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64 replies on “Knicks Morning News (2023.05.24)”
I don’t know, Hubert. There is a reason no team in NBA history has ever come back from being down 3-0. The Celtics do have homecourt advantage, but they can’t be the first homecourt team to wind up in that hole, which means others would have had to win a Game 4 on the road in the past. Even if they manage to win their next game back in Boston, I’d be shocked if Miami doesn’t close them out in Game 6.
I’ve got $100 on the Heat at +380 they better not blow this!
I thought going in to the series that the Celts were the superior team by a significant margin on paper. When they play like they are capable of playing they can beat anyone. Obviously, the odds are way against them, but if it were ever to happen, this is as good a situation as any.
“I’ve seen teams down 3-0 win game 4 at home but I don’t think I’ve ever seen one win on the road. I think the Heat are in trouble.”
Shirley, you can’t be serious.
My dislike of the Celtics (actually all Boston teams) runs so deep I have been attempting to rationalise why yesterday’s win was actually a good thing. The best I could do was that it possibly saves Mazzulla’s job and makes them run it back again when the correct course of action may be a new coach and a partial retooling.
The stats on 3-0 series are misleading.
1. Most of the teams that got to 3-0 were vastly superior to their opponent to begin with.
2. Most probably had home court advantage.
In this case we are talking about the Celtics arguably having the better team and 2 out of 3 of the remaining games in Boston.
Theoretically they are probably around 70% or so to win the next game at home and even higher to win a game 7 if they should win games 5-6.
The Celtics probably have somewhere in the neighborhood of a 25% chance or more to win this series.
From a gambling perspective, I see them as too volatile to play to their peak talent level 3 games in a row. Tatum has to be one of the more volatile star players in the league. So I’d probably take the Heat to win one game where Tatum, Brown, or both are bad.
the heat’s success has largely been fueled by hot 3pt shooting…. so if they shoot 25% the rest of the way the celts have a very good shot at it…
the problem is that reversion to the mean doesn’t really work like that…. and on top of that beating a team 4x in a row is just really hard…. buuuut… if there ever was a matchup where it can happen this would be it…. all it would really take is for jaylen brown to show up and the caleb martins and gabe vincents to remember who they are….
if you gave the heat normal 3pt% the celts would be up 3-1 now but the problem is that you don’t get those games back… they happened… and so they have to dig a lot deeper to get back into it and hope some bounces go the other way….
the spread right now appears to be celts minus a point/point and a half…basically a pick’em..for Game 4…
agree with dj…if martin/vincent/strus….come back to earth…it could get dicey…if I was guaranteed that nuggets will win vs the celts…i wouldn’t mind seeing them do it….just so it happens to the heat and riley…ignominiously in the record books (unfortunately like the yanks) of blowing the 3-0 lead…but….jimmy buckets might derail the dream…
Unfortunately not much time for me to watch these playoffs and have a clear view of the potential of each team.
Watched Miami closely due to the Knicks matchup and just a bit of celts sixers.
Celtics D that i saw was a joke compared to the Heat’s.
A bad one
You can’t even get good odds on the Celtics winning right now. I was going to bet them but they’re only plus 225. They are favored by 8 points to win game 5.
There are two reasons teams down 3-0 never win:
1. They give up in game 4.
2. They are down 3-0 for a reason, i.e. they are facing a vastly superior team.
Well, the Celtics showed up in game 4.
And in this case the team down 0-3 has a league best 6.38 SRS compared to an opponent who has a negative SRS.
Miami better play their best game tomorrow. Time is in Boston’s favor.
For trade-ophiles (not sure why I don’t have that gene) Katz runs through a few Knicks scenarios in his piece in The Athletic.
ha, that’s funny pepper, we’re all trying to think up ways where both teams lose 🙂
same raven…just so much conjecture in the draft and trade “game”…
although, very cool to see folks ID ihart last year as a good free agent target last off season…
i must be in a mind fog today…not sure why I was referring to game 4 spread above…8.5 seems steep….but i could see it get away from miami early and then they just look forward to game 6…
Celts are 4-5 at home over the course of these playoffs, so……………….
