Knicks Morning News (2022.09.21)

Of all the X-factors for this team going into this season, we haven’t talked much about Derrick Rose. He gave the team a huge jolt in 2020-21. They went 24-11 with him in the lineup and 17-20 without him. Last year he was not himself even before being shelved, and obviously there were lots of other problems.

I know all the Rose detractors and foes of marginal wins would like to never see him play in another game for this team, and I truly get it. But strictly from an “impact on winning” perspective, a return of Rose vintage 2020-21 might make as much of a difference as each one of the things like Julius regressing to the mean, RJ becoming more consistent, Brunson replacing Kemba, Mitch being healthy from day 1 and further development from IQ, Grimes and Obi. He’s probably the nearest thing we have to a high-end closer we have on this team.

For a team that will probably be in a lot of competitive games that go down to the wire, he could wind up being the single biggest reason we beat the Vegas odds. Or conversely, if he goes down again, it could be the single biggest reason why we don’t.

Which is why I’d be reluctant to take the over. He can’t really be counted on due to his injury history and age, and without him, I don’t feel like we have a legit go-to guy at the end of close games. Maybe someone unexpectedly fills that role…Brunson, Randle (nah!) RJ, IQ…but Rose is the only proven commodity.

We can run lots of different lineups out there, all good but none great. And with Thibs we’ll always have a great defensive game plan. But when other teams have 2-3 closers and we have none, it’s going to be tough to get over the top.

That’s what I’ll be looking for early on…how do we execute at the end of close games? Will we have a consistent go-to guy or will it vary with matchups? Again, Rose is the only guy with a reliable track record for executing in those situations.

It’s also possible that since Rose circa 2022 and Brunson have similarities that Rose can help mentor Brunson on executing in late-game situations. Obviously Brunson has a much bigger stake in the future of this team, and although there’s only limited data on his ability to be an effective closer at the NBA level due to only becoming a starter this past year and playing next to possibly the best young ball-dominant closer in the league, we don’t realy know what he is capable of in that role. I just don’t want to see that role revert to Randle and I don’t think RJ is ready for that at this point in his career.

I think Thibs will try Obi and Julius together quite a bit more. A lot depends on whether Obi continued to refine his game since mid-April. after the all-star beeak…in his last 18 games he shot over 40% from 3 on higher volume. If not, and the team struggles out of the gate, Thins should be shown the door.

“So it’s just possible that if you flipped the two groups of scrubs, the new starters might play even with other starters, and the ‘starter’ bench mob might kick other bench mob’s booties.”

I don’t think there’s any chance that those new starters would play even vs. a team with 2 or 3 legit stars in the lineup. The two guys I think would have struggled most mightily are Obi and Grimes. They’d probably be in continual foul trouble as opposing stars targeted them. Coaches would have also targeted them defensively by getting up on Grimes and forcing him to penetrate or pass, while sagging off on Obi and sending defenders at him from the weak side when he started his move. IQ would get trapped over and over again, forcing Grimes to handle the ball. You’re also not going to get out on transition nearly as much against a team you can’t prevent from putting the ball in the basket, or when you aren’t rebounding the ball.

I just don’t think the numbers tell the whole story here.

“Drivel. A person is smart, people are stupid. About 30% of people can’t name the year 9/11 happened, deny evolution. About 40% of American’s can’t find Canada on a map.

There’s no way in hell any of those 200 people watched more than 20 games from every team. And that’s just a quarter of the games the team played. So they’re evaluating people based on the 2 or 3 games they saw them, their reputation, the highlights on SportsCenter, other groupthink, and bad stats.

This isn’t any kind of super-machine. These are flawed humans who carry their poor assessment abilities with them when they rank the players. Most of which probably didn’t even take the assignment too seriously.”

