Knicks Morning News (2023.10.02)

Damn, I thought I kilt the KnickerBlogger! Anyway, since Owen brought it up, I posted this yesterday:

Here’s some interesting stats:

Jrue Holiday has a career playoff shooting percentage of 42% in a season’s worth of minutes (2,651), including shooting under 40% in his 3 seasons with the Bucks…and 40.9% in his championship run. In his last 5 playoff runs (300+ attempts) his 3pt% was .250, .320, .303 (his championship year), .316, and .286. Jrue shot the Bucks out of the playoffs vs. the Celts in the second round in 2021-22…36% from the field, 30% from 3, while Smart shot 41% from the field and 39% from 3. He was terrible against the Heat in the playoffs last year, especially considering how much the Bucks needed him to step up when Giannis was struggling.

KP had a very good season on a terrible team with absolutely no pressure in a small market with no media and no storied history and no entitled, insufferable fans. He has played a total of 327 playoff minutes. In his first year he got hurt after 3 games. In his second year he played all 7 games and was hardly noticable…13.1 pts, 5.4 rebs, 0.7 blocks in 33mpg, while shooting .296 from 3.

“Leon is kind of like the inverse of every past Knick GM. Doesn’t get distracted by the shiny object, doesn’t make the pointlessly aggressive move, but is so risk averse that he’s not really ever in the mix for any of the big fish. I mean, he’s so risk averse he usually won’t even select a player in the draft.

The end result certainly isn’t terrible, and maybe one day he’ll break the mold and make the big all-in trade for the superstar that you need to have if you want to contend. In the meantime I’m enjoying being something other than a laughing stock.”

Well if the rumored mega-offer the Knicks made for Spida was what it was, that hardly backs up the contention that he’s risk-averse. Similarly, extending RJ, waiting on Mitch, trading a first rounder for Hart…all of these moves carried substantial risk…just a different kind of risk that the “all-in on a star” type of move carries.

Last year at this time, some here were convinced that there wasn’t even a plan at all…and have now come to understand that there actually is a plan, and that the plan is actually very risky, with very little margin for error. It’s a plan that could be fatally derailed with one premature “swing for the fences” move. And Leon deserves very little credit for missing out on Spida because his final offer was totally inconsistent with the success of his plan, and only the fact that he was outbid by CLE bailed him out from making an unrecoverable high-risk/low-reward blunder.

And outbidding MIL or MIA for Dame would have been even worse. Same with outbidding BOS for Jrue. Thank goodness he wasn’t stupid enough to blow a shitload of assets on those guys, who happen to play the same position as the most rootable player we’ve had this millenium.

Just because you set a limit in a bidding war doesn’t mean that you are risk-averse. In fact, there is substantial risk inherent in not outbidding your competitors. When you let such opportunities pass, whether in trades, free agency, or in the draft, you are taking the risk that a better opportunity to improve the team might not come along. Who knows when the next Lillard-level player might hit the market? Or whether the cost will be even more prohibitive?

But in spite of “missing out” on those deals, we have a top-8 team with a slew of good to excellent value contracts, a 9-deep rotation of very good players who are all 28yo and under, and a surplus of draft capital. Leon has dramatically exceeded the expectations of nearly everyone who doubted that his commitment to the hybrid approach could get the team to this point in such a short time. That he did so in spite of a bunch of “bad” risks like drafting Obi, trading a first for Reddish, signing Kemba and Fournier, doubling down on Rose, Burks, and Nerlens, is even more impressive.