@BernieErnie
Frankly, I’m rooting for Denver no matter what. I could never root for either Boston or Miami.
Oh, and I live in South Florida.
As an eye-test ambassador I’ve got to say that Jokic is the guy that makes incredibly smart and substantial stuff but always flies under my eye test radar.
Without the help of stats I’d never had realised how mind-blowing his game is.
Feel guilty for always undrestimate him and hope to have the time to watch these finals.
Whom i want to see winning?
The best
KYN, if you have the time and interest, you should hunt down “best Jokic passing” compilations. There are a few of them out there, and they’ll fix that eye test issue you have about the guy.
Boy, Nick Nurse couldn’t have asked for a better time to be a free agent, right?
@Raven
Yeah man i know his ridiculous passing
I just never could have imagined him playing each year at the MVP level if not being proved by stats!
He gets his stats extremely sneaky for my eyes!!!
I love this forum, but you guys have to stop reacting to one single game. Celtics win one game, just one, and now all of the sudden they’re going to win 4 in a row (including the one they already won)!? 😮 I just don’t see it. They showed pride in game 4, for their fanbase it’s nice to see, but that’s it, the chances to win the series are still very slim. I’m guessing not even their fanbase believes they can win the series.
Jokic led the league in defensive BPM by quite a large margin. If you look at the guys who are right behind him, they’re all players who have reputations as great defenders: Caruso, Draymond, Giannis, Embiid.
I don’t want to put too much stock into defensive BPM, but I’m going to go ahead and guess that you probably have to be at least a plus defender to lead the entire league in that category.
I did what I recommended earlier, just watched a compilation of Jokic passes through the years, and it’s amazing that even knowing they’re coming how many cutters even I couldn’t spot initially.
Also made me wonder as I watched it what it would be like if Randle had that court awareness and capability. Or, even funnier (sob), RJ.
But of course if that were true Thibs would have to install more movement in the offense, where players actually cut rather than stand around the three point line for 24 seconds. Which is a third implausible fantasy…
We haven’t talked much about the Knicks trading for Zach LaVine and Derrick Rose being sent back to the Bulls as part of it.
That’s a deal that could happen.
I’m not really Zach Lavine fan. On one level he’s the kind of versatile scorer and spacer we could use, but on the flip side his teams always seem to be worse when he’s on the court. Typically, that means terrible defense, but in his case maybe it’s even more??? A backcourt of Lavine and Brunson is a big risk.
Talked to a greek guy who lives in Usa and is a Sixers/Eagles and the rest of the Phila teams and told me that He didn’t expect Miami to go that far.
I told him that i did. My surprise was the Lakers elimination.
He looked me like i was from planet Cuckoo!
The truth is that (after NY was gone) i expected a Mia LaL finals just like the bubble year and if you were a gambler the betting odds were very enticing but …
Thank God Reality is more exciting than Fantasy!
I performed an admittedly hasty search but I couldn’t find a single basketball team in the last 30 years who won game 4 on the road down 3-0.
I doubt my results are definitive… like I said, very hasty… but I think it’s pretty rare.
I performed an admittedly hasty search but I couldn’t find a single basketball team in the last 30 years who won game 4 on the road down 3-0. That’s usually pack it in time.
in the last 40 years 13 home teams have gone down 3-0 in a series. ten were swept. two (05 spurs 20 suns) won game 4 only. one, the 2010 orlando magic, won games 4 and 5.
You guys remember when I told you that when I don’t know how to look something up, I just say something wrong and wait for ptmilo to correct me?
Wait a second… the ’05 Spurs won the title… the ’20 Suns missed the playoffs.
This AI is broken.
In 2005, the Suns won game 4 on the road, down 3-0, against the Spurs.
In 2020, I think you’re counting the Bucks vs Miami. But that was in the bubble, so not really home court.
y sloppy meant suns over spurs in 05 and miami in 20. agree 20 should be kicked out of the home/away list.
