[New York Post] – Sat, 23 Dec 2023 20:17:00 GMT
- RJ Barrett puts up another dud as Knicks take brutal loss to Bucks
- Knicks’ RJ Barrett’s shooting slump continues vs. Bucks
- There’s no reason for Knicks to lose faith in RJ Barrett amid ugly shooting slump
- Knicks RJ Barrett Has Struggled In This Area Since Return To Lineup
- Is it time to start worrying about RJ Barrett?
[New York Post] – Sat, 23 Dec 2023 22:27:00 GMT
- Knicks prove again that they’re just not at the same level as league’s elite
- Knicks Notes: Elite Opponents, Barrett, Skapintsev, G League Showcase
- The Knicks Are a Superstar Away From Greatness
- What Can Make the Knicks Real Contenders
- Here’s why the Knicks’ defense has collapsed, and what they can do to fix it
[New York Post] – Sat, 23 Dec 2023 15:47:00 GMT
- Knicks praise new center Dmytro Skapintsev with depth thinned: ‘Size is terrific’
- Knicks sign center Dmytro Skapintsev to two-way contract
- Atlantic Notes: Knicks Frontcourt, Skapintsev, Embiid, Harris, Smith
- Knicks sign Ukrainian center Dmytro Skapintsev
- REPORT: Knicks sign center Dmytro Skapintsev to two-way contract
[New York Daily News] – Sat, 23 Dec 2023 22:07:55 GMT
- Knicks defense falters in 3rd straight loss to Bucks this season
- Bucks vs. Knicks Final Score & Summary: Team Effort Takes Care of Brunsons Knicks
- Scenes from Milwaukee being rotten house guests
- Bucks beat Knicks; Antetokounmpo, Portis lead scoring
- Bucks beat Knicks 130-111 for seventh straight victory
[The Athletic] – Sun, 24 Dec 2023 11:33:16 GMT
NBA Christmas games odds, previews: Celtics-Lakers, Warriors-Nuggets highlight five star-studded matchups
[Sports Illustrated] – Sun, 24 Dec 2023 02:38:34 GMT
Damian Lillard’s Instagram Post After Bucks-Knicks Game
[Sports Illustrated] – Sat, 23 Dec 2023 16:38:51 GMT
- Giannis Antetokounmpo’s Current Injury Status For Bucks-Knicks Game
- BREAKING: Milwaukee Bucks Announce Concerning Giannis Antetokounmpo Injury Ahead Of Magic Bout
- Giannis Antetokounmpo Considered Probable For Saturday – NBA News | Fantasy Basketball
- Giannis Antetokounmpo (foot) cleared for Bucks Saturday
- Giannis Antetokounmpo (foot) listed probable Saturday
137 replies on “Knicks Morning News (2023.12.24)”
There’s a bit of a happy ending to “Jane Says.” The real-life inspiration for the song, and for Jane’s Addiction’s name, is Jane Bainter and she is alive and well. I have never met her but we have 30 mutual friends on Facebook.
She eventually DID kick on one of those tomorrows, and has been sober for decades, and eventually did make it to Spain! She still lives in Los Angeles today.
I’m Jerian Grant*…
Just watched the game and honestly I’m a little bored…
We beat who we must beat, we lose (often badly) with the others, the playoffs are a certainty, Mitch’s out, Brunson is a star, Julius is Julius, Barrett is as maddening as he’s ever been (and he’s blowing his last chance, in my eyes, to be something), IQ’s playing 5 less minutes despite his improvements, DDV’s nice but not enough, Grimes imploded, the Hart Connection is still fun, Thibs… no, I don’t want to talk about Thibs…
It’s 100% true that winning is better than losing (I feel for you Pistons fans) but… Yawn…
Wake me up when there’s a trade or else before the playoffs start… 😀
* So in 2022 I finally realized my childhood dream of winning (as a player) the “Scudetto” in the Italian League… 🙂
Boy, I hope front offices around the league have a higher opinion of RJ than I do. (Maybe they think he can be better on a team with better spacing, though of course he’s a big contributor to the spacing problem.) Because I’m really ready to be done with the whole, “Has the light turned on for RJ now?” “What about now?” “Is this streak real?” “How about NOW?”
He is what he is: below average athletically, a theoretical jack of all trades who’s really only good at a couple of them. (And one of those, getting to the rim, isn’t that helpful when he makes so many stupid decisions when he gets there.) If the light bulb happens to turn on once he’s on another team — like it did briefly for Andrew Wiggins when he was traded to GSW — I’ll feel some remorse, but not a lot. After all this time, and with such high usage, he should be so much better than he is.
Merry happy, everyone!
Precisely where “the haterz” always said we were headed, innit?
All these high floor/low ceiling Leon moves get you to the same place: here. Name it what you like.
Btw Jalen Johnson in his third year is already a taller, better version of OG Anunoby, Jalen Williams in year 2 is the player we wish RJ Barrett was, and there’s already a handful of guys from last year’s draft I’d rather have than Josh Hart at 18X cost.
