I’m totally expecting the Knicks to win this one with Burks playing 43 minutes.
Let’s go go gadget arms!
Month: February 2022
Let’s hope that Obi Toppin wins this one, but without being too cool about it.
Ian Begley, who is not at all a Berman-style guy, so if he is reporting stuff like this, you know that there are some legit grumblings, reports:
Given the context, the Knicks just completed one of the worst five-day stretches in recent memory.
New York blew a 23-point lead in a loss to the Portland Trail Blazers on Sunday. They lost at home on Monday to an Oklahoma City Thunder team that had lost 12 of 15 and was missing its top two players. Then on Wednesday, they blew an 18-point fourth quarter lead to a Nets team that didn’t have Kevin Durant, Kyrie Irving, or Ben Simmons.
It’s the kind of stretch that can lead to major changes in pro sports.
Which leads to the obvious question: is Tom Thibodeau’s job safe?
Only Knicks owner James Dolan, team president Leon Rose, and executive vice president William Wesley know the precise answer to that question.
What we know: Even before the brutal loss to the Nets, confidence in Thibodeau had diminished among some people of influence at Madison Square Garden.
Begley notes that Thibs’ benching of Walker was not well-received by his teammates, especially as others were looking at how the whole team was playing poorly and just Walker got singled out (Walker noted that Thibs also stopped talking to him after the benching which…weird) and that in general, the players didn’t feel like everyone is being held to the same standard (gotta be complaints about the Julius Randle double standard, right?).
Begley also quoted some more of Thibs’ increasingly indecipherable thoughts on the team, “You try to get some sort of rhythm and consistency and that’s what we’ve been lacking. Everything’s on the table now, it has to be. It’s got to be merit-based, it has to be. I’m not just going to give minutes to give minutes. You look at everything. What are you going to do, how are we going to manage this. It has to be merit-based. A guy is playing good, he plays. If the team is functioning well when he’s on the floor, he should play. That’s the most important thing. The team has to come first for everyone. This can’t be about what’s best for any one individual. It’s what’s best for the group. That’s the way it’s got to be. We have to do what we have to do. We got a chance to reset here. We all have to take a hard look at what’s going on and we got to figure out how we can do it better.”
I keep expecting Thibs to start muttering about the strawberries any day now.
The fascinating thing is that Begley went in much further detail in a tweet (which is weird, right?) noting that it is specifically Wes that is talking shit about Thibs to Dolan. On the one hand, I want Thibs gone as soon as possible, but on the other hand, I don’t know if I like knowing Wes has that much power with this team.
Another day, another LOLKnicks.
The Knicks host their crosstown rival Brooklyn Nets tonight. Due to Kevin Durant’s injury, Kyrie Irving’s stupidity and Ben Simmons’…whatever, the Nets will be without their three star players as well as their pretty good #4 option, Joe Harris (who has an annoyingly lingering injury following ankle surgery where he is not officially out for the season but it feels like is essentially out for the season).
The Knicks, meanwhile, will be without Nerlens Noel (out with the same knee issue, I guess?) and RJ Barrett (out with Thibs’ stupidity – by the way, the Knicks totally know RJ is hurt more than they initially said, right?).
The Nets will be starting:
PG: Patty Mills
SG: Seth Curry
SF: Bruce Brown Jr.
PF: Kessler Edwards
C: Andre Drummond
That is not a good team at all, but hey, neither are the Knicks. Still, that Nets lineup is so bad that I think the odds are that the Knicks pull this off, much to my annoyance.
Let’s have ourselves a ball!
The Knicks host the OKC Thunder on Valentine’s Day night for a meaningless win that will push their pursuit of the play-in game at all costs.
Oh boy!
Let’s go give our Valentine a kiss or hug or whatever!
The Knicks are in Portland and you just know that these assholes are winning this one to keep them in the play-in picture.
Let’s go to the lobby and have ourselves a drink!
Watch these assholes win this game just to make their play-in chances seem realistic.
