hogs get slaughtered…

Alan: Nor can I imagine any team taking on Smith at the moment

I was hoping to trade him for another team’s disappointing lottery prospect.

I’d be happy to Seattle get a team again.

Fuck Vegas though.

Ntilakilla: No one is assuming it. Everyone here admits that the FG% on 3 point shots allowed is probably too good. The point is what the baseline for falling back down to Earth really is. If we’re defending 3s like a top 5 defense in that department then we’re also still pretty damn good at it on top of being very lucky. Yes, we’re lucky and good. This isn’t a controversial statement in any sane sports blog where fans celebrate team positives and the good fortune it brings. But here, on Knicksblog, we have to belabor how things will inevitably fail without acknowledging the sustainable aspects of what this team is accomplishing. I can’t say I understand it but I suppose everyone has their reasons for believing we can’t have nice things.

the whole point is that even if we’re still league best it’s going to significantly impact how good we’ve looked….. do you want to just ignore that? ok.. ignore it.. no one is stopping anyone from having their own personal tea cup party ignoring everything critical about this start….

if that makes you uncomfortable then there’s probably more wrong about you then there is about the blog….

djphan: the whole point is that even if we’re still league best it’s going to significantly impact how good we’ve looked….. do you want to just ignore that? ok.. ignore it..

Only someone who is willfully refusing to read my multiple posts where I’ve openly acknowledged regression is probable would say I am ignoring it. The irony here, of course, is that in strawmanning my point about contextualizing this “luck” you end up committing the very act you accuse me of by ignoring my actual point.

Z-man: so is knee-jerk hyper-cynical straw man beating

Mmhm. Don’t forget that this is a Knicks blog, where we talk about the Knicks, the franchise owned by James Dolan, the owner of the Knicks. Hypercynical is a big part of what we do here.

And fuck it, you know what else? I want Julius Randle to continue to play well and grab an all-star spot. Dunno about his long-term prospects yet, but he’s a Lakers castoff and It’d give me something to strike back at my #lolKnicks Laker-snob coworkers.

djphan:
what did you contextualize?you’re using volume stats to measure effectiveness and you called it a day and expect ppl to take it at face value?

no it got ignored because it’s wrong not because we want to belabor it….. do you get that?

I inserted another piece of information to get a clearer picture as to why so many of these opposing 3 pointers aren’t falling in. If anyone wants to dive deeper with percentages go ahead. But until then I am the only one actually examining how we’re contesting opposing shots into the actual conversation of our 3 pt defense. Because without answering this question we don’t have a clue as to whether or not we’re just really lucky or really lucky and good in this department.

Totes McGoats as Totes McGoats: Notice that Bullock and DSJ are missing? That’s because I wanna use Bullock to move DSJ.

This is some Phil Jackson shit. Why would we use Bullock to dump a player on an expiring contract? Just waive him or don’t resign him this summer. If Bullock is good enough to dump a player no one wants he’s good enough to get an asset back by himself.

Max: Fuck Vegas, I’d rather have Vancouver, Nashville, Saint Louis, San Diego, Buffalo, Montreal or some place in Kentucky… I had a crush for the ABA 🙂

How about Baltimore? I live there now and would love a local team so I could get to watch NBA in person without having to travel to DC or Philly.

Because all I am reading here is why these wins aren’t statistically legitimate according to the probabilities without a consideration what they mean in the context of an improved team defense

It’s not whether or not a win is ‘statistically legitimate’, What I’m asking is ‘what do these wins tell us about the team’. Winning because the other team missed shots they would normally make tells you something different than winning because your offense generated a lot of good shots at the rim and you crushed the other team on the boards.

I actually think the league is in about as good a spot as its ever been in my memory talent-wise and can probably reasonably support expansion. Just going by 538’s rating as a rough estimate of current talent level the 10 worst teams are:

Easily. Just the influx of foreign talent alone.

If you watch yesterday’s game again you’ll see too many bunnies lost by the Knicks. We could have won way much easier.
Let Lady Luck alone
This team has character and discipline and plays Well.
Believe It.

Z-man:
If Randle keeps up his .600 TS%, keep his usage at 26%, keep his assist% above 30 and just cuts back a bit on the turnovers, he’s better than half the players making more than $30 mill a year. If he keeps it up, extending him in the low-mid $20s is a no-brainer. He’s not aesthetically pleasing but he’s a very effective player and he is just pulverizing opponents on the interior. We always talk about how we appreciate the lunchpail guys here in NYC…he is epitomizing that.

