So he gets credit for a bunch of wins, but his hyper-rigid orthodoxy about not changing up the line-up when things are clearly not working (or not installing more than three set plays) means I think you can pin (a good part of) this loss on him. If he’d tried a bunch of different stuff and nothing worked, okay sometimes you just have one of those days. He kept putting out the same thing that wasn’t working until, well, we lost.

BigBlueAL: But for right now as Bill Parcells likes to say, you are what your record says you are!

I agree with Bill, but there are different reasons why teams finish with better or worse records than their talent would suggest….chemistry, coaching, injuries, etc. It couldn’t be more clear to me that Miami was far better than us, and yet we have the same records. Same with Atlanta. That’s why I think we will regress somewhat and will finish behind Miami, Atlanta, and Boston. The rest of the East is very bad, so we should finish in the top 10 for sure but beyond that, anything over 32 wins is gravy.

watching Randle, or Melo, or (yes) even Ewing shoot predictable iso fadeaways at the buzzer can be ulcer-inducing.

some nights they do go in, not so much tonight, it was painful to watch…

thibs needs to cool it with those off-day no practice things…get them in the gym, keep them in the gym – shooting…

yikes, we shot 72.4% from the line in march, not winning basketball…

biggest revelation this week – i need to be youtuber – i can do this…, under 10, that’s straight gold…and, digital art, yeah, gots to learn me some digital art…

DRed:
I picked a good game to miss it sounds like

Haha. By Friday let’s all make offerings to our chosen deities (real and/or imagined). I’d much rather win that game than this one.

But for right now as Bill Parcells likes to say, you are what your record says you are!

Enough of this guy, let Burks or Q run the point in crunch time.

geo:
not sure what it really even means, but, yeah – thibs does seem to coach: not to lose…

Yeah, temperamentally Thibs seems the opposite of loose guys like Pop, Kerr, Dantoni and even older coaches like Phil and Daly. Obviously, I see a lot of Van Gundy in him (and I loved JVG!) but watching Randle, or Melo, or (yes) even Ewing shoot predictable iso fadeaways at the buzzer can be ulcer-inducing.

BigBlueAL: I love ya Z-man but considering you think the 18-30 Raptors are good but the 24-24 Knicks, who have actually outscored their opponents thru their first 48 games, suck doesn’t exactly speak well of your talent evaluation 🙂

The Knicks are not a very good team but they far from suck, their .500 record is what it’s supposed to be no matter how much you think the talent on the Knicks suck.Of course if they finish 32-40 like you think they will then I’ll have to eat my words lol.

We can agree to disagree on this. I think the Raps are better on paper but have major chemistry issues. I also think Thibs has generated several wins beyond what most coaches would have out of this bunch. In other words, the whole is greater than the sum of our parts due to coaching and chemistry. I get the quibbles about Thibs’ O, but the team, which is mostly comprised of developing young players and journeymen, is bought in and cohesive on D, which is where their wins are coming from. And that’s due to the coach more than anything else. When teams are relatively healthy and play harder and smarter than we do, we will probably lose. That’s what happened tonight.

And in fairness, I said 32 games was a floor and that 39 was virtually impossible. I did say that we would not finish at .500 or above and am standing by that. The next 10 games will be very telling. If we go 3-7, we’ll never see .500 again; 5-5 would be much more promising.