At least Mitch is back! Maybe he’ll have a good game against the relatively short Warriors.
Let’s go take a nap!
I sort of like that the Knicks/Lakers/Raptors possible deal was leaked, because it allowed people to say, “Oh man, gotta at least give Rose credit for pivoting” and then he…didn’t do anything. So it’s like they pulled the rug out from under a defense of the guy. Pretty funny.
That the Knicks couldn’t even dump Burks or Kemba says a whole lot of how poorly they managed the assets of the team, in the sense that they don’t really have many veteran assets, just deals waiting to expire. However, if the Knicks were at least considering dumping Burks and Noel to clear cap space for this offseason, it suggests that there might be a willingness to try that again in the offseason. It’s much harder to do that in the offseason since contracts or no longer expiring, but…well…fuck, I dunno, man, maybe they can still find a way? But probably not.
As an aside, the Knicks can’t cut Kemba, since his deal is guaranteed for next season. They really have to try to trade him somehow.
The Knicks didn’t trade Mitch, which would suggest that they now plan on keeping him longterm, which would be great, but, well, this is the Knicks, you can never rule them out of saying, “Burks and Noel, we gotta lock down before free agency even starts, but Mitch…hmmm…I guess we can just let him go for nothing.”
“They still have their future draft picks!” Why the fuck SHOULDN’T they have their draft picks? It’s like, “Hey, they tied their shoelaces! You can’t say they didn’t tie their shoelaces! Previous Knick GMs ran around tripping on their laces every other day, but not these guys! They tied their shoelaces!” Not to mention that they already burned through one of their draft picks to get Cam Reddish, so if “they still have their draft picks” is such a bonus, then that was a bad thing, right?
In other news, while his injury didn’t seem too bad at the time, RJ is now in a walking boot, which is hilariously bad. With 50 seconds left and the Knicks down 17, Thibs took Randle, Fournier and Burks out of the game, but chose not to bring Reddish in for RJ. When asked why not (after RJ, of course, injured himself with 18 seconds to go), Thibs explained that he had put the starters back in when the Knicks had cut the lead to 13 (it was actually 15, but whatever), ignoring the fact that, again, he took three of the other starters out with 50 seconds left but not RJ for…why? The guy doesn’t just make curious decisions, he then can’t even own up to the decisions he makes! What’s up with that dude?
Boy, it was nice to have a year off from this organization being a laughingstock.
Michael Scotto, who is an actual legit reporter so this is likely for real for him to be talking such detailed specifics, is reporting that the Knicks, Lakers and Raptors are talking about a three-way deal that end up with:
Lakers get Cam Reddish and Alec Burks.
Knicks get Goran Dragic and draft picks.
Raptors get Talen Horton-Tucker and Nerlens Noel.
Reddish can’t be combined with another player in a trade, but I assume that this deal takes that into account, so it’s really more like Reddish for pick and then Burks and Noel for Dragic.
This would clear a decent amount of cap space for this summer (something like $23 million, as I totally forgot that Taj’s money is non-guaranteed. Good call, CZ!), so that the Knicks could likely again sign a free agent before then re-signing Mitch to go over the cap (Mitch’s cap hold is miniscule, something like $3.2 million) and then extending RJ. So this could give them enough money to make a real run at Jalen Brunson, and if they free up even more money then even Miles Bridges could be a conceivable target. So that’s definitely nice.
It would be an abrupt shift in their plans, but since their first plan was a bad one, then a shift could be a much-welcomed turn.
The draft capital is the key here to see how good this particular deal is, but overall, I think it looks pretty much, like most Rose deals, “okay,” in that it works to basically erase his own mistakes, but using the charred Charlotte first rounder to do so (unless the Knicks somehow get a bunch of draft picks out of this deal). The end result could be a real positive if this deal goes down and they use the freed up cap space on someone like Jalen Brunson. I bet the Mavericks are a bit worried after seeing the rumors of this deal!