Knicks Morning News (2023.08.21)

“Thanks, Z–Man. Interesting. It was nice to hear someone lauding RJ’s defensive abilities, considering that every time I look it seems he’s getting turnstiled. Perhaps I just notice the gaffes and not the regular good play. I also noticed the hedges off his weak side match-ups in the video correspond a lot to my feeling like he’s ball-watching, when it’s actually that he’s more or less doing what he’s supposed to (he’s standing around in space).”

Of course!

re: RJ’s defense, Thibs defended RJ (npi) in this NYP article way back in February:

“Quite honestly, I look at some of those numbers and they’re meaningless to me,” Thibodeau said. “I haven’t seen a good ratings system yet defensively, and I think I’ve studied it pretty hard for a long time. I don’t buy into it the way some people treat it as gospel. You ask them what does it mean, and they can’t explain it….The way it works, defensively, it’s five guys working together, and the people that are tracking things, there’s no context to it,” he said. “You don’t know whose responsibility it is to switch, you don’t know whose responsibility it is to show, you don’t know if there is a responsibility to stay down. You don’t know any of that.”

This is why it kind of bugs me when folks suggest that RJ is a terrible defensive player. I agree that he’s far from a DPOY candidate, but Thibs is not playing someone who is an obvious defensive detriment unless it’s a guy like Brunson who more than makes up for it on the offensive end and as a leader.

On that note, Brunson’s defense was apparently the reason why he got so much criticism about yesterday’s game. Apparently Schroder and the other Germany guard were scoring at will against him.

PS I know Brunson draws lots of offensive fouls, but that is not an indication that he is a good defender. In fact, it is often a bail-out for players who are physically overmatched.

“If anything I’d say our offensive rating and defensive rating is skewed by aggressively pursuing offensive boards, which creates benefits for the offense at the expense of the defense.”

I agree with this, and it was pointed out somewhere that Spo took advantage of this tendency right off the bat by boxing out well and then having Love throw long outlet passes.

I disagree with the notion that all possessions being “situational” validates ORtg and DRtg as foolproof indicators of proficiency on either side of the ball, except maybe at the extremes. There’s all kinds of noise that influences these overall ratings…injury, lineup decisions, random hot/cold streaks, etc. The difference between being ranked 19th and 10th is 1.0 PP100P. Pace factors in pretty heavily. So does the ebb and flow of games, and of the season.

Overall, the Knicks were 11th in points scored per game and 13th in points allowed per game. Those stats suggest that we were pretty good but not great on both sides of the ball. Which sounds pretty much in line with what I saw all year. Seems to me that the Knicks scored somewhat more often than not when they most needed to and got stops somewhat more often than not when they most needed to.

“Lack of ball pressure was a problem for the Knicks for much of the year”

To a degree, but it is also by design that Thibs prefers keeping players in front of you to jumping passing lanes. Similar to the way he chooses to utilize iHart on offense in a way that doesn’t highlight the strengths he showed in LAC. So it remains to be see if DDV and JHart will be turned loose in that way. Conversely, I’m not sure that RJ would get as few deflections as he does under a different coach/scheme. I believe we’ve already had this discussion, but I refer again to Fred Katz’s article from July 10 which stated:

“Unless an unassuming dribbler politely places the basketball into a defender’s hands, the New York Knicks do not want your turnovers. They say “no thank you” to steals and want no part of pick-sixes. Instead, they prefer that you miss a shot so they can return judiciously up the court with the ball in hand…Thibodeau’s teams are disciplined. They aim to cut off as many avenues to the basket as they can. At least during this last regular season, the defense was consistent in its morals: Whether it was forcing stop after stop or allowing make after make, it did not gun for takeaways. Steals that occur inorganically are not the Knicks’ thing, nor have they ever been under this coaching staff. Defenders don’t jolt into passing lanes, hoping for an interception but leaving a path to the hoop open as a result. The Knicks at their best are Darrelle Revis, not Antonio Cromartie….The Knicks defense was 25th in the NBA in turnover rate this past season, and the low number was by design…New York doesn’t gamble as some other teams do. It hasn’t risen above the league’s bottom 10 in turnover rate since Thibodeau took over.”

The article goes on to say that Thibs is not a rigid adherent to this philosophy, and that the addition of DDV and JHart might indeed prompt some change in this approach:

“They leaned into takeaways during their first-round playoff series against the Cleveland Cavaliers this past spring. It was one of the major reasons they ousted the Cavs in only five games….This season’s team could be even better equipped to disrupt….It will have a full season of Josh Hart, possibly the group’s best deflector, instead of just a couple of months of him, as it did last season, considering Hart arrived at the trade deadline….And it will have DiVincenzo, who swarms dribblers, cuts off passing lanes and knows when to get handsy.”

In summary, there is not purely an “inability” to generate turnovers when factoring the essentials of Thibs’ preferred schemes…but it’s possible that he prefers the schemes that he does with this team due to the defensive weaknesses of the personnel that you pointed out, e.g. not having elite length at the guard and forward spots. So your last point is ultimately very valid, since we might see the schemes themselves getting tweaked due to having excellent disruptors like DDV and JHart.

The nice thing about the Mets throwing in the towel at the deadline is that I’m actually enjoying this nice little run with no pesky expectations to diminish the fun!