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[news.google.com] — Tuesday, September 19, 2023 5:05:56 PM
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50 replies on “Knicks Morning News (2023.09.20)”
I agree with almost all of these. I would probably switch Grimes and IQ. And I’m irrationally giving RJ a full up.
It really might be this simple. Randle was awesome last year, and I think it’s easy to underestimate the impact it will have if he’s less than awesome this year.
Jesus, how are we are 35 days away from the regular season starting? I never remember offseasons feeling this long.
Season 2 of The OC was definitely not as good. Did deliver on the live performances I was promised. Seems they replaced the more dramatic parts and the fish out of water story arc with bands and more of an emphasis on comedy. Still good but not anywhere near season 1, it’s basically a sitcom at this point. I look forward to the disaster that is season 3.
Personally I think a lot of the variation we see in box score numbers from year to year is the result of a change in role, defensive adjustments, injury related, occasional personal problems and noise (especially 3p%). I think most players are improving until age or injury catches up with them and they start slowing down.
That said, I think most of our players are young enough to get better. How that translates will be a function of the above. I gave J-Hart a “down” because he was just too good for NY last year to sustain and I’m more on the fence with Randle.
Brunson: hold
Barrett: up
Grimes: up
Hart: down
DiVincenzo: hold
Robinson: up
Quickley: up
Hartenstein: up
Randle: down/hold
Deuce: up
Sims: up
My projections:
Randle: UP
Brunson: UP
Barrett: DOWN
Hart: DOWN
Grimes: LEFT
DiVincenzo: RIGHT
Robinson: LEFT
Quickley: RIGHT
Hartenstein: B A
I distinctly recall the OC came to a grinding halt when Oliver appeared, which I think happened in Season 1.
There was definitely some good episodes in the later years (I loved Taylor Townsend). But this is one of those shows that would have benefited from the English Series model, which is basically “tell a story til it’s over.” In that case, it probably would have ended after Chrismukkah, which was about 12 episodes in. That’s when the original idea ran out. The rest was them throwing shit at the wall to varying degrees of success because the money was good.
I never remember offseasons feeling this long.
Given our playoff run, it is actually one of the shorter ones we’ve had in quite a while!
A little weird that we have 2 preseason games vs Boston and then play them again on opening night.
I think RJ will be slightly better but that’s it. He’s going to end up a decent but overrated player unless he can figure out threes, ft, and defense.
I agree on JHart. He was an All-NBA player for us after arriving, until the playoffs. He can’t repeat that but will still be amazing to watch.
I wouldn’t bet against the pattern Randle has established of alternating great seasons with terrible seasons because that’s the kind of Knicks fan I am. Dreading a Bad Julius season.
I think a lot of the guys are stable and it’s really down to IQ and Grimes and whoever we may acquire to provide upside.
The off-season between the O.C. Season 3 and Season 4 felt longer, but that may have been because of the writer’s strike.
In-depth article on James Dolan in today’s NY Times (behind a paywall).
Isiah Thomas still works for him in a non-basketball capacity.
Its seems like the consenus on Josh Hart is that he will have a down year because he was so great for us last year and exceeded expectations.
My view: Other than his 3FG% on wide open spot up shots, he basically did what he always does.
Toughness, rebounding, leading a 1 vs 4 transition break, defending at an elite level, being the first domino to create an advantage on offense, (see Steve Kerr explanation), play multiple positions inteligently, great insticts + effort (win 70:30 balls, – Spo).
Same as Brunson, Hart’s game is simple but very effective. Can’t be game planned strategically by opposing coaches.
With Brunson, doesn’t matter how many times you warn elite defensive players not to fall for his fakes. Same with Hart, – it doesn’t matter how many times you warn NBA players that they will have to play with higher intensity and effort when going up against him. I’ve seen opposing players decide not to contest a 50/50 lose ball and surrender it voluntarily because they either don’t want to be embarrased or actually believe that he will win it anyway.
Unless Hart gets a little lazy like Oakley did when he got his contract/bonus or his kids don’t sleep at night, – can’t see how he has a down year because of opposing players/coaches strategy until his athleticism declines.
I will continue to count on a dog to be a dog. Especially, when it’s my dog.
