Imagine if pagliacci was a Grizzlies fan right now.

I’d be fine. That team is much better than the Knicks even without Morant, who is better than any Knicks player in my lifetime.

It’s not any one game that gets me, it’s the 25 years of hopelessness.

The playoffs exposed that you can just pack the paint and play zone and we’ll reliably crumble. Opponents’ shooting will range from terrible to fantastic, while ours will range from terrible to okay. When those are the parameters, stretches like we’ve had are not outliers that we can just disregard. They are part of the expectation.

At this point I believe we are between the 20th and 25 best team in the league. I’m revising my prediction ~35 wins and the 11th pick in the draft. And that’s purgatorial.

We struggled early because everyone struggled (except RJ LOL). Now most players are PROgressing toward their mean, but RJ is out and Randle is still mastiff poo.

My position is that come 20 games, Randle is back to All-NBA. I do not think this is the every-other-year meltdown, it’s him coming back from an injury, exacerbated somewhat by Randle also being a weirdo.

The fact that we’ve almost beaten everyone so far despite our deep suckitude (we just shot 25% from three, they shot 51%!!!), including (to repeat d-mar) having played 5 playoff teams, 2 teams favored to win a title, and 2 back to backs in 6 games, to me is pretty fucking impressive.

So yeah, I’m upping my 46 wins to 47. Fuck you.

But I think we had a hard time with their hot-shooting bigs drawing our bigs out of the paint.

Unfortunately given his track record, it’s hardly a guarantee he stops being terrible. What would it cost to get the Toppin guy from Indiana?

Here’s a hot take, if RJ plays these past 2 games Knicks win both games.

Not that RJ would necessarily play well, but that would probably mean fewer shots for Randle and fewer bad lineup decisions from Thibs. I’m not even sure that’s much of a hot take.