Knicks Morning News (2023.11.06)

I’m not sure if I am rooting for Randle and the Knicks to turn it around quickly and start playing well or if I’m willing to open the door to a very disappointing year just to get Leon on track.

I feel like I’ve been saying this for years now.

1. One of either Randle or RJ as to go. They both have things about them to not like but more importantly they don’t fit together. One has to go! Randle is just making the decision easier with his inconsistent play, inconsistent effort, and low basketball IQ. At this point I’d way rather stick with RJ and hope he improves. I know Randle is not gong to change. Maybe both have to go, but for sure Randle has to go.

2. I was hoping for a big off season even though I knew that was unlikely. However, I was at least expecting a move that improved the team. DDV was not it. Maybe it’s making Brunson happier, but he doesn’t fill a need and now we have an extra long term contract on the books that I suspect makes Quickley (who could be critical to out future success) more vulnerable to a trade. This was a BAD off season for us. A bunch of teams got better or have injured players returning and we potentially worsened our position despite having a pile of assets.

If we get off to a bad start, the pressure will start ramping up on Leon and Thibs. Maybe then they will understand that we need a partial reset to create a more balanced team, starting with a trade of Randle and bringing Quickley back.

What a crazy coincidence, then, that so many people wildly guessed, accurately, that it was a bad move at the time.

No!

The result means close to ZERO.

If we made 20 trades, there were 20 threads of people complaining about each one of them, and 15 turned out bad, we’d have some evidence that maybe people were right and the deals were bad, but even that’s not enough proof.

These are not even player deals where it sometimes gets more subjective because of need, fit, and job pressure.

These are picks.

Data on what each pick is likely to produce over the long haul is well known and the market for trading them is generally efficient. The intrinsic values are understood.

At worst we gave up pennies on a dollar of value for strategic reasons. We wanted to save picks for a bigger deal that we hope still comes to pass. If it doesn’t come to pass that doesn’t even prove the strategy was wrong. It just means on this single occasion it didn’t work.

so what you’re saying is that you’ve been doing all that based off of your gut?

No.

For gambling it means using years of data, trial and error study of past results, basic regression analysis, and years of practical experience to estimate the probability of something happening and betting when the value exceeds my estimate of value by enough to give me a margin of safety to cover my own occasional mistakes.

In the market it means looking at earnings, cash flows, balance sheets, forming an opinion on future prospects and discounting it back to a fair. price. Then using the same margin of safety concept to cover mistakes.

here’s something that might blow your mind…. if you ask 20 people what the intrinsic value of something is… you will get 20 different answers

Successful gambling or investing requires that you know when you don’t know enough to estimate the value accurately enough to have an edge. You don’t have to bet every game or every race. You don’t have to have an opinion on every company. In fact, if you do it almost guarantees you’ll lose. There are that many mistakes out there.

he called us stupid…

I didn’t call anyone stupid.

I think this preoccupation with draft pick trades that have had as much significance to the values as a flea on an elephant’s back is stupid and talking about specific players and outcomes indicates some people aren’t thinking about deals in a long term value oriented way.

Who else operates like this?

I’ll give you that one.

Most people either make the pick, trade up or down for a different pick that year, or trade the pick for a player immediately.

Rolling picks out is not as common, at least that I can recall.

But you can understand the thinking.

Would you rather draft player X this year, player Y next year, and player Z the year after that or would you rather roll X and Y out and combine them with Z for a bigger trade later.

Value wise we probably gave away a few pennies on the dollar (that’s what ptmilo calculated) for what Leon perceives as a better long term chance to land a significant star than via the draft slots we had. Maybe his relationships, the NY market etc.. are part of his thinking.

What happens is still anyone’s guess, but it hasn’t worked so far.

this is exactly the kind of thing that people who haven’t learned anything in 30 years try to tell themselves…. it’s almost as reliable as the ‘if you can’t handle me at my worst you don’t deserve me at my best’ personality types…

it seems that you’ve forgotten it all because the only thing you know are things that you learned in your 20s and 30s…

smh

First off, I’m not insulting you.

