Knicks Morning News (2023.12.19)

Plus Thibs would probably just wind up Fournier-ing Bojan anyway. There wasn’t a dime’s worth of difference between the two in the year before Evan came to the Knicks (other than Evan being three years younger).

The time to move on from Thibs has long passed. By declowning the place, he served his primary purpose well, but it’s now time for the next stage.

He’s already in a limited third option role, soaking up the backwash when the first two options’ ISOs break down. He actually functions in that role very well.

Plenty of other players would bitch about it, which we’ve already seen on this very roster this very year. (And that’s not even including Fournier, who has been chafing about it for multiple years.)

Nor is there any objective reason to believe that this spring will finally be the playoff spring wherein Julius raises his TS% above .500. If people want to dream about that, fine.

We need a guy who knocks RJ off his god damn perch.

We need a lead guy who doesn’t choke and lay brick in the playoffs.

All I have to say is thank God RJ is hitting his FTs at an excellent rate or people would be a lot more upset than they are now.

Knickerblogger and RJ trutherism is a tiny, tiny sliver of the fanbase. The majority position is that people like RJ, like his moxie (and performance) and what it projects for potentially big games, but wish he was more efficient — understanding at the same time that a lot of his shot chart is impacted by his third option status, the perpetually clogged lane, and the ISO-heavy offense.

Internet opinion will always skew misleadingly toward the provocative (and to a degree the envious).

It’s almost like a weird edgelord opinion to say that the guy is actually good.

It really isn’t.

Shall I list the really good players who had a worse TS% than RJ in the playoffs last year (at high usage), or can we depend on the group as a whole to actually play it straight?

“Stocks” is stupid, a textbook case of confusing availability of descriptive data with actual description and understanding. It’s not selling beyond the base of people who can’t or won’t make this fundamental distinction.

Mikal Bridges had two stocks in four playoff games last year; Barrett had 9 in 11. Who cares?

Please, this is ridiculous.

Only from your perspective. Objectively, it’s completely normal in every way.

Also, “moxie”?

Yes, moxie. It’s an English word like normal and modern are English words.

(Actually the stocks numbers were RJ 11 in 11 games, Mikal 4 in 4; the other numbers were only steals. Still doesn’t really matter.)

If (underlined) certain players hustle more than others in certain regular season games, that advantage is long gone by playoff time — as we saw clearly last year.

You don’t win serious NBA games by “playing harder” than the other team or “outhustling” them. Maybe you do on a random February Wednesday. But who cares about that?

Moxie isn’t an intangible; it’s a personality trait. Ceterus paribus, I’d project someone who doesn’t shy away from big moments to perform better in big moments than someone who turns into a deer in the headlights or an emotional puddle of goo. But it’s not a perfect projector by any means. And moxie can be counterproductive if there isn’t anything to back it up; in fact, people with moxie and nothing behind it are infuriating.

We led the playoffs in Orb% and DRTG.

Those aren’t the product of “hustle.”

Hustle could help with those, but the existence of hustle isn’t proven by those things. It has to be proven independently. (Just as the quality of Randle’s passing isn’t proven by how many shin-burners other players turn into actual makes.)

Renewed chatter of a Spida trade.

If you watched the game you’d have seen RJ take some shots IN THE LANE that had 0% chance of going in, 100% chance of getting blocked, and which resulted in layups on the other end. You know, the typical RJ Barrett hopeless kind of shot

Why did you capitalize IN THE LANE when responding to a suggestion that Anthony Davis be taken out of the lane?

If Anthony Davis is in the lane, shooting the ball in his face might show a lot of moxie but it also results in points for the other team.

The Anthony Davises and Timelords of the association are in the lane and in the way far too much for the drives of not only RJ Barrett but also other Knicks, almost entirely because of the (premodern, not normal) nature of the offense the Knicks run. This needs to change.

If it did, the shot and efficiency charts of many players on the team would change for the better.

(Knickerblogger actually knows this to be true, but has a thing for Mitch and an anti-thing for RJ and so it tries to shade and muddy and work around this truth. And so it goes.)

#Moneyball.

Wait, if Mitch is the one “clogging the lane” and tanking RJ’s efficiency,

All the centers are.

(And there’s no need for scare quotes around “clogging the lane.” We all know what it is.)

https://www.si.com/nba/2023/12/19/new-york-knicks-arent-real-nba-title-contenders

I suppose we have two options then.

Three. The other is to modernize and normalize — real English words!!! — the offense.

The article’s hot off the presses at SI and is the lead story at SI.com. That’s why I posted it. It’s newness, not its content. The response to it comes off as a bit whiny.

When Randle plays great like he did last night, things are fun around here.

The RJ trutherism really isn’t that fun in an internet sense. And then it’s defended with a lot of basketball BS and I have a natural aversion to basketball BS. Time plus basketball BS equals commentary. The timing is mostly coincidental.

Randle played well last night and is on a nice streak, no question about it.

Everyone’s been kinda cool.

That’s not really true, but I have thick skin and it’s no big deal.

It’s largely been the cautious contingent of the board feeling excited today.

Leave out the “RJ sucks, if they only replaced him with Quentin Grimes the team would win 57 games” stuff and the “anyone can create usage in the NBA” stuff and the “Julius is a great passer, look at all the 3 pointers he’s assisted on” and the “hustle is critical, look at all the offensive rebounds the team gets” stuff and the “whither do you mean by this term “clogged lane”?????” stuff and we’re good.

