For me, winning took total concentration, not only for watching the cards and calculating odds, but trying to control the signals I was sending out and continually evaluating patterns of my behavior. I’m very easy to read, so I had to use that to my advantage by thinking about pre-determined situations at specific, planned times. Deciding on different counts before I moved regardless of my hand, leaning forward when I had a bad hand I was planning to show, etc etc. Programmed chaos. It was a lot of work and not particularly fun.

On the other hand, the money was good…

So I haven’t played seriously in a long, long time. Last game, in fact, was a celebration/memorial maybe 12 years ago for a player I had become friends with. When he died unexpectedly, a bunch of us got together and spent an evening playing low-stakes and telling stories about him. I miss that guy.

our bench right now is proof positive of that as it’s littered with all the mistakes of this front office… and again… despite being absolutely blessed with the luck of randle recovering part if not all of his value and brunson wildly overperforming.. that we’re still only battling for a playoff appearance….

and if you doubt that… you have to ask yourself… so what happens to our team if Randle or Brunson turn back into a 1 bpm player? which maybe is an improbability at this point but certainly not an impossibility….

good strategies are resilient…. phil jackson probably drafted the best player since david lee…. yet that was still not enough to overcome all of his dumb mistakes… isaiah thomas probably has the best draft record of any gm we’ve ever had in the dolan era yet he is still viewed as a laughing stock….

it’s not enough to make one or two good decisions.. you have to be consistently good.. and that means having the right strategy and executing on it well enough…. and that’s where i think this FO comes up short… others will goto the mat to disagree and that’s fine… but i think the proof is already out there if you just want to see it….

DJ – That is interesting. I’d say game theory has applications in the NBA. People choose to maximize different things for sure. I certainly wouldn’t pay 80 million for Gary Payton in the playoffs so I can lose to the Suns in a more dignified fashion. But Lacob doesn’t care I guess.

I do think GTO in poker is less limited than you suggest but that’s a long conversation.

Who had Joe Harris having a new lease on life as a result of the trades? Nets looking good

But the goals of NBA teams are various–nothing nearly so simple as maximizing money over the long-run. For example: GSW was willing to pay 80m in luxury tax for GP2’s services. I’m not sure what the cash value of a chip is for a chip-rich team like GSW, but I’m not sure it’s worth 80m even given rosy projections for tickets and jersey sales.

what you’re describing is what the optimal strategy is for team’s at the end of the win curve… which is just another form of exploitive strategy and has been around and understood for decades…. flags fly forever and so any incremental step that achieves that goal has near infinite value…. which is why spending 100mm sort of makes sense for gp2… and why sending multiple first rd’ers for jrue holiday made some sort of sense…. it makes sense because chips have intangible value and so whatever that value has for you it can cost 100 billion dollars and so paying 99.9999 billion for a marginally good player would make sense if it theoretically got you closer….

gto in the nba doesn’t really exist.. it really only exists in poker in narrow scenarios when you can break down situations into different 2-3 player scenarios and so in those situations you can come up with a balanced strategy… the nba has 30 different competitors with a myriad of transaction types with players that come in a wide variety of flavors and an evolving game with changing rules both on and off the court…. i doubt we’ll see any part of this being solved in our lifetimes….

– I want the front office to fail
– I want us to miss the playoffs because I hate Thibs
– This Knicks/Wizards scenario is better than being the 5th seed
– I want the Knicks to tank so they can engineer this play in matchup
– I want us to have draft picks just so I can later criticize Leon for drafting the wrong player.

Some of y’all need to read better. A lot better.