Knicks Morning News (2023.04.08)

the dream of (trading) the 11th pick is
not dead, but it’s moribound. i can come to terms with its demise, considering that it comes with luka and kyrie sitting in cabo and watch no less than two ja()len williamses start a play-in game.

what i cannot under any circumstances stomach is seeing us meet a toothless first round gentleman’s sweep type exit followed
by dallas waking up a minute later with the wemby horseshoe up their ass. or even any of the top four to use in a trade.

the in season tournament is one of the reasons i’ve been pretty disappointed with adam silver as commissioner, relative to high expectations. it’s not that it’s such a horrible idea — it might work out at least okay, though i’d bet against that. it just fixes so little that’s worst about the league for so little upside. people who think it’s costless are underestimating the scarcity of attention and political capital needed to make fundamental changes. years of pimping the in season tournament doesn’t seem like it has to impede other reforms, but it does.

of the many good ideas, i prefer the simple solution where late season wins improve rather than worsen your lottery position. at the extreme, imagine an in season end of year tournament of losers, where the winner literally gets wemby. admittedly that’s perhaps too extreme bc a prize like that might induce pretty good teams to tank the first half just to be the best of dregs in the wemby invitational, but lesser versions reduce that risk. but the risk of some gaming is inevitable and SO worth it. you 180 the late season by having wins matter. and you can add some luck to it to favor the worse teams a bit by having an in season tournament like structure, where teams can get unlucky and eliminated in a game or two.

the reverse lottery doesn’t protect bad teams that well anyway. the vicissitudes of the lottery are massive, and inescapable. getting a top pick when it’s lebron or AD or is better than getting years of top picks. and we can’t democratize that well. protect the regular season without distracting from the main quest!

another random first round thought. for this series, the health of mitch and ihart are probably even more important than randle’s effective return. if we lose mitch to injury as we did against the Hawks, i think we’re pretty much cooked. part of this is my ongoing take that jericho sims, as a center on this team, is much, much worse than most observers i’ve seen seems to thinks he is. like, i think there are lots of replacement type player who would fill the role we try to put him in more effectively. this is not entirely due to jericho sims, himself.

part of it is because our scheme very heavily relies on the center to be a good rim protector in drop against the pnr and dho, and jericho sims is very bad at doing this! maybe one day he gets a feel for backing up against the short court two on one, but that day is not today. sure, he can block a shot or two to only a handful of guys could get to, but that is a vanishing minority of his screen time. at the moment his amazing physical composite would best show as a weak side rim protecting 4, who continually shocks the hell out of guards and wings by effectively switching out on them and/or blitzing like madman. obviously you need some constraints in the surrounding lineup to make him effective in that role, but i don’t think there is any possible lineup that makes him effective as a drop C at the moment.

this is especially because is such a low value offensive clogger, even for a pure rim runner. his awesome finishing is offset by his pretty poor rolling instincts, and by the fact that we are just a bad lob passing team. adding an offensive deadweight on an already spacing challenged team to a guy who is not great at his primary defensive role is a pretty harmful combination. on this knicks team, jericho is the answer to the question: what if naz reid was terrible at offense? unfortunately for us, we also don’t have palatable small ball options as currently constructed, and certainly don’t against a team with allen/mobley. so here’s to the health of our centers. let’s sit ’em both tomorrow. if either one gets hurt, i worry foul trouble would mean a lot of ugly empty nest minutes.

btw our infamous 1400+ minutes of -3/100 play from rj/randle/brunson lineups this season turns into +2 if you ignore all minutes with sims/reddish/fournier.