So if 2020 shouldn’t count, it’s 12 home teams and only 2 didn’t get swept, one went down in 5 and the other in 6. I don’t think this helps your cause, Hubert! 😛
nice yanks/o’s on espn + this afternoon…that’ll be a nice nap for a while…although, this season may end up missing 3 or 4 innings 🙂
This particular series is different when you look closely at the particulars. Boston has been playing well below their predicted level based on their record, health, personnel and recent playoff experience. Miami has gone way further than anyone really expected going into the playoffs and are far more lileky to run into a wall of sorts than a typical “up 3-0 team”.
It wasn’t that long ago that the same “it’s never happened so it’s not going to happen” logic was refuted in that Yankees-Red Sox series. This is a pretty experienced and savvy Celtics group with depth, talent and leadership, and some real advantages over the Heat. If they stay on the same page like they did last night and play to the backs or their bubble gum cards, they can definitely pull it off.
I remember being convinced that the Yankees were fucked if they didn’t win that series in a sweep (the pitching matchups for the rest of the series were really bad). I was freaking out way ahead of most people.
But yeah, same basic idea in that series would apply now. The 2004 Red Sox were better than the 2004 Yankees, so them sweeping the Yankees wouldn’t be a shock, nor would the 2023 Celtics sweeping the 2023 Heat be a shocker.
Put another way, going into the series, I would have been shocked if the Heat swept the Celtics (and I was indeed shocked that they won the first 2 in Boston, and then went on to win game 3.) However, I would not have been shocked if the Celtics had swept the Heat…just mildly surprised.
All that said, we are where we are right now and the Heat still have to be relatively heavy favorites to win.
Oh sure, if you only give them a 25% chance in each game, that’s a 75% chance they win the series.
I think it’d be more like a 60% chance they win.
Of course, if they only had a 25% chance of winning a given game, then they’d need to have already hit a 1% chance of winning 3 games in a row.
So they most likely have a better chance than 25% in each game and a better than 60% chance of winning the series… assuming the refs haven’t switched sides and that these percentages are completely independent and yada yada yada…
A comeback is still obviously highly unlikely because the margin for error has completely evaporated for the Celtics, but even at 3-0 I wasn’t comfortable writing the Heat into the finals.
The regular season numbers speak for themselves. The Heat have given us reasons to doubt them, but this is still a series that would look like a Celtics sweep on paper. It was trendy on twitter to make fun of ESPN’s projection system giving the Heat a 3% chance, but I mean, I don’t know what people expected from a computer simply responding to inputs.
In any event, I really, really hope the Celtics aren’t the first to do it.
after game 3 I was feeling great and after game 5 I knew it was over, if Miami loses game 5 they’re okay
Lavine is not that far away from Booker…. it’s really a year and getting to the line a bit more separating the two…. and i know there’s a whole lot of the board who would give it all up for Booker….
Lavine’s not a perfect player but there’s probably not enough time in the world to wait for a perfect player…. Randle could probably turn back into a pumpkin as soon as next year…. and if you keep enough draft picks in a trade you’re not really going all-in.. if it doesn’t work out you’re basically just like every other team instead of waiting out a 5yr jail sentence…
not the best plan in the world… but considering that there’s a non-zero chance Randle imploding would torpedo everything… it’s actually sort of better to not go all the way…. nothing would be worse than dealing it all for Kawhi and then Randle pulling a 2022 instead of 2023… and i would think Lavine would not cost 5 firsts….
The Celtics are definitely better but if they have one bad 3 point shooting game it’s turn out the lights, and that’s not even factoring in what Miami is doing
Anyone for some Melo love? Admittedly late in his career, but the only difference in my book is earlier he moved more quickly to the wrong spots.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpDsw6mxq7c
LaVine intrigues me. I’m not sure our defense would survive, granted the metrics hate RJs defense, so maybe it’d be fine.
It actually proved my case, Cyber, as this is only the third time in the last 40 years a team down 3-0 won game 4 on the road. We’re already in rarified air.
And the Celtics are going to be favored in every single game the rest of the way, too. That was not the case for the ’05 Suns or the ’10 Magic.
