Knicks Morning News (2022.11.02)

I enjoyed Macri’s newsletter today and think he’s right that Randle and RJ are specifically a bad fit with one another. However there’s a part of me that thinks even that analysis is overthinking it a bit.

The reason lineups with Randle and RJ have been bad over the past few years is because Randle and RJ have mostly been bad players over the past few years. Outside of the weird 2020-2021 season, their Knicks tenures have consisted of taking a lot of shots and missing most of them. That’s not a skillset that’s going to be a great “fit” in any lineup.

Last year with RJ off the court, Randle’s TS% was a robust .529. This might’ve taken him to the 10th or so percentile instead of the 6th in terms of efficiency among bigs, but it’s still quite bad.

Last year with Randle off the court, RJ’s TS% was actually worse than his TS% with Randle on the court (.503 vs .515).

So even if we pick one, that’s not going to solve the issue that has made the remaining player a difficult fit into various lineups. These guys are either going to start being able to throw the ball in the ocean from the beach, or they aren’t. If it’s the latter no amount of lineup tinkering is going to fix the issues presented.

The productive players with bad shooting efficiency are fairly rare birds–being able to throw the ball in the basket is quite important. The players who can pull it off are either outlier talents defensively or have extremely well-rounded tertiary games (or both).

Also the players in this category (e.g. SGA, LaMelo Ball, and Brandon Ingram just to throw out some names) still have better efficiency numbers than our Brick Brothers, there’s very little precedent for a player being productive in the 90 TS+ range.

Regardless, Julius Randle and RJ Barrett are never going to fall into either category. They’ve got to score well to be good players, full-stop. They’re not good enough at anything else to get away with being high-usage, low-efficiency chuckers.

“This year is only to see if one of RJ, Mitch, Obi, IQ, Cam, Grimes leaps out of this bad/mediocre category. That’s it. Nothing else matters. Brunson and Randle are known. The kids alone have that last bit of “promise” still attached.”

I fully agree with you, but collecting the data we’d need to make this determination would, at a minimum, risk coming with a 2022-2023 wins tradeoff. So it’s not happening.

I say “risk” because it’s far from clear this would be the case–there’s every empirical reason to believe that siphoning minutes from Randle to Obi would *increase* our win total, for example. It’s much less clear with regards to Fournier and Reddish/Quickley, but not impossible.

We’re not going to find out because we’d much, much rather win 41 games than 35, even if the latter would come with data collection benefits. Same reason we have Svi and Arcidiacono rostered instead of 2021 and 2022 draft picks.

The payoff to this approach is apparently that it’s more likely to attract star players. Maybe! I think the Mitchell saga also reveals a major flaw with it though–the approach also makes it harder to trade for those star players.

An underrated inflection point:

On February 8th, 2021 the Knicks were 11-14. Julius Randle was averaging 23/11/6 while shooting 40% from 3 with a .582 TS%. His contract was either expiring or only had one season remaining depending on what he did with his player option.

The Knicks quite easily could’ve traded him, perhaps for serious value, and played out the rest of the season with rookie Obi Toppin. They likely would’ve lost far more games than they actually did.

It was as clear an opportunity as we’ve had in years to make clear that we were going to prioritize the future over pursuing a first-round exit.

Instead, the Knicks traded for Derrick Rose, were unexpectedly but unsustainably good, got a mediocre pick in the 2021 draft, and more importantly got saddled with a self-imposed organizational mandate to be in win-now mode.