Our path to a really fun season looks like this: offense stays as good as it was, while defense improves substantially.
A less fun season looks like this: offense gets worse, defense doesn’t really improve much.
Both scenarios seem equally likely to me.
Frankly, I think the anticipation of a down year for Julius based solely on some pattern is low-level thinking. Each of the last 4 seasons were very different in some way regarding his role, his teammates, and his shot profile.
At the very least, give some statistical reasoning behind this prediction. Will he shoot worse from 2? From 3? More turnovers?
Because without that, it’s just a better’s hunch on a coin flip.
“Our path to a really fun season looks like this: offense stays as good as it was, while defense improves substantially.
A less fun season looks like this: offense gets worse, defense doesn’t really improve much.”
Probably every team in the NBA has fans that are subject to some version of this very general level of analysis. It’s almost as basic as “If we on average score even more points than the other team, we’ll have a really fun season. If we don’t, we won’t.
Similarly, the better-worse-same list with regard to specific players is pretty nebulous. Are we talking BPM?
Z–man with the “Don’t give me your flabby personal takes, feelings, or general impressions. Data up or go home!”
lol Raven, if any of it came across as snarky or dismissive, my apologies! The intent was purely light-hearted.
No worries, Z, I just like how you went after Knicks and Analysis with Stats, and managed to inject Humor into the process, at least for me.
i like kburt8’s nintendo cheat code 🙂
I think we were a little too quick to dismiss Strat’s concern about team’s copying Miami’s approach yesterday. Leaving bad-to-average shooters open and crashing the boards is not a particularly hard strategy to replicate.
NBA coaches often seem to busy to come up with tactics in the middle of the season, but once the book is out on you, they follow it til it doesn’t work. Shouldn’t we expect a whole year of teams leaving
Eh, not too worried about the regular season and teams worse than Miami trying to copy Miami’s playbook and beating us.
A lot of teams have tried to copy the Warriors blueprint once they took over the league and started shooting way more three’s but they didn’t have Steph and Klay so it didn’t work as well for them.
Miami is an insanely disciplined team defensively. Very few teams can replicate what they did to us in the regular season. And even then…would they have had that same success if Randle (a great rebounder) and IQ (a great rebounder for a guard) weren’t hurt?
Also, Miami didn’t smoke us. It went to 6 games and almost won that last one. To me it felt like the momentum had started to turn in our favor those last few games but we were down too much by then to come back.
Randle and Mitch are elite rebounders. IHart is pretty damn good too. RJ, IQ and HART are all great rebounders for wings. Most teams are not gonna be able to match up against us on the boards. We absolutely dominated Cleveland in the first round on the boards even with RAndle hurt.
I also think the every other year theory for Randle is way too simplistic a narrative to be true. We’re talking about 4 years out of a 9 year career. The 5 seasons before that he had simply gotten better every year as he went from being a young player to a young vet.
And it’s very easy to see why his first season with us was not good (9 power forwards, no real PG outside of Elf) or his third year (defense took a huge hit with the kemba and fournier back court).
Dolan confirming again that he’s a spoiled brat, – saying he doesn’t like owning sports teams. It’s human nature not to value inherited assets like one would value them when they’re self earned but the deuchebag lacks the humility and gratitude of hitting the gene loterry. Steinbrenner and Buss family would never utter those words publicly.
Yeah, Oliver was pretty terrible. And yeah, that was season 1.
As soon as he left I thought it was really good again. It would have been perfect if they ended it at season 1 and just cut or made less of Seth trying to date 2 girls at once, which struck me as a little too ridiculous.
If they ended with the Tijuana episode I’d have thought that was great too, but Im a sucker for downer endings. It kinda seemed like they were going for an end of season episode there anyway. Sandy even makes a meta-joke about a next season in it.
If it wasn’t clear, I meant that Bad Julius feels inevitable, even if it’s “low level” thinking.
Keep me on my toes though Z!
I have never wanted to own the Knicks, except for every day of my life.