I suppose that could be true. I’m not sure how seriously anyone took the assignment, or how much basketball they watch, or whether the obviously “wrong” opinions were wrong enough in opposite directions to cancel out somewhat. But beyond a couple of guys here or there, most players seemed to be in the right cluster of players.

“It’s doesn’t remotely pass the smell test to say this had *nothing* to do with the poor individual numbers both players were putting up.”

I totally agree, and if you find where I said that or anything close to it I will cease and desist from this conversation. If you can’t, then I would ask you to not do that.

Here’s what I actually did say…or try to:
1) Our starting lineup was one of the worst in the league (worse with Kemba but bad with Burks too.)
2) Every player in those starting lineups had a significant role in it being bad.
3) Randle and RJ absorbed proportionally more of their share of the blame because they were the highest usage players, i.e their efficiency was adversly affected by the weeknesses of the other starters.
4) The starters’ weaknesses were “exposed” by playing against better opposing starting lineups, while the bench’s weaknesses were “masked” by playing largely against other team’s worse second units.
5) If you reversed roles, the bench would have done worse against other team’s starters than our starters did, and the starters would have done better against other team’s benchs than our bench did.
6) The bench, most notably Grimes and Obi, could not have possibly played the amount of MPG that Randle and RJ did because the great iso players in most starting lineups would have consistently gotten into foul trouble.
7) Starting defenses keying on our bench players would have resulted in a significant drop in their efficiency. And vice versa for our starters playing against other benches.

“I just don’t buy for one second that this accounted for the entire disparity and thus our record would be no different, and think the idea it would be worse is a near empirical impossibility. The difference in both the individual numbers for the players in question and the lineup data is simply too large for this to be feasible.”

That’s your interpretation. I totally disagree, and think it’s quite feasable. Seems that our “win at all costs” coach, who studies game film of each game as minutely as probably any coach ever, felt the same way.

“WITH the caveat that we’re talking about the bench mob at the end of the year. There was real developmental growth in Obi and IQ over the season, as shown when they were given the reins those last few games.”

It’s an important distinction, though. Honestly, I don’t even know whether Obi, IQ and Grimes could have withstood the physical pounding of playing 2400+ minutes mostly against starters. In the beginning of the year, IQ and Obi were pretty bad. In the 55 games before the all star break, IQ had a TS% of .509. Obi played 54 games and shot 22.6% from 3, and scored almost exclusively on dunks in transition and on lobs. Grimes shot well from 3 on catch and shoot looks and had no other way to score. He had 46 2pt attempts in 46 games, and took 19 FTs all year. And that’s without starting lineups game-planning for them. While by both stats and the eye test both Obi and IQ looked much better after the all-star game, you have to qualify the games in April since they were nice and fresh, we were eliminated, and other teams had other late season concerns. That they had to earn minutes probably accelerated their development, especially Obi who was godawful on D every time he went in early on.

All that said, I totally agree that they should have gotten more minutes at the expense of the starters, but that’s as far as it goes for me.

So while I acknowledge that their proximity to being

Who is Quinton Rose? (Is Leon a bit too serious about the family thing?)

Yeah, he just signed a training camp deal…

https://www.hoopsrumors.com/2022/09/knicks-sign-quinton-rose.html

I looked at some film, he’s a poor man’s Maurice Ndour…

I am praying that Thibs finds a way to get Obi 24 mpg, whether by going small with Julius-Obi-(Rj/Grimes/Cam) of trying a super-big front line of Hart-Randle-Obi. So much depends on Randle’s and Obi’s switchability. If one of them can effectively play the 3 in big lineup and one of them can effectively play the 5 in a small lineup, it can be done relatively easily. But if Thibs is insistent on having a rim protector out there for 48 minutes, the possibilities dry up.

I am guessing that both Randle and Obi are going to report in phenominal shape and will have worked hard on versatility. Until we see them out there with Brunson and Rose running the show, it’s hard to feel strongly about anything.

Man, that’s really out of left field. Whatever, fuck the Celtics.