Knicks Morning News (2023.02.08)

There’s no “cherry-picking.” Cam Thomas was mentioned during the incineration draft and Cam Thomas has been mentioned multiple times since the incineration draft, even as he languished on the bench.

But I guess he isn’t worth the 27th pick rookie scale salary, so we’re all good ….

“Cam is the perfect player to lay bare the fact that there are tons of guys on NBA benches who could score 30 points every night if you gave them 31 possessions.”

Sigh. Usage in the NBA isn’t “given.” It’s a rare skill to even be able to use 31 possessions in an NBA game, other than in clownshoes hypotheticals.

If it’s so easy to score 30, then why is Quentin Grimes averaging 12.4 points per 36 minutes?

Didn’t see it, but dropping the F bomb in that context is classless and trashy.

Linsanity did it for like 10 games, then the frisson wore off, the league figured him out, and that was that. Proved nothing. If anything, it proved the opposite.

There are definitely guys on benches who could bum rush the league for a few games and go on 30-ish runs. But most would never sustain it. We’ll see if Cam T. can sustain when teams start preparing for the Nets with him as a main option. If he can, he’s a player. If he can’t, he joins any number of players over the years who have had short-term bum rushes. (Hi, Obi!)

And no, Quickley couldn’t average 30 if he was given the keys. Honestly, I have no idea where this “anyone can go for 30 in the NBA” theory even comes from. Probably some “edgy” podcast or somesuch.

There’s widespread agreement here with Owen and Raven and it’s fun speculation. IMO, things start to unravel and get dicey when the question is framed as “giving” RJ’s shots to Grimes and Quickley.

The starting point would have to be defining “giving.” The five guys on the court play the game and they take shots in the course of the game. I’m not quite sure where the “giving” part fits in.

Let’s take as the starting point what I think would be the inarguable supposition that both informed fans and coaches can easily tell when players are “taking” — that’s a better word than “giving,” IMHO — shots outside the normal course. So certainly there are formal and informal enforcement mechanisms against taking too many shots. (The old school term was “forcing” shots; that term has seemed to fall out of common currency a bit or a lot.)

Now there are obviously times in basketball games when players do that; i.e., force shots. (There’s also now the “heat check” shot, which isn’t forced but isn’t smart, either. It’s outside the proper course.) A decent argument could be made that RJ Barrett does that too much. Julius Randle does it sometimes. Dozens of players do it, including superstars. It’s part of the game.

The way to rein that in is sticking the guy on the bench, or reducing his minutes, if it goes outside the typical amount. (So in the spirit of agreement, I suppose we can say that a coach “gives” usage to players if he doesn’t affirmatively bench them for engaging in their typical usage.)

So is RJ Barrett “forcing” too many shots? I don’t think so. Tom Thibodeau doesn’t think so. He does force some shots, almost all on his forays into lane traffic. I don’t think it’s too many. TT appears to agree. Others may differ. That said, the only way to make this judgment is the eye test. Appealing as it might be, we can’t properly proxy “forced shots” or “permitted forced shots” simply by looking at what percentage of his shots a player makes. Doesn’t work that way. It’s eminently possible to simply miss too many perfectly appropriate shots.

So in the absence of a player stepping up and literally taking more shots, the only “excess” shots there to be taken are the ones the other players “force.” And even those are really only available if the coach enforces the “don’t force shots” rule.

So then the question becomes even more interesting — what’s stopping Immanuel Quickley (or any other player) from simply taking more shots? The most accurate answer is probably something like, “their own internal mechanism for evaluating whether a potential shot has the proper likelihood of going in.” That mechanism will vary from player to player and personality to personality, as will the “proper likelihood” variable. Your big-time chuckers will screw up the “evaluation” part, i.e., will overstate the likelihood *and* will have too low a threshold for “proper likelihood.” Your more timid types will sell themselves short and underestimate the likelihood and will have too high a threshold for “proper.” (Query whether Quentin Grimes does this. He might.)

Yeah, I got caught up in the weeds a bit and left out the obvious factor that you have to co-exist with your teammates. That, again, is one of those things that’s going to vary by personality — some guys give zero fucks if their teammates think they chuck too much; other guys give many fucks.

Hubert hit it right. As you move up the quality ladder in basketball the thing that defines you hitting your ceiling is “I can’t get my shots off anymore against these guys; they’re too good.”

Why would anyone be outraged passing at 19 on a guy that went 25? In fact, they did exactly what they should have done by trading down to get the guy at 25 (even though the asset they picked up in exchange for the higher pick was insufficient and then if memory serves quasi-incinerated in the Kemba clownshoe trade that wasted a lottery pick for a guy who was a buyout a year earlier).

What you keep ignoring, beyond any rational comprehension at this very late date, is that they walked into the draft with two first round picks and walked out of the draft having made … one first round pick. The players they wound up with have literally nothing to do with that alchemy. They picked a guy at 25 who looks like he’s probably a good value for that pick; they picked another guy high in the second round who looks like he’s probably good value for that pick. Who cares? It’s irrelevant to the incineration.

what do you think E – could wile e coyote also sue that evil roadrunner for some kind of thing???

I was too busy laughing at your invocation of the Acme brand management program ….

“We don’t know that they aren’t shopping him as we speak.”

Those of us who want contentions and championships are hoping that they indeed are.

“Although if by chance they are, maybe they should hold off on the unproteted 1st sweetener…thoughts?”

Sure — assuming it would have taken a 1 to get rid of him last summer, it would have made them a year further along in the road out of purgatory if they’d traded him last summer. At this point, presumably, they would actually get something back for which they would have traded a year and a bunch of 2023 ping-pong balls.

Even if you prefer the latter calculus, that makes it a tactical error within an otherwise smart strategy, far preferable to the opposite.

How many extra games do we think the Knicks won by playing Randle at starting 4 over Toppin? Let’s start there. Then you can get the number of ping-pong balls sacrificed.

We’ll assume, even though it’s unrealistic, that getting rid of Randle was the only 2022 offseason anti-purgatorial move.

Compare the speculation value of the Lakers 2027 top 4 protected with the Bucks 2025 top 4 protected the Knicks own … it’s quite a bit higher. Most likely the Lakers pick conveys some other way later if it’s in the top 4, unlike the Bucks pick.

It’s relevant as a benchmark to demonstrate the validity of your observation.