Knicks Morning News (2022.12.14)

I cannot fathom this.

And I cannot fathom its unfathomability! Vive la difference, I guess.

Quentin Grimes has a 12.6% usage rate and everyone thinks any deviation from their impression of his “true baseline” is because of his foot or “finding his rhythm” or a bunch of other things. But that’s nonsense.

In terms of his pedigree, he was a top 10 recruit who washed out and transferred. That’s not really a factor, though.

It’s absolutely fair to say that Grimes hasn’t hit enough from three yet to project him as an above average player.

*************************

Honestly, I don’t even see him right now as the Tier 5 The Athletic has him at, though I do think he’ll get there. He’s just very low-ceiling, unathletic, and my time in getting excited about competent role players, especially Johnny Hustle types, given this team and its current place in the association cosmos, is pretty much expired. It really doesn’t even have anything to do with Cam Reddish; Cam Reddish is just an archetype example to prove the bigger point. (On TNFH’s stats, there’s a difference between “taking a shot at the rim” and “getting to the rim.” Big difference.)

If he makes the team marginally better than Joe Shlabotnik or Pete Bag-o-Donuts, it’s not even something I care about. I read what you guys say about it, and I’m happy if you’re happy about that marginal improvement, and I’m not even sure there’s actual “disagreement,” but to me it’s kind of definitional “meh.”

Maybe that helps explain my perspective.

If you’re an early-Xer, “hustle,” “plays a good floor game,” “smart,” “intelligent,” “heady,” “trustworthy,” “does the little things well,” and all the rest are virtually without exception, code for “white nobody.”

I’ve never bought into that crap since I was like 12 and I’m not about to start now.

And even putting that aside, it’s axiomatic and obvious that elite athletic types get to places on the floor/court/field/whatever effortlessly or with little effort that pluggers have to “hustle” to get to.

I’ll take the athlete and his extra gear.

I mean, yeah those phrases were code for unathletic white player who plays hard, etc.

But that doesn’t mean that those traits aren’t good for a basketball player to have, does it?

***********************

It means their hoop intellectual provenance is crap and they’re still essentially crap. They appeal to the Tom Thibodeaus of the world, to be sure, a dude who literally said out loud last year he doesn’t really care for “cool” player types. There are certainly a faction of fans who find them appealing, too, but whatever. There were a faction of fans who found them appealing BITD, too.

They pale in comparison to talent, particularly at the pro level.

Actually, I should be more precise. Maybe “racial coding” isn’t the exact right word.

It’s more that virtually all the “heady” and “hustling”and “smart” (and for the most part “hard working’) players just so happened to be white nobodies. Put whatever term on that you deem to fit. And those traits were deemed to suffice to play said nobodies over better players.

When Tom Thibodeau said last year that a player either was “too cool” or wasn’t “too cool” — I don’t remember which — what exactly do you think he had in mind with the term “cool”?

The Thibs question might have seemed like it, but it wasn’t rhetorical.

Now, the real shit-disturbing question is this:

Does Tom Thibodeau, age 64, basketball lifer, Mr. Eat Your Vegetables himself, still carry with him the vestiges of the “Hustle Era” that comprised his formative years and does he, consciously or otherwise, still see in certain players the same things he saw in that era, using much the same visual and evaluative template?