You don’t necessarily build around him, but you can build with him as an integral piece if this level of play keeps up. I guarantee he’s getting the attention of opposing coaches…he’s a freakin’ load.

Now if someone knocks you over with an offer, sure take it. Even shop him quietly and keep eyes and ears open for opportunities. But he’s playing like an all-star right now and that makes the option of riding with him next year a much more attractive proposition. Legit all-stars on below max deals are hard to find without getting lucky in the draft.

FWIW, if you look at his last year in LA and his year on the Pelicans, his WS/48, usage, and TS% this year are all in line with those years. The difference is that he’s making a lot more assists now and he traded free throws for 3s. But it was interesting to me that, at his best, he was always a pretty efficient player even with high usage and that last year was the aberration statistically, not this year.

vincoug: This is some Phil Jackson shit.Why would we use Bullock to dump a player on an expiring contract?Just waive him or don’t resign him this summer.If Bullock is good enough to dump a player no one wants he’s good enough to get an asset back by himself.

How about Baltimore?I live there now and would love a local team so I could get to watch NBA in person without having to travel to DC or Philly.

Baltimore would be great, I fear that the Wizards will put up a fight Orioles/Nationals style, but it’s hard hard to say no to a city that once upon a time was the cradle of The Pearl.

DRed: It’s not whether or not a win is ‘statistically legitimate’, What I’m asking is ‘what do these wins tell us about the team’. Winning because the other team missed shots they would normally make tells you something different than winning because your offense generated a lot of good shots at the rim and you crushed the other team on the boards.

  

QFT

At his best Bullock was a backup 3&d guy. I’m not convinced he’s the same player he used to be before the injuries. Either way, he’s one of the weak links in the starting lineup. The question is who do you put on the court to replace him. The most obvious choice would be Burks. He’s more of a backup also, but he’s a scorer. You need a versatile scorer like him off the bench. To me, the fantasy is that RJ slides over to SF more regularly, Frank becomes the 3&D player in Bullock’s slot, and Quickley moves to starting PG and give us the extra scoring punch and spacing. That leaves no true PG, but between Quickley, Frank, RJ, and Randle that’s more than enough guys can either penetrate, make some plays, or both. For that to work Frank has to get healthy and become the player we all hope he can become that can lock down on D, switch, make a few plays here or there, and hit the open 3 if the ball is kicked out to him. If he’s not that player, you keep Bullock around for awhile unless there’s an opportunity to upgrade the position in a trade.

Brian Cronin: Easily. Just the influx of foreign talent alone.

I think you’re still diluting the talent a bit (in theory you’re adding the 451st to 480th best players in the world) but with so many available good players from overseas/G-League that’s absolutely sustainable.
And by the way the majority of teams play a 10-11 men rotation at the max.

A different argument is which set of protection and draft rule to put in effect in the expansion draft.
Historically expansion teams needs at least 5 years to reach .500 (i.e. Tor 5, Mia 6, Cha 5 the first time 6 the second one, Min 8, Mem 9) and that was before the flattering of the lottery odds.

But it was interesting to me that, at his best, he was always a pretty efficient player even with high usage and that last year was the aberration statistically, not this year.

This is one of the areas where the boxscore fails.

The boxscore is partly the result of the skills a player has and how effectively he uses them, but it doesn’t tell you any of the system, player role, or teammate issues that also contribute to those results. That’s why I kept saying Randle is a good player even though I was watching the same crazy spin moves, TOs, lower efficiency etc.. that everyone else was seeing and that the boxscore was capturing. The conditions for his skillset were atrocious last year. To be honest, they aren’t way better this year, but he has adjusted better to the double teams and is making plays out of it better instead of throwing up as many trash shots.

I hate to go way back in time, but we saw what happened to KP after Melo was traded and he was pushed into the #1 slot. He started getting double teamed because Hardaway was the #2 option. Then Hardaway got hurt. KP was totally lost for awhile and was throwing up trash left and right that was killing his efficiency. He was slowly starting it figure it out before he got hurt.