I did say that dumping RJ and moving Quickley and Hart to the starting lineup would probably improve the team by 5 wins despite their obvious lack of moxie.

Answer your question, Hubert?

But kudos to him for hitting wide open practice shots at a 33% clip that made a Hart-RJ pairing impossible.

Barrett TSing .550 in the playoffs made it impossible to pair him with Josh Hart? Seems a bit counterintuitive.

Mitchell Robinson OBVIOUSLY clogs the lane

Are you disagreeing with this?

Could you get more production out of him if you provided him with better spacing? Probably. That’s a reasonable enough argument.

OK, exactly — then let’s start there. You’ll have to get TNFH on board, though.

Reconsider the statement that he was “shitty” in the playoffs last year (*) — he was anything but — and we have something pretty close to agreement.

(*) Probably the core tenet of “trutherism.”

I mean, the rest should also be affected by the lack of spacing.

Randle pretty clearly is. Look at strat’s data and look at his efficiency his two years before coming to the Knicks.

Brunson’s a bit more iffy since his usage has gone up so much. But he’s less efficient now than at Dallas peak.

Both would be better players with a modern open lane. So would Barrett.

But even those numbers are downstream from the easily observable fact of a non-modern mosh pit lane.

I’ve been too tough on Randle (other than the playoff stuff). I didn’t fully realize how good he was before coming here and he’d be closer to that with a more modern offense and lane. Let’s all hope he plays well in the playoffs.

And playoff average TS% was .566 btw.

I know.

RJ will be free of his lane clogging oppression.

The other centers clog the lane, too. It’s a Tom Thibodeau production.

Let’s not end this era of good feelings.

The other centers clog the lane, too. Nerlens Noel clogged the lane. You know this already.

Pssst: It’s not just RJ. It’s affecting Randle and Brunson, too.

Mitch unclogs the lane for them.

Julius Randle’s TS% has fallen 50+ points as a Knick. His two-point percentages in the two years before he became a Knick were 575 and 564. As a Knick, his two-point percentage is 501.

People are skeptical that Lane Clogging Theory accounts for all of his inefficiency,

No one has said “all.” You’re lawyering again. (I’m guilty of it, too, sometimes.)

because he has multiple teammates who have managed to be efficient,

Julius Randle is nowhere near as efficient overall or from two since he became a Knick. Jalen Brunson is kind of coming close to at least holding serve, but he has the best footwork and natural ability to avoid traffic of probably any human being on earth.

The eye test is overwhelming and so, really, is the numerical evidence.

The question is how do we address that.

A new coach and a lot of Mitch as a high screen/roll rim runner with everyone else at the trifecta line. Barrett and Brunson could both be the ball guy, with some Julius mixed in.

They should have been doing this the entire time.

But the dual ideas that we can’t possibly win with someone like Randle, but we need to move heaven and earth to construct a roster around the skillset/lack thereof of the demonstrably worse player in literally every fashion, RJ Barrett, do not make a modicum of sense taken together.

Oh, I see now — the price of admission for wondering how Julius fits or doesn’t on an actual contender is being obsessively and relentlessly negative about RJ Barrett.

And all along I thought they were separate issues.

And of course no one has ever said anything even in the same galaxy as moving heaven and earth to construct a roster around RJ Barrett. That’s a complete strawman.

i dont know how this turned into an issue about spacing….. there’s spacing issues because 5 defenders are looking at one guy dribbling the basketball for 5 seconds at a time….

It’s both. The ball doesn’t move *and* the lane is clogged.

Randle and Brunson seem to do just fine in spite of the detrimental effect that RJ has on spacing.

We’ve been through this at length, but Randle is nowhere near as efficient as he was in the two years before he got here. He’s not efficient anyway; his Knick TS% is 550, sub-100 TS+.

Knick TS%+:

99
90
100
95.

Funny how Thibs is suffocating our 2pt offense while we keep outplaying better 2pt shooting teams with one or more max players on their rosters and coaches who run modern offenses.

But we don’t do that. I mean, since pretty much the entire league shoots better from 2 then yeah they beat those teams sometimes … but they don’t really “outplay” (whatever that means) the better teams that much.

Thibs is clearly suffocating the offense. The evidence is overwhelming as is the eye test.

How much of those shitty TS%s are due to RJ and his 27% usage?

Very little. Probably next to none.

The clogged lane on the other hand ….

Nice how the obvious clogged lane issues have been morphed into an RJ issue. But there’s no obsession here and I’m stanning.

Pull the other one.

What does any of this have to do with RJ being significantly worse?

It has literally nothing to do with RJ Barrett, which is why it’s always so weird and incongruent and off-putting when the obsessives and truthers bring RJ Barrett into everything.

In terms of Randle, it means he hasn’t really been efficient as a Knick. Due in large part to the clogged lane and primitive offense.

Jalen Brunson’s two-point percentage his last two years in Dallas:

578
545

First two years in New York:

519
483

He’s not immune.

This entire offense is premised on basket-hanging centers and board crashers regaining enough possessions and put-backs to make up for the relative bricklaying from inside the arc it forseeably causes. It’s time to move on.

What’s really stoopid is that a-holes who don’t even stay up for classic west coast wins have the temerity to pollute the afterglow blog with not only negativity, but perverse self-serving

Someone has to do the work to pay the taxes to support your Social Security, Z.

Glad someone brought up the Kobe assists so the board could be spared me bringing it up. Kind of weird in 2023 to have an offense so primitive that it on-purpose depends on the Kobe assist, but here we are.