Knicks Morning News (2023.05.16)

Dallas bumbling into having to convey the pick anyway would be phenomenal. Then the hope would be that it would just be used, rather than pissed away.

I’d even think seriously into trading way up in this draft, and would definitely spend assets to do it. Getting the Dallas pick would be a massive assist. That’s a better idea than blowing the farm on a veteran with issues.

I’m thinking Scoot for the tradeup. If he’s ungettable, he’s ungettable — but he’s the guy I’d target.

It would cost a fortune to trade up for Scoot and he’ll probably take at least a season or two to even be productive. Why would we do that?

Same reason for any move — to advance the team toward being able to win a championship. If he becomes a superstar, that greatly assists achievement of the goal.

Is there a risk? Yes.

Or is the question rhetorical?

Look, he’s no Cam Reddish

One look at their playoff numbers makes that crystal clear ….

But in any event, he’s a JAG. Nothing more. The only reason he’s even discussed here is because the coach drastically overuses him and agitates for him to be an untouchable — a reflection on the coach, not the player.

It was predicted here long in advance that the coach would rely way too much on him and Josh Hart and it would lower their playoff ceiling — and that’s exactly to a T what happened. That prediction received massive pushback.

All of which is to say that the 2023 season is now in the rearview mirror and yesterday’s news. The build-a-champion task continues apace. There’s a ways to go.

I don’t know what Just a Guy means precisely

I have it pegged as one of those sublime sporty phrases that carries its meaning right within the four corners of its words, in concentrated form. That could be just me, though.

You just don’t want him having to make too many decisions in the playoffs, he’s best when he’s reading and reacting quickly.

Concur, and concur with the idea that he doesn’t have to be traded just so long as he’s downgraded. I don’t think he has much trade value anyway.

In terms of basketball guard skills, there’s basically (1) catch and shoot; (2) shooting a normal jumper off two feet after moving, stopping, and gathering (Michael Jordan and Kobe being the top-end examples); and (3) all the various floaters, up and unders, pivot moves, duck unders, and the like (of which Jalen Brunson is phenomenally fantastic at, for example)

A lot of players are good at 1 and 3 and then ceiling out because 2 is much tougher than it looks and doesn’t necessarily even correlate with 1 (or 3 for that matter.) If you’re a guard-type, you’re always going to test drive/proof of concept 2 whether or not you do it in actual games and you wind up having a very good sense at whether you’re any good at 2. (In my days of nobody palookaville organized basketball, I wasn’t. Though not for lack of trying.) If you are, you bring it to games. If you aren’t, you don’t.

His presence on this team is unambiguously positive.

Not for 48 minutes in playoff games during a postseason in which he’s coming up very small.

Everyone knows this, and not his “presence on the team,” is what I mean.

Getting furious at the 25th pick for not being a star is one of the weirder bugaboos I’ve ever seen here.

I’m not sure what being the 25th pick has to do with anything at this late date, but that said — no one’s “furious” or anything resembling that.

I mean what the hell are we even talking about?

I’ve said it at least ten times, but I’ll say it an 11th:

We’re talking about the coach’s massive over-reliance on Josh Hart and Quentin Grimes, which thereby put a ceiling on the team’s playoff potential and contributed significantly to losing a winnable playoff series.

In a very open year.

Clear now?

Not that it matters, but this was warned about pretty much on trade deadline day.(*) It was left alone, pretty much, in deference to reading the room and the fact that Josh Hart was playing well, until the playoffs started. After, I think, Game 2, I wrote another post about it. Hubert either beat me to it or started in the same vein shortly after and if anything was more adamant about it than I was near the end. Djphan, too.

Intelligent observers could see this coming. It’s Tom Thibodeau’s MO, and he’s been this way pretty much since the beginning. He has his type, it’s always the “safe” type who can “play defense” and “plays hard” and has a lot of “intangibles” — and then he wonders why he always loses early in the playoffs to lower seeds.

And the counter is, “he’s a useful player at rookie scale” or “he has a chance to be a solid rotation player.” As if anyone ever said otherwise.

For the future, it means, among other things that “running it back” isn’t really an option.

(*) I believe I said something like, words or substance, “Great, another of Tom Thibodeau’s low ceiling guys that he’s going to lean like hell on.”

Anytime you lose a playoff series you should blame the role players instead of the 2x All-Star/2x All-NBA player is a thing people commonly agree on.

They are role players, but they weren’t used as role players. That’s the problem.

If people would talk in a way that made it clear they see them as role players, this would probably be a little less of a topic. But it’s the opposite.

The next shoe to drop is going to be when Josh Hart signs for $20 million a year, capping the team out for the foreseeable future. Will he be talked about as a role player then? Stay tuned!!

Remember the scene in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood where Steve McQueen is at that big party and is wistfully filling in that woman on Sharon Tate’s past and present, and then gets to Roman Polanski and Jay Seberg, points them out, and the woman listens and then concludes that “Sharon has a type — short guys who look like 12-year-old boys?”

And then Steve McQueen then kind of gets it, sort of gets bitter and muses that he never stood a chance?

Tom Thibodeau is Sharon Tate.

Derrick White is second team all-defense and he’s played over 30 minutes a game in one playoff series for the Celtics. He played 26.5 minutes a game against the Sixers.

Every championship team has some roleplayers.

So we’re all agreed he’s an NBA-caliber “role player.” Progress!

The next step is to realize that the coach is going to use role players who fit his preferred archetype way more than he should and that’s going to hurt the team’s ceiling in the playoffs — as we literally just saw with our own eyes. With not just one, but two.

Meeting of the minds on that one, and we’re done.

At that point, the discussion becomes whether he should be kept around as the coach another year when there are a bunch of really good coaches available. I’m a no.

Harden’s gonna pick the coach, so it will likely be Pringles.