I’m telling you that gambling and being value oriented is an area I’ve spent more time on than anything else in my life. I know a lot about gambling and thinking in terms of values. I’m a lifetime winning gambler that’s still active and I’ve made more money from investing than I did over my entire work career. There are loads of people smarter and better than me at both. There are even more that are smarter at everything else. But I have a very good opinion on this subject. Don’t feel insulted if I disagree with you about how to think about draft picks.

yes it’s astounding that you spend so much of your life doing something yet have so little understanding of the subject… you have a complete juvenile understanding and applying the wrong terms to the wrong things…. and calling everyone else uneducated on the subject… no .. just no….

Again, I did not insult YOU.

But beyond that I’m legitimately laughing my ass off.

I’ll be 65 next year and I’ve only met a handful of winning gamblers in my entire life. It’s pretty rare. I guess I should disregard about 50 years of personal gambling results and 37 years of stock market results if you think I don’t know what I am doing. lmao

Come on, EB, what does Pat Riley know about running a successful franchise?

lmao

He should of tanked and got lucky like San Antonio instead of all the teams that tanked and fell down in the draft or drafted disappointments like us.

Any gambling or trading strategy that intentionally dissipates asset value is DOA. Guaranteed to bust. There isn’t a single circumstance when it would be justified.

I understand what you are saying about giving away pennies on the dollar rolling out picks. That would generally be a terrible and doomed idea.

But there’s more to the story.

There’s the probability of landing a star with $1.00 worth of picks now vs. using $0.95 cents later as part of cumulative pick star trade.

If you believe you are more likely to land a star with 2-3 $0.95 cent assets later than with 2-3 $1.00 drafts now it’s correct to give away the 5 cents and wait.

If you don’t agree with Leon that’s another story.

His draft strategy is bizarre and has generated underwhelming results. I don’t know why that is such a controversial thing to say.

I don’t think anyone would disagree with you on that. We gave up a little value with some of these deferred draft moves and have little to show for it other than using a pick to get Hart. The counter point is that the strategy is still in progress. When we’ve used up all the excess picks then we can evaluate whether it worked poorly, meh, or well.

you are injecting your personal record into this and asking me to accept everything you say solely based on your record… and saying solely based on that that i got something to learn from you….

I never mentioned you or anyone else in particular once.

It was general comment made because this is about the 15th thread about incinerated picks that needed 1-2 at most when the traded occurred with no follow up. I think it’s a gigantic waste of time and energy over insignificant value.

Maybe I came off a little arrogantly, but I was tongue in cheek joking that a few years spent with a degenerate gambler like me would help some people think about picks better. Then things started getting personal.

I respect your basketball opinion. Let’s just move on.

I played online poker tournaments with moderate success 2009-2016, earning a middle class living with an ROI of about 40%. For the record, I don’t think this makes my basketball opinions any more credible than those of a non-gambler. Arguments on basketball, like arguments on how best to play a specific poker hand, should succeed or fail on their inherent merits and the parameters of the situation at hand.

Congratulations on your poker results. I played a little during the poker boom before Black Friday (or whatever is was called), but it never grabbed me the way horses did. My results reflected that. I became a bonus whore while it lasted and then quit.

imo this wasn’t a basketball discussion. It was a discussion about how to think about the value of picks that degenerated into what the correct term should be for their value and other such nonsense.

I’ve said this before, but in poker terms we play weak tight. We try to protect ourselves from volatility by avoiding risks, counterintuitively guaranteeing we’ll bleed off chips and lose in the long run. There are occasional Giannises and Kawhis even in the mediocre range where we end up picking, but we can’t luck out because we don’t pick. Because we fold a nut flush (19th pick) draw but go all in on top pair (Josh Hart), we never even give ourselves a chance to get lucky.

I understand what you are saying.

There is nothing stopping us from making our own pick and the Dallas pick this year, trying to move up, using the other excess picks to move up etc… going forward.

I have always argued that when you choose to build via draft, trade, and free agents you should do whatever makes the most sense at the time and not limit yourself.

If the trade market looks dead for stars, we should be drafting.

I think we know what happened do far.

They were ready to trade for Mitchell, but Ainge is the Grinch.

I’m not sure who or what they are thinking about now, but I’m pretty sure they were as shocked as anyone that Dallas was that bad and then tanked. I think they were expecting draft someone with that pick. So maybe they’ll make 2 picks this year if there are no stars available.