Speaking of Detroit, I saw Detroit was down by six points or so to Brooklyn in the third quarter and thought maybe they have a chance for a win and I did go to school in Michigan, so I have a soft spot for the pistons, and I started watching the game. It was close for five minutes or so and then Brooklyn went on a fifteen nothing run. Detroit couldn’t hit anything and DSJ looked better than Cade Cunningham. I turned it off. I feel for the fans there.
Detroit is now in an extra pickle: no team is going to want to be the one that allows them to break the streak. So suddenly, the worst team in the NBA is getting every opponents’ A-game because of the historical nature of the Pistons’ badness.
It’s interesting that the Bulls, who two weeks ago were dead and buried, are now sort of ahead of the Hawks and Raptors. I wonder if that’s further depressing the market for disgruntled Zach LaVine…or what things will look like upon his return…
IMO, at a minimum it’s further evidence that despite the generally efficient scoring he’s not contributing to much to winning because of offsetting negatives that are less apparent.
I know Robert Randolph talks a lot of BS about “sources”, but he’s saying the Knicks have 3 trade offers on the table. Maybe he’ll finally get one right and one of the deals will close.
Seems like LaVine has a thin skin and can’t deal with a coach like Billy Donovan, who while not necessarily a great coach, isn’t going to coddle him. The recent winning ways of the team without him might give Donovan some new life…at LaVine’s expense…
That RJ performance yesterday was so damn depressing. At this point I’m not expecting much from the guy, but as z-man pointed out, most of his shots were not even close. And that airballed floater, wow…
And we were never going to beat the Bucks yesterday, but if he makes just one of those 3’s in the 4th quarter, we could have at least put a scare into them.
If he did something else well, like play defense or grab rebounds, you could forgive bad shooting days. But he was a total negative at both ends.
If he has any freaking pride, he’ll come out and play with a vengeance tomorrow. But I’m not optimistic
“I know Robert Randolph talks a lot of BS about “sources”, but he’s saying the Knicks have 3 trade offers on the table. Maybe he’ll finally get one right and one of the deals will close.”
He might be the single most unreliable “connected” source in the Knicks galaxy. He spouts shit all the time and none of his scoops ever comes true. He should stay in his lane.
So, Cade? Who would you rather have – him or RJ?
RJ is trying to be something he doesn’t have the athletic talent to be. I don’t know how it plays out but his only way to be productive is to try to be a different kind of player. Which won’t happen.
Oh, such a wonderful story, thanks! It’s one of my favorite songs/band! 😊
Don’t know either, but… will he survive next morning’s breakfast? 😀
Yeah, that RJ game was as bad as it gets. What’s funny (not really!) is if you didn’t actually watch the game, you couldn’t grasp how horrific he was just by looking at the box score. He was, in a phrase, maddeningly putrid.
It’s the weirdest thing, right? He never gets anything right, and yet keeps talking about his sources. Why does he do this?!
He’s the king of the garbage time buckets to get his counting stats to less gross levels.
I think i’m feeling just like you, and maybe that’s because of this that i’m missing a lot of games. Lately i don’t even know when we’re playing. I’m going to try to change it, like a new year’s resolution, but yeah the feeling about the team is that we’re kind “stuck in a moment”, like U2 sing in one of their songs.
RJ was awful as a rookie. He made a leap as a sophomore to being merely bad. He’s been the exact same guy ever since. I pored over his annual stats and can’t find one area that he’s definitely better at now than he was three years ago.
Leaving aside rookie seasons, has there ever been a player this bad who showed zero improvement over his first four years before suddenly emerging in his mid-20s? I hope somebody can come up with a historical precedent.
And Merry Xmas to all KBers! 🎅
“RJ is trying to be something he doesn’t have the athletic talent to be. I don’t know how it plays out but his only way to be productive is to try to be a different kind of player. Which won’t happen.”
I could live with the getting snuffed at the rim when he fails to see the secondary shot blocker just sitting there waiting for him to put his head down. What kills me is that he simply can’t make shots even when he gets to his spots, whether wide open 3’s, jumpers, floaters, or layups. There is no place in a competitive team’s starting lineup for such an unreliable shooter. He’s either got to step it up or Thibs has to yank him.
Now to be fair, it’s not like any of Josh Hart, IQ or Grimes showed up either. They went a combined 4-17, so together with RJ you have a combined 9-34 from 4 key rotation players. RJ obviously was the centerpiece of the shitshow, but he was far from alone.
It’s very strange, but as a celebrity he must have some connections inside the organization. You would think he’d occasionally hear something legit.
FTs
Maybe we can turn him into an assistant coach and he can work with Mitch. 😉
RJ’s improvement from the FT line seems real, and one would hope that a bit of that would translate to other areas of his shooting. Sadly, it just isn’t happening.
I wonder whether some of his teammates, while being supportive in public, are starting to get frustrated with him behind the scenes.
I don’t see how they could avoid it.
The first couple of years of a player’s career you are going to be supportive.
If a player is normally good but going through a rough patch or coming back from injury you are going to be supportive.
When we are going on 5 years and he’s still throwing up high usage trash hurting your chances of winning, at a minimum you are going to be privately frustrated that they haven’t found a player to replace him in the starting lineup.