This is a first-of-its-kind situation. The history of other teams down 3-0 is not relevant.
if you subscribe to the fact that we’re trapped with thibs… and i think building around coaches is rather stupid considering how quickly they get jettisoned… it’s much easier to build a defense with offensive minded players than it is to build an offense with defensive minded players… esp when thibs is your coach… and Lavine isn’t a bad defender in that he doesn’t try… he tries.. he just has a rather large offensive load….
if he’s getting swapped for RJ… then it’s probably going to be a net positive anyway on the defensive end… and if you really want you can throw in some more picks for Caruso….
ive been thinking about it for awhile and i’m talking myself into it… and i generally dont like it since it’s probably a short window but it’s the best shot at a sustainable 3 year window with limited downside and keeping a lot of the upside… this is all assuming Lavine goes for RJ + the Dejounte package which seems doable… but who knows with these things…
Hopefully Randle can handle being 3rd banana. Not even from an ego standpoint but from a not choking in the playoffs standpoint.
I’m honestly not sure if OG is still available after TOR decided to improve at the deadline instead of blow it up. He’d be great on the wing in that lineup. He’s only got a year left, so the price will come down from the rumored 3 picks.
Running LaVine & OG might be tempting injury a bit too much. And Thibs will need to earn his defensive rep.
In the past I’ve read about studies that found that team continuity and playoff experience were both characteristics of teams that won Championships. I believe it. I’m not in favor of turning the Knicks upside down this off season. Thibs should stay. The team has a consistent personality, players are working hard both on and off the court, and they play together as a team. We should make improvements around the margins unless a good deal for a great player comes along and even then we shouldn’t give up too much of the current team to get him.
I don’t think we should ditch Randle either. A lot if times when he looked the worst it was because the team’s offensive possession went nowhere and he was given the ball without much time left on the clock. In terms of personality issues, compare him with Draymond Green. Green punched one of his teammates in preseason and the effect on team chemistry made the Warriors a worse team. The Warriors still seem to want to keep him. Randle seems to be liked by his teammates and sets a hard working example for them. Whatever his personality flaws are, they are not as bad as Green’s.
I wan’t no part of LaVine on that contract for what it would cost us to get him. If he came cheaply enough to want him, you’d seriously have to question why Chicago would do that deal. He’s currently a second banana on a lottery team getting paid like a #1 on a contender. We don’t need another second banana with a bad knee on a max deal with a $50M player option four years out that’s going to cost us several valuable assets, especially when he and Brunson would be one of the worst defensive backcourts in the NBA. And if he’s your best and most highly paid player, your team likely has a hard ceiling as a second round exit. The hardest of passes.
The nice part of the Knicks paying so little for Randle & Brunson is that we can take on LaVine’s contract much easier than other teams who are interested in a win now player. There will be some issues when IQ & Grimes (or whoever is left after trades) come up for extensions
The contract is part of why he could come cheap.
And if you look outside of DeRozan/Vucevic/LaVine their offensive repertoire is a joke. And of those guys, DeRozan took a big step back from last year and Vucevic has never been an offensive juggernaut.
“And if you look outside of DeRozan/Vucevic/LaVine their offensive repertoire is a joke. And of those guys, DeRozan took a big step back from last year and Vucevic has never been an offensive juggernaut.”
If he’s that good, then why wouldn’t CHI just keep LaVine and rebuild around him? It’s because they know that he’s not worth what he’s getting paid but, mainly because of pointzz, some sucker GM out there might give up way too much to get him. It would be like Minny getting desperate and trading the farm for Rudy Gobert…maybe worse.
I hated the idea of getting Spida, and hate this idea even more. Would way rather just see if Grimes pans out.
“Would way rather just see if Grimes pans out….”
…and I should add RJ and IQ, since LaVine would likely getting minutes at the expense any or all of these three…and/or fish around for the next Austin Reaves or Max Strus.