Well, it’s hard to hit three like Steph & Klay. It’s not hard to leave RJ Barrett and Josh Hart wide open.
my projections:
combined number of games that Donnie and I will watch this season because I fucking hate James Dolan almost as much as I hate sportsbetting advertisements: 4.5
taking the under
I shouldn’t be surprised, but that Dolan profile is extremely unflattering despite the author taking care to be as neutral as possible. I guess I naively thought that decades of being despised by large groups of people for different reasons might instill in him an ounce of self-awareness, but nope. Just a dumb pompous asshole despite having zero accomplishments to his name. At least it seems like he doesn’t really care much about the Knicks anymore. Just cut the checks.
Randle’s shot distribution from this past season (basically trading most long mid-rangers for threes) should protect him against harsh regression, but if his 3PT% is closer to 30% we could still be in some trouble there.
One thing I’ll be watching is whether Quickley can get off to a good start. It’s kind of been memory holed because he finished the season so strongly, but his 2022-2023 start was woeful.
First 30 games: 9.6-4-3, 39/30/84 shooting splits
Next 51 games: 18-4.2-3.7, 47/40/81 shooting splits
Now, I’m not really a fan of dicing up stretches of games arbitrarily and arguing without evidence that a particular stretch is the “real” version of a player. The safest assumption is Quickley is the player he showed he was through 81 games, which is plenty.
But he has improved every year, and simply being the guy he was for 51 games for the whole season would constitute another such improvement that would counterbalance regression from other guys. I ain’t betting against Immanuel Quickley making it happen.
Interesting take TNFH. Was this is part due to his minutes increase as a result of Evian & Cam benching?
Well… turns out the Heat didn’t actually stop us on the boards. Our ORB% only dropped from 28.3 to 27.2. So there you go, Strat.
It’s very easy to replicate. It’s pure strategy as opposed to trying to copy an offense that requires skills that very few players have.
People have a tendency to think in extremes as if the other teams have to do it as well as Miami or it doesn’t count. They don’t. All they have to do is come into a game stressing boxing out and paying special attention to Robinson and Josh Hart. If they take away an extra possession or two in a game that could be the difference between winning or losing or few games over the course of a season. That’s not the end of the world, but you need something else to offset it.
We also know they are going to give some shots to RJ and Randle unless they prove they can hit tougher 3s.
I think if one wants to defend the concept that Julius is due for regression. the fairest way to do it is to average his 3 Knicks seasons, where despite the changes around him, his role has largely been consistent, as the baseline. That average with the Knicks is visible in B-R at the bottom of every table. For example, I don’t think it’s far-fetched to anticipate a TS% in the .551 range or a BPM in the 2.1 range. And if that happens, it would have to be counterbalanced by improvements for other players for the Knicks to be as good or better than they were this year.
What would likely account for the regression? Since he was pretty much at his Knicks average of 34% last year, it is less likely to me that it would happen there. It’s really his 2pt% that seems like the outlier. Last year it was .553, which is well above his Knicks average of .498.
However, he has shifted his shot selection to more attempts from 3 and from close to the hoop and fewer long 2’s. So it could be reasonable argued that he has some theoretical protection against regression there.
As such, I don’t project much regression in Julius’ upcoming season. There’s not a thing that he did last season that screams regression. But more importantly, even with some regression back to his Knicks’ averages, I don’t buy the “as Julius goes, so goes the Knicks” premise. To me, it’s actually the opposite; it’s how everyone but Julius (and Brunson, Mitch, and iHart) goes….IQ, Grimes, RJ, JHart and DDV all have a pretty wide range of possible outcomes.
I mean, his career graph looks a lot like the tide history at Zuma Beach. You can still build your sandcastle down by the shoreline and hope it’s there in the morning, but there’s a rather reliable chance that you’ll be disappointed when you return.
I am not expecting a huge regression from Randle. His shooting seemed much more sustainable than it did in his first all-NBA season. The problem is his defense fell off such a cliff last year that I don’t think he was even really a net positive most of the time.
So even without regression he is not really helping our team win much anyway. If he does regress then he is a pure liability, and with no option behind him and the unwavering support of Thibs, we are in a lot of trouble.
I expect our team to regress as a whole because I don’t really buy that we are the third-best offense in the NBA and I doubt our defense gets much better.
