Thibs is neither the solution nor the main problem.

Thibs may be wrong on who he thinks gives him the best chance to win from time to time and reluctant to correct his mistakes, but I simply don’t believe that it’s ever much of a vets vs. young player thing. He has archetypes that he prefers, and is stubborn about those things, particularly on the defensive end.

1)As that great Fred Katz piece from last spring attests, Thibs likes working with young players in practice, and quite possibly is good at helping to develop their games; but

2)On average, Thibs’ circle of trust will default to vets over kids.

He is playing the kids a lot more this season because there are barely any vets on the roster. Even Brunson is a relatively young vet, from the same draft class as Mitch. He is marginalizing Fournier because Evan just stinks right now; perhaps the same is true of Rose, though it also feels as if Rose is playing through some injury that nobody wants to talk about.

True, he played IQ right away, and Grimes would have played a lot last season if he hadn’t gotten injured. (RJ was already a featured member of the roster before Thibs arrived, so he doesn’t count.) The Obi thing is impossible to separate from the Randle thing, which may be a case of Thibs forgiving a vet’s mistakes but not a kid’s, or it may be that Randle’s success in Thibs’ first season has convinced him that the team’s only chance of reaching its ceiling is to play Randle as much as possible. (Plus, there’s Thibs’ whole rim protector fetish, which he has let go of slightly since Mitch’s injury.)

All of which is to say that it is more complicated than the Thibs Hates Kids faction (not just here, but among Knicks fandom at large) would suggest, but also that this current rotation may be less about Thibs changing his stripes as Leon taking away nearly all of his security blankets.

Note that I’ll probably be masking; I’m one of those lunatics who’d prefer not to get COVID. So I don’t go out much, but I’d go out for this!

There are zero assurances that this will happen, but you never know…

used to be more selective in my voting habits when it came to elected officials…our system should have given us an option c…who knows though, maybe political parity would have led to our downfall decades ago…too many choices, like all those boxes of cereal up on the grocery store shelves…

So the fact that all of them under thibs have gotten better is a very positive step in the right direction. At some point one of them is going to take a big leap forward.

EB, are you stating that the young players’ positive gains AREN’T subject to regression but their lower-than-usual numbers are?

They very well could be, but most of those stats (except RAPTOR, I assume) are quick to stabalize. On the other hand, 3pt shooting is not. The 2p% should already be a good indicator of talent while I’d wager the 3p% will regress to the career average.

At the same time I feel good about Obi’s 3p% because of the high volume of 3s he takes. This is part of the formula for predicting NBA 3P% out of small college samples.

For Reddish’s 3P% I’m optimistic because he’s always been a stellar FT shooter—84% on his career.

The high-level numbers are the same, but the underlying numbers that serve as the inputs to those metrics aren’t. If we understand how the basic numbers are likely to change, we can predict how the advanced metrics will change. And I like a lot of the underlying indicators I’m seeing.

Im sure Thibs and his staff have done a fine enough job, but I think it’s pretty hard to demonstrate that they’ve done better or worse than any other pro staff.

I’m not too concerned with this. One of the criticisms of the team was that playing the vets & mercs would stunt the growth of the younger players. I’m just trying to refute that claim.