The conditions are part of the analysis.

thenoblefacehumper: As I noted I’m sympathetic to some of the points you’ve raised, but I don’t see why you see this as such an urgent situation. We have tons of games left until the damn 2022 trade deadline.

Fair post, but I’m going to pick out and address a couple things. IMO, he loses a lot of value between the 2021 and 2022 trade deadlines, thus the “urgency.” I disagree that that’s a false premise. Two postseasons and a full 20201-22 are worth WAY more than one and a partial. If that is in fact a false premise, yes, some of the urgency goes away.

I think this is a weird ass season that’ll continue being strange.

Also I’m very into the idea of a team in Mexico City. Is that still on the NBA’s radar?

Brian Cronin: The reason that is fascinating is that it makes expansion even easier, because, as you correctly note, we’re just talking about adding guys on the margins here and there are so many guys on the margins already in the NBA. So I think expansion will have even less of a major effect as it has in the past (which was not much).

Not sure I agree with your overall conclusion here. I agree with your assessment of the trend towards “stars and scrubs” but I think you need to consider that the two expansion teams means the quality of the worst “star” in the league drops as well. If you assumed an even talent distribution (obviously not true but just to explain what I mean) the “worst best player” would go from the 30th best guy in the league to the 32nd best guy. At that level there is more of a marginal difference and for that reason I think the increased importance of star power is at best an ambiguous trend here. There already aren’t enough guys truly worthy of that label to spread among 30 teams. With 32 it gets stretched further.

That’s why I originally did my list sort of taking the temperature of the worst teams in the league because I think understanding to what extent do the bottom teams in the league have anything interesting going on is a way of thinking about where that breakpoint is in terms of there not being enough star talent to go around.

Why would you even want to think about shopping Randle at this stage?

It turned out I was right. He’s a better player than he showed last year.

So It makes no sense to trade him unless you are convinced Obi is going to be the better player/fit and we can fill another need better by trading Randle. The idea is for the team to get better not to gather picks for Randle and get worse again in the short term all for some theoretical advantage 5-10 years from now. Randle is a young player that has plenty of productive years ahead of him. Let’s see how this plays out between him and Obi and how much of what he’s doing he can sustain. When the time comes to make a decision about whether we want to sign him again for his fair market value or trade him we can think about that then. But right now trading him for some protected pick and playing Obi all to get an extra pick asset is crazy. Way too soon.

If you take Randle and replace his current 3p% (.407) with his career avg of .300, then his TS% is .569 instead of .603.

You still aren’t considering the fact that he’s not in an ideal situation even now. He’s NOT a #1 option even though he’s a very good player, but he’s getting double teamed like one and operating without much space because of the makeup of the team. If we start shooting better and things open up to the point where they can’t double him anymore, he’s going to be more efficient inside to offset if (or actually when) his 3p% drops. But you have to sit through that. If his TS% drops to .560 or .570 don’t start screaming and panicking. We have to wait until we have a real team with all 5 positions filled, good spacing etc..

Deeefense: This is one of the areas where the boxscore fails.

The boxscore is partly the result of the skills a player has and how effectively he uses them, but it doesn’t tell you any of the system, player role, or teammate issues that also contribute to those results.That’s why I kept saying Randle is a good player even though I was watching the same crazy spin moves, TOs, lower efficiency etc.. that everyone else was seeing and that the boxscore was capturing.The conditions for his skillset were atrocious last year. To be honest, they aren’t way better this year, but he has adjusted better to the double teams and is making plays out of it better instead of throwing up as many trash shots.

I hate to go way back in time, but we saw what happened to KP after Melo was traded and he was pushed into the #1 slot. He started getting double teamed because Hardaway was the #2 option. Then Hardaway got hurt. KP was totally lost for awhile and was throwing up trash left and right that was killing his efficiency. He was slowly starting it figure it out before he got hurt.

The conditions are part of the analysis.

The most interesting case of this is THJ, who was clearly much better when went to the Hawks, became worse again when he came here, and has become even better on Dallas than he was on Atlanta. Our team/coaching/system/whatever is typically so bad that it brings out the worst of whoever is here. He went from being a salary dump to probably being undervalued given what Joe Harris just got

Randle, Payton, Burks and Co play hard and smarter than ever as knicks but let’s not fool ourselves. They’re expandable as fuck! They have flaws that you don’t need going forward as a team that wants to contend in the future. They need upgrading.
Unless they start meditation and yoga and become different kind of players.