Also, I think we signed Divencenzo to make IQ expendable and I would be surprised if he ends the season on the Knicks. If we trade IQ I foresee a pretty sharp drop since he is in my opinion our third-best player, after Brunson and Mitch.
What’s true for sand castles isn’t necessarily true for brick shithouses…
“The problem is his defense fell off such a cliff last year that I don’t think he was even really a net positive most of the time.”
…sigh…
I finally read the Dolan profile. It didn’t seem so bad to me. I thought the headline was misleading. It reads “Scorned in NY, James Dolan makes $2.3 Billion bet in Las Vegas”. But if you read the article, he didn’t decide on Las Vegas because NY rejected him, he picked Las Vegas because he thought it would be much harder and too long to build something similar in New York. I believe it. NY is a very difficult business environment.
man inherits media empire, including sports franchises that generate enormous public goods. man maintains a very minority economic interest in said franchises, but chooses to retain complete dominion via class b super voting stock, by what can only be considered the antithesis of popular demand. man laments he “doesn’t really like owning teams.” man sighs.
The Sphere is a big swing. Grudging respect for it.
But he is still a massive dick and massive blowhard.
there was this interview with paul mccartney wherein he was commenting about his contentious relationship with michael jackson…
he’s dead now, so I guess I won
make it your life’s work to out live james fucking dolan…
I really don’t give a shit about James Dolan.
Honestly, and with all due respect, I truly believe that if you really enjoyed last season, you need to give Julius Randle his props. He was at least the second biggest reason, and possibly the first, for why the Knicks won 47 games and didn’t have to play a team that would have beaten us in the first round. He was a fucking menace. We can quibble about whether he chokes in the playoffs, but this bullshit about whether he was a net positive or not in the regular season really has to stop.
Here’s some reminders.
That game in Denver was a turning point of the season, and Julius was magnificent. Those few plays in the video got me excited again and dreaming of 52 wins…
theoretically – julius should just be hitting his prime…not too many 20/10/5 players playing…
i see him maturing further, which should help him be a better teammate…he has insane athletic gifts…
i think the more we simply use him as a finisher, “hopefully” the more energy he’ll have for defense…hopefully…
his usage and increased efficiency, as well as his rebounding, do seem useful to our team defense…
He’s going to be fantastic in ‘24-‘25. Just gotta wait for it.
the off-year stat/play dip and “the ankle” are a bit spooky for the upcoming season…
thankfully donnie i can simply be a fan and choose when and how to spend my emotions…
and you know, when the going gets tough – only watch recorded wins…and, let the rest of the folks here fret and worry enough for any and every knick fan out there…
Another unappreciated thing about Julius Randle: he is on one of the most reasonable contracts in the NBA (and if I may say, contrary to the absolute nonsense spouted here last year as being the actual worst contract.) Every one of the other 14 all-NBA players is locked in on a max deal except Sabonis, who will still be getting paid $30M this year but his extension escalates dramatically after that. In 2024-25, Randle will earn $30.3M while Sabonis jumps to $41.8M.
Now it’s totally fair to say that Randle is the worst of the all-NBA group, or that even on this bargain deal he wouldn’t bring back as much in a trade as an all-NBA player should, but it is still an awesome contract for a player of his stature, and a feather in Leon’s cap.
I think one of the reasons Julius is such a lightning rod is because of his style of play, which leads to a wide range of perceptions about him.
He has the perception of being on-again, off-again (Good and Bad Julius), whether within a game, over a stretch of games, or even from season to season.
He’s not terribly graceful. Of the all-NBA power players, people like Giannis and LeBron have a beauty to their power, an inevitability when they go to the hole. I tend to hold my breath when Julius drives.
This extends to his outside shooting, which is often of high difficulty with multiple players draped on him. Again, with Steph and Dame it’s inevitable, while a Julius spin-and-shoot in traffic does not feel that way, despite it often going in.
I think this leads to people underappreciating Julius because of the aesthetics, which really isn’t fair (except perhaps for the first bit).
I’m expecting Julius to be on par with last year, as I am working to release my PTSD at his turnover-laden point-forward time (with Elf) and his meltdown season. I expect to be holding my breath a lot, but I also expect good things to happen.
And Z–Man, not a single statistic to back up my impressions, so have at it! (wink emoji…)