Knicks Morning News (2023.07.10)

I welcome some clarity on why RJ is viewed as having been bad at defense this year beyond raw on-off numbers, which are all kinds of noisy, as are DBPM and stuff like that.

Because there’s a faction around here that, for whatever reason, hates the guy.

I’m certainly no stranger to the emotion but (a) it’s usually not guys on my team; and (b) it’s usually players of immense, surpassing, detestable loathability such as Danny Ainge.

He doesn’t stand out as a bad defender like some guys we have seen over the years.

Because he’s not.

He doesn’t stand out as a bad defender like some guys we have seen over the years.

Guess it’s just The Athletic now, then.

Sad day when something like the Knicks winning the championship or the Rangers winning the Stanley Cup won’t have any coverage as “city team wins title” in the NY Times. Very sad day.

In its heyday, the Times sports section was tremendous. Generally speaking, the move in sports coverage away from narrative and people and teams to instead numbers and “value” and rankings and obsessing about trade deadlines and drafts — i.e., the next thing, rather than the thing going on now — is a net-net negative. Is what it is.

Blocks and steals mean very little to good defense.

People only talk about them because they can be directly quantified and they confuse that with actual meaning. That’s kind of the illusion of modern sports “analytics.”

The inability to quantify something discretely and exactly does not mean that thing is devoid of meaning and import. Conversely, a thing subject to exact measurement does not imbue that thing with meaning.

Player 1 guards Player 2 10,000 times. Player 1 never steals the ball from Player 2 and never blocks Player 2’s shot. Player 2 makes 4,000 of the 10,000 shots.

Player 3 guards Player 2 10,000 times. Player 3 steals the ball from Player 2 50 times and blocks Player 2’s shot 50 times. Player 3 takes the exact same 10,000 shots as against Player 1 and makes 6,000 of them.

Player 1 is the better defender. By far.

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Which kind of illustrates the point that relative defensive statistics that include a sample of teams playing anywhere from 4 to 20+ games against isolated opponents isn’t all the relevant as evidence of anything at all.

They’re more important, as they factor in playoff intensity, planning, and adjustments.

The point of playoff basketball games isn’t to generate “evidence” of other things. It’s to play and win playoff basketball games. If a guy plays well in the playoffs, I don’t really give two shits whether it serves as “evidence” of anything beyond playing well in the playoffs. Why would I?

I don’t look at these games so much as things that throw off evidence of other things beyond the games. Those things thrown off are greatly secondary to the games themselves. I don’t bet on the games, I don’t play fantasy basketball, I don’t have a massive interest in predicting the future … so I don’t need the games for those things.

David Eckstein hit better in the playoffs than Alex Rodriguez, therefore is a more valuable player than Alex Rodriguez, the argument went.

That’s not my argument.

If you need my argument applied to David Eckstein and Alex Rodriguez, it’s “David Eckstein hit better in the playoffs than Alex Rodriguez.”

Which he did.

I’m not entirely sure why people need that fact to “mean” more, in either direction — beyond the fact that sports yakking has become a 24/7 business and quasi-business.

You are referring to relative stats that rank teams against each other even though they are all playing different opponents. The “playoff intensity, planning, and adjustments aren’t reflected in the stats to any useful degree.

Both are factors, or at least can be factors. Opponent quality is speculative. The fact that the series are best-of-seven against a single opponent at playoff intensity and include far greater planning and adjusting than in the regular season is clearly true and not at all speculative.

weak evidence that you don’t seem to fully understand, which puts you in bad faith.

It’s not weak, and I understand it completely.

Opponent fg% isn’t a great stat.

It’s more important than “stocks” by many orders of magnitude. See the hypothetical with the 10,000 shots posted above.

We’re getting into that illusion territory wherein stocks are discrete and precise and opponent FG% is harder and tougher to measure individually and for that reason, and that reason alone, stocks is seen as better and more probative.

Doesn’t work that way.