#I have a name proposition for that team: Mexico City Sombreros :D#

LOL
Still laughing! Too good!

The point of the Knicks is to win basketball games, not put Julius Randle in an ideal situation. Randle kind of mucks up this team, as valuable as his playmaking currently is. Idk, let’s see how the season goes. If he gets his turnovers under control and keeps up the efficient scoring maybe you think about keeping him. . .there’s no rush.

#Give Randle a break, he lost 30 lbs this offseason#

I’m giving him as many breaks as he wants but i ain’t giving him a new contract if i can trade him for something less spinable, more 3pable and D oriented. Unless he takes a backseat and a brave paycut and becomes a PointF Bench Leader.

if we’re going to walk the drunkard’s walk that fate all but damns us to here in the early season, let’s talk about the offense under randle 2.0. with randle in the game this year vs last our team TS has jumped from 53.2% to 56.7%. our rim+3 percentage has jumped from 67% to 71%, boosting our “shot quality” from .52 to .54, and we have made 37% of our 3s vs 33%. our assist/100 have likewise increased from 22.4 to 24.6. so our passing, shot quality, and also shot-making over and above shot quality have increased YoY with randle on the court.

one thing that hasn’t increased is pts/100. ytd we are at 105.2 vs 107.9 last year with randle on (league avg is about 109). the two culprits for that so far are TOV (18.9 vs. 14.6) and ORB (11.5 vs. 15.4). this vaguely corresponds to randle’s person deltas (6.2 vs 4.5) and (2.4 vs 3.5) in these areas. randle is getting a lot of acclaim and i absolutely get why that is. but it’s also true that it’s somewhat unusual to have a player with his turnover profile dominating usage. if we use a tov% and usage that incorporates assists, rwb does not approach his levels. the closest recent analog is demarcous cousins from the 17-18 pelicans who had a 32.7% usg rate and an 18.7% TOV rate, again, not using the bref definitions but one that includes assists (using this measure randle is 28.3% and 19.5% ytd). so as oddly great as randle’s numbers have been, i think it’s legitimate to ask how valuable this brand of greatness is likely to be to an nba offense.

Revisiting last night’s Dante Exum injury, Shams says he has a strained right calf and will miss 1-2 months. Much better than I feared, but still… snakebit.

Knew Your Nicks:
#Give Randle a break, he lost 30 lbs this offseason#

I’m giving him as many breaks as he wants but i ain’t giving him a new contract if i can trade him for something less spinable, more 3pable and D oriented. Unless he takes a backseat and a brave paycut and becomes a PointF Bench Leader.

Haha was making a dumb joke about him being ‘expandable’

Querly Q-Word, Pen Name of Pen Name Early Bird
January 5, 2021 at 5:24 pm
If you take Randle and replace his current 3p% (.407) with his career avg of .300, then his TS% is .569 instead of .603.

That’s still a good number but probably doesn’t justify his current TOV%, even with the increase in assists.

I think Randle may be better at shooting than his career average suggests (thanks, Keith Smart!) but he’s not going to be stellar. Exactly where he ends up will determine how good he is.

Even taking last year’s abysmal shooting (.277) he ends up at a healthy but slightly below average .562 TS%. Average last year and this year are .565 for reference.

hold up Querly – Q, are you saying the julius randle that i am watching play basketball this season is basically the same julius randle i watched play basketball last season?

I don’t think this has been linked to already, but here’s a very good CBS Sports piece by Sam Quinn articulating the many ways in which Randle’s game has improved. As always, you should read the article, but here is a tiny sample (about tiny samples, no less):

Through seven games, Randle is making more passes per game than Ben Simmons and more passes per minute than Stephen Curry. He is creating more points per game off his assists than LeBron James and Luka Doncic. He is averaging more assists per game than Nikola Jokic ever has over a full season. And he’s doing all of this while sharing the court with a pass-first point guard in Elfrid Payton and a high-volume wing scorer in Barrett.

Alan: Through seven games, Randle is making more passes per game than Ben Simmons and more passes per minute than Stephen Curry.

How is this a positive? It just shows he controls way too much of the ballhandling and offense. Given his high turnover ratio and obvious clumsy forays that often lead to passes, why would we want him doing all the passing? We shouldn’t WANT him making more passes for the Knicks than Ben Simmons makes for the Sixers. That’s bad, not good.