Re: replacing RJ with LaVine, in 2026-27 LaVine’s player option is $20M more than RJ’s and my guess is that RJ has a way better chance at age 26-27 to have two healthy knees and to be more than earning his deal than LaVine hase at age 32-33.
Right but we’re not trying to win with LaVine when he’s 32, we’re trying to win right now. By LaVine’s age 32 season, Brunson & Randle will also be 31 or 32 and there’s a good chance the window will have closed.
LaVine played 4 more games and 300 more minutes than RJ this year.
Last year RJ beat LaVine by playing a whopping 3 more games & 90 more minutes.
We can run IQ & Grimes basically the same minutes, just replace RJ with LaVine.
We lose one guy in RJ whose ceiling looks a lot like where LaVine is right now, but with RJ we might waste 3 more years of Brunson & Randle’s prime just to find out he’s Andrew Wiggins on offense with Zach LaVine’s defense.
RJ is more of a 3 and LaVine is more of a 2. I don’t see a lineup with hiim and Grimes working. If RJ settles in as who he was in these playoffs, I am good with that on his contract. To me, LaVine is the guy who wastes the primes you mentioned, especially if that knee acts up.
*in the sense that at worst, given his age and durability, RJ’s contract can be easily dumped, while LaVine’s has a much more significant probability of becoming a massive albatross.
LaVine is a bad idea. Grimes is a good defender, but not good enough for a backcourt of Brunson and LaVine. We’d need even better defenders at the other positions to make up for the backcourt’s bad defense. Mitch would be fine, and if we kept Randle, the SF would need to be a DPOY candidate for it to work. And then there’s the injury history. Let Chicago go down with that “core”. It’s a good way to eliminate the competition. 😀
Hahaha, you’re funny. So winning a game or two is super hard, but now that the Celtics won one, they’ll somehow win 3 more in a row easily. I don’t know what to tell you, except that you most likely don’t understand the law of probabilities. LOL
If we made a move for LaVine, Grimes would be the more likely candidate to go. Then you still have RJ at the three and Hart off the bench, providing solid D at both spots. LaVine is an all-star and he might be attainable at a reasonable price. RJ or Grimes will never be as explosive as LaVine. I don’t have any data to back it up, but I don’t see LaVine as someone who gets picked on the defensive end. It’s not an easy call at all, maybe the young core continues to develop and trading for LaVine could blow up in our faces, but this is the type decision Rose will be faced with. I’m cool with giving the kids one more year, but after that if the Knicks don’t make a big splash, the new cba will probably take that opportunity away from them. If it were up to me, I would pull the trigger if he was available for less than what Mitchell would have cost.
That’s even worse, GKHenman, RJ is a bad defender. We’d have 3 bad defenders 1 to 3, a guy that only puts effort on D half of the time at 4 and Mitch to try to clean up this mess all by himself.
Don’t forget about Hart Cyber. He’s a very good and versatile defender. Also, the other half of my fantasy, is to use RJ and the rest of our assets to acquire OG. That would give us a core 6 of Brunson, Randle, Mitch, Hart, OG, and LaVine. Those six plus whoever doesn’t get dealt is a contender my friend.
I don’t find much value in listing positions. Grimes guards the opponent’s best player, RJ guards the 2nd best, Brunson gets hidden on the 3rd guy. RJ spent the entire playoffs defending opposing guards.
And RJ was terrible on defense all year. I’m not sure we’re going to miss him. LaVine is perfectly capable of running into screens and closing out too slow.
Well, if we can get OG, then it’d be a different scenario. But OG reportedly wanted out of Toronto last year because he wasn’t getting the touches he wanted. Playing with Brunson, LaVine and Randle, good luck getting touches, OG. 😀 And then there’s LaVine’s injury history, i think with the Knicks usual luck, he’d blow his knee in the first month here or something. 😛
I’d prefer a two-way superstar, or else just keep getting better with smaller steps. Why not get only OG and not LaVine? I’d support this idea.
Ok Cyber, we all want prime Kawhi or PG, but in ’22 or ’23 who are you going to get that is better? Don’t say we don’t know yet. The league is only so big.