(If it’s true that RJ Barrett (or anyone else) holds his man to 10 points below his man’s average shooting percentage, RJ Barrett (or anyone else) is a very valuable and good defender even if he (or anyone else) never blocks a single shot or steals a single pass.)

Sure but if on 2000 of those possessions, the player gets a wide open layup and Mitch has to contest at the basket and becomes the closest defender or IQ needs to rotate from the corner leading to a kickout then it’s very bad defense despite not counting against RJs opp fg%

And if that happened, it wouldn’t matter if RJ (or anyone) else led the league in stocks, they’d still be a shitty defender.

Go to B-R and sort the league by stocks, and you’ll see a lot of the players regarded as the best defenders in the league at the top

The regard and the stocks auto-correlate.

in which your authority figure is Tom Thibodeau, who you daily rail against as being shitty at his job.

Tom Thibodeau is not even close to shitty in “not unnecessarily deploying shitty defenders at the wing for major minutes.” He’s extremely good at that part of the job.

He’s basically weeded out every indifferent/shitty defender that’s come through his door as Knicks coach and bent over backwards to favor people he sees as good defenders. Elfrid Fucking Payton got major minutes at point guard for the guy.

Yet only RJ Barrett survives the purge? I think not.

I don’t even think he’s shitty at the job overall and in fact I’ve said the opposite numerous times. I think he isn’t the guy you want if your goal is the NBA championship. But he’s a very good coach.

TNFH can start with this simple exercise and maybe things will start to take.

On the same day at roughly the same time that EB (I think) disparaged usage generation by “noting” that a 10-year-old could go on an association floor and get his shot blocked 30 times a game, TNFH chimed in with the Emmanual Mudiay 2015-16 inefficiency example, the idea being (I guess) that Emmanual Mudiay missed so many shots for the 2015-16 Denver Nuggets that he was, by virtue of that alone, a loss causer.

I missed no shots for the 2015-16 Denver Nuggets. Was I therefore a better, more valuable player for that team than Emmanuel Mudiay? If not, why not?

This is incredibly tedious.

It’s not tedious in the least. It points out that there’s more to NBA basketball, or basketball at any level than “not missing shots.” In fact, the degree to which it’s important to “not miss shots” goes deep into a lot of current basketball analysis.

If you have a different definition, such as “could beat Cole Aldrich in one-on-one,” you’ll have to let me know.

The answer’s pretty obvious — you’ve just been avoiding it (though it’s been hinted at by others). Being able to generate usage is the rarest of skills and therefore being “bad” as measured by the standards of that very exclusive club doesn’t make you “bad” writ large.(*) A bad member of that club is better than some “good” backup 3&D nobody.

There is no NBA player who has spent four seasons as a mediocre-to-bad defender and a high usage, low efficiency offensive player I have ever spoken highly of in terms of their ability to help their team win NBA games.

Is RJ Barrett a worse basketball player than Cole Aldrich or Willy Hernangomez at their efficiency peaks?

If you’re not willing to go on the record with even broad ranges as far as those things go, it’s incredibly weak to accuse skeptics of irrationality. It reeks of you wanting to say you’re smarter than people without actually having to prove it.

I think the problem might be that the RJ-obsessives here think that the “opposite” side is equally obsessive about that “side,” and we’re simply not. That’s why we hear multiple times that my “position” is that they shouldn’t move him, which isn’t even close to true.

(*) Unless you vastly overstate the meaning of missing shots, which is why the Mudiay Example isn’t “tedious.”

what is the correct opinion on RJ Barrett? How good will he be, and when will he be that good?

He’s good now. He just might not be good enough to play the “exclusive club” role, if you can find someone better for that role. But he’s good enough to be in the exclusive club.

The only way he’s “bad” — apparently your take — is if you badly overrate missing shots in the grand scheme of basketball talent.

RJ creates Kobe assists for Mitch with all his misses.

He does. Being able to get to the hole, draw the shot blocker away, and leave your 5 open for an easy offensive rebound in case you miss is a valuable skill.

E how do you win an NBA game?

Not by “not missing shots.”