Knicks Morning News (2023.11.21)

Recap:
It was bad. Minnie was clearly the better team and looked like contenders, using their length to devastating effect against the lilliputian Knicks squad. The Knicks couldn’t buy a shot and didn’t stop the TWolves either. The Knicks will have better shooting nights, but the defense is trending down awfully fast after a strong start early in the season.

To paraphrase myself from the game thread right around halftime(because I’m too lazy to look for a better quote, I’ll note that a couple people mentioned pretty much the same thing a little before me):

Feels like we’re up 1 in the same way the Wizards were only down 5 against us in the 4Q

And that turned out to be the case as we were up that 1pt for the length of the shot clock. The half ended close before they got blown out in the 2nd half.

Brunson: A-
Should probably be harsher on him for his defense and underwhelming 2pt shooting, but was once again stellar on offense. Went 3-6 from 3, 8-8 from the line, and finished with 6asts to 1 TO.

Randle: F
Almost gave him a grade boost because he grabbed 14 boards and hit 50% from 2 while getting to the line 12 times, however, he missed 4 of them for 66.7% from the line in a trend that’s getting more concerning. In other words, his ankle is generally looking better but his shot isn’t. Also, KAT cooked him all night.

Mitch: A
He continued his incredible rebounding and added 2 blocks and 2 steals. He “shot” 5/7 from the field, so his fg% is getting back up to where it normally is.

Hart: D-
Overmatched by the TWolves’s length, he collected only 2rebs and 1ast in an unusually empty boxscore for him. He did pickup 2 steals, but didn’t do enough elsewhere.

Grimes: F
If he were any more passive on offense the ball would slap in the face every time a teammate passed it to him. Also, he missed all the ones he did take.

RJ: F
The ball did slap him in the face. Continues to hit 3s, otherwise old RJ showed up for a prolonged stretch to help seal the loss. Went 1-9 inside the arc with a 1 ast to 4 TO ratio and 5 PFs.

IQ: D-
Didn’t shoot all that great, didn’t rebound well, didn’t get an assist. On the other hand he was the only non-C challenging opponents at the rim and I’ll give him a couple points for that. Drew a couple of fouls in the 3rd and seemed like he was getting going after a nice and-1 floater, but nothing came of it.

Hartenstein: C-
He played 14 minutes and didn’t do a lot. He had a nice finish on a PnR with Brunson. Feels like the first PnR I’ve seen all season that used a bounce pass instead of a lob. He probably played good defense or something.

DiVincenzo: C
Yet another Knick who shot poorly but finished with 5asts, including a nice lob to Mitch on the PnR. He spent some time initiating the offense, fully showing his ability to get into the paint and make a good read. He could easily be the starting SG if Grimes doesn’t pick it up in the non-shooting areas.

Touched the Floor:
Sims, Archie, Deuce, and Jeffries

We didn’t struggle to score at the rim last night.

We shot 65% in the restricted area last night and 29% from everywhere else inside the arc. If we separate it out like this we see we struggled from a volatile area of the court.

Compare that to early in the season (through game 6) where we were shooting dead last with an atrocious 50% from the RA—a full 7% points worse than the next team. We were middle of the pack from everywhere else.

This was not a continuation of our early season trend.

We’ve been trending up in 2p% for a while now.

If you split the season into the first 6 games and the last 8 games, our 2p% split looks like this: 45% to 50%. The worst non-Knicks team over the course of the whole season is shooting 50% (we’re currently at 48% over the full season). It wasn’t going to last.

We were never going to shoot that poorly at the rim over the course of a full season.

Our 3p% luck has had less effect than our unsustainably low 2p%.

If we take our 2p% over the last 8 games (50%) and substitute it for our season 2p% (48%), we add 32 points to our total.

If we take our 3p% from last year (35.4%) and replace our current 3p% from this year (37.0%), we only subtract 27 points. This may overstate our loss too, since Donte is a much better shooter than Obi.

If we manage to tie for the worst 2p offense in the league, that will offset our 3p regression moving forward.

We need more than 3 good (Brunson, IQ, and Grimes) and 2 opportunistic (RJ and DDV) shooters

Donte is probably in the first group. He’s currently leading the regulars in 3pa/36 and DARKO* has him as a 37.3% shooter.

*I’m using DARKO instead of career 3p% because it adjusts for players who have shown an increase in skill while controlling for variance, so DARKO thinks Donte has improved as a shooter rather than being a beneficiary of variance.

50% of 757 2pa is a difference of 14.5 shots or 29 pts… but this is a complete wrong way of looking at it…

I rounded from .502 for the post, but 50% would still lead to a bigger difference than the 3pt regression assuming we end up where we were last year.

you’re not getting it.. you can just say if ‘we just do x over the rest of the season we will be exactly where we are’

You’re supposed to change your expectations when things change on the basketball court. If you acquire a new player you don’t make your prediction based on how the team performed with the previous player.

If we swap Randle for Lebron, we don’t say “That sample with Lebron isn’t predictive, we need to look at the whole year!” No, we’re going to make our predictions based on how the team plays with Lebron in the lineup because Lebron is a better player and the team is better with him on it.

The same thing happens when a player is hurt or healthy. Randle was clearly still adjusting from his surgery in the early going and is healthier now. All I’m doing is trying to reflect that.