*********He is creating more points per game off his assists than LeBron James and Luka Doncic. He is averaging more assists per game than Nikola Jokic ever has over a full season.*******

This is just a function of the number of passes he’s making and thus has the same flaws as the passing number.

********And he’s doing all of this while sharing the court with a pass-first point guard in Elfrid Payton and a high-volume wing scorer in Barrett.*********

Not sure how this relates to the high number of passes or what it otherwise brings to the party.

Question:

do all the stats that have been used, for on against, in this argument, consider “who” is the shooter defended or left open?
It’s one thing to let Steph Curry open (baaaad) and another to let Elf Payton open (goood).
Does “expected FG%” compare the result with the league average or the shooter average?
Do different statistics compare differently? And if so, which is the more reliable?

Thanks in advance for answering

cool Querly Q (i’ve been wanting to write that since you changed your name :)…i see enough numbers on a daily basis at work to not want to seek out many more…however, you all have convinced me to be skeptical of relying too much on what i see when i watch games…i really appreciate it when folks bring some fairly easy to digest numbers in to the discussion – really helps to evaluate the present and past and provides a very good indicator for what will happen in the future…

man, i still remember when i first started posting and not having a single clue about any basketball metrics outside of basic box score stuff…

you guys do a great job of teaching…

i mostly though just wanna relax and enjoy my time watching us play…obviously the whole watching knicks play and enjoy yourself has been an extreme challenge for many years…

i slept through most of the first half, and when we got down by double digits, i didn’t think we’d come back…

i don’t know – maybe the worm really has turned this time for us knick fans…i mean – statistically speaking – as an organization we couldn’t continue to make historically bad choices over and over again…eventually dolan (and us) was due to get lucky in letting someone halfway competent run basketball operations…

Mike Honcho: Do you think we’re the best perimeter defending team in the modern era? Because that’s where we’re at right now. Either Thibs turned an island of misfit toys into the best perimeter defense of the last decade or, just maybe, it’s a fluke because we’ve played seven damn games and that the drop off between our current level and a normal elite level is quite large, so the inevitable regression to the mean is going to bite us hard even if opponents continue to shoot poorly.

Talk about putting words into my mouth

E, two-way G-Leaguer: *********He is creating more points per game off his assists than LeBron James and Luka Doncic. He is averaging more assists per game than Nikola Jokic ever has over a full season.*******

This is just a function of the number of passes he’s making and thus has the same flaws as the passing number.

********And he’s doing all of this while sharing the court with a pass-first point guard in Elfrid Payton and a high-volume wing scorer in Barrett.*********

Not sure how this relates to the high number of passes or what it otherwise brings to the party.

What’s impressive is he’s doing this playing with three sub .500 TS% starters and Mitch who doesn’t spread the floor. Play him with better shooting and I think turnovers go down (a little- he’s still going to turn it over more than you’d like) and the assists go up and the marginal gains we’re getting now might be much less marginal. For me though he has to be at the four- if you need him to play five to generate numbers it’s not worth it.

i think that closing lineup from last night was really good: IQ, rivers, RJ, julius and mitch…i think thibs trusts those guys – particularly austin rivers, he just seems like a thibs kind of guy…you probably could say the same for IQ (listed as 6’3″ and 190#’s but looks a little light in the ass, but dude is just super gritty = a “gamer”) and born-again-hard julius…

what i wonder is if alec burks may replace either mitch or RJ in crunch time?

KD has obviously been holding Brooklyn back with his round earth beliefs

Lakers-Nets will be a fun final. Especially if an earthquake swallows Staples Center during Game 7…

Okay, that was dark. Watching Georgia has me a bit on edge.

Utah might be fired up tomorrow after this ass kicking

Utah might be fired up tomorrow after this ass kicking

Atlanta was defeated by Cleveland and then didn’t exactly rise to the occasion against the Knicks.

Ntilakilla: Does anyone have the feeling that the team is just resting guys to see what we have with other players in the rotation?

No.

#Does anyone have the feeling that the team is just resting guys to see what we have with other players in the rotation?#

From day 0.
I wouldn’t call it resting but something like “Let me check out rotations without NYpress busting my balls” kind of stuff