Amazing how RJ just gets minutes and minutes and minutes no matter how he plays. He hasn’t developed at all, plays the same dumb way he has always played, and yet never manages to find his way into Thibs’ doghouse.
You can see in a way why we don’t bother to use our draft picks: we’re not going to develop players in any meaningful way anyway. You’re either one of Thibs’ ruff rydahs, and you play shit tons of minutes, or you’re not, and you rot in the doghouse. If you’re one of the ruff rydahs it’s almost impossible to lose that status no matter how many thousands of minutes you play like dog shit. And if you’re in the doghouse there’s no way out.
Why would RJ have any incentive to improve as a player or work on his flaws? He gets tons of minutes and keeps his beloved PPG high. He has nothing to worry about. Nobody is taking his minutes. Kid got moxie.
I don’t see how you meaningfully improve as a team with this mindset. We have a stable roster, stable rotation, stable front office. And stable results. Behold it everybody: the ceiling. Enjoy where we are, because this is what we are. We’re at the ceiling. Nothing is changing here except the possible swapping out of a nut for a bolt.
I wonder if any other coach would dust off Evan Fournier and give him a shot in the starting lineup instead of RJ.
Alas, not Thibs.
(Don’t get me wrong, Fournier sucks too. More as a warning shot to RJ…)
The other alternatives:
-Start Grimes and DDV
-Start Hart and DDV
-Start IQ and Hart
and landed him a $120m contract extenion…If we were RJ, we’d probably think this is working just fine. Why change?
That’s the one I want to see for ~ 25 games but with the caveat where IQ gets 32-34 minutes per game.
JK, nice to hear that – I never knew the outcome.
My funny Jane’s A story is that our one album was being mastered at Warner in LA the same time as their live album. I flew out to be there, and the engineer let me hear it as he worked on it – very cool. I think it sold just a little better than ours… But at least we got good reviews….
As for RJ, I have nothing more to say. Here we are.
Meanwhile, Julius Randle is having a colossal month of December. In 10 games, he’s putting up 27-8-5 on a .645 TS% at a 29% usage rate. He is 52-57 from the line. Brunson has also been phenomenal. But we need more from everyone else against teams like the Bucks. For all the IQ hype, he’s been kind of a no-show in those games.
Cool, rama! Jane Bainter did the cover art for that live album.
There’s a definite magic that happens when you get all four canonical members of Jane’s Addiction to play together. They are supposedly working on a new record with the classic lineup, and if it ever comes to fruition it will probably be very good. The fugazi Jane’s Addiction albums without Eric Avery are not real Jane’s albums in my opinion. The songs are all built around Eric’s iconic bass lines.
He does, but he still sucks. I’m done with him.
Great stories about Jane’s Addiction and Jane, thanks. Love their first (?) (*) two albums.
(*) Ritual de lo Habitual and the one before it. Can’t really remember if those were the first two.
Comfortable organizations stagnate. This organization is happy and comfortable at too low an achievement level. Comes from the top.
He’s the face of purgatory.
How, exactly, is he going to downsize what he did yesterday in order to fit in better players that lead the team?? His flex-off with Portis was preposterous.
Barrett doesn’t need to be replaced with a better version of himself; he needs to be replaced by a true #1. No need to simply tweak purgatory.
Question. Would you trade RJ for Lavine straight up?
100%
E will continue to say this about Randle: “He’s the face of purgatory.”
But now he follows up with this:
“He does, but he still sucks. I’m done with him….Barrett doesn’t need to be replaced with a better version of himself; he needs to be replaced by a true #1. No need to simply tweak purgatory.”
So after years and years of bashing Randle while referring to those who (quite easily) refuted your rosy RJ takes as truthers, you are now done with him?
What a fraud.
“Question. Would you trade RJ for Lavine straight up?”
Absolutely not. LaVine is a 2, and we’re pretty okay at that position, relatively speaking. It would be at most a modest upgrade at the cost of a huge hunk of the cap, and possibly a net downgrade.
I would rather attach an unprotected pick to dump RJ than make that trade.
That said, I still hope against hope that RJ can recapture some of the magic he showed at the beginning of the season…that magic is hanging by a thread of his FT shooting improvement. But I’m not 100% out….more like 85%. But yesterday was simply unacceptable. He desperately needs a shorter leash.
RJ sucks but Randle playing like an all NBA player is why we’re in “purgatory” even though purgatory used to mean not good enough to be a playoff team but not bad enough to tank for a top pick. But now that we’re a solid playoff team with two all star level starters, “purgatory” is having a playoff team. And the person to blame for that is Randle who plays like an all star, or the fifth year player who is making as much as Randle and regularly goes 1 for 109 in big games and does nothing else good.
It never meant that. The term was redefined and repurposed for the sole purpose of writing Leon’s Knicks out of the definition.
Having a lead guy you can’t really win with is a textbook feature of purgatory.
Can’t win lol.
So how many years has Randle played for the Knicks WITHOUT RJ in the starting lineup?
Dude for years on this blog purgatory meant exactly that. You changed it the moment the Knicks won a playoff series.
staying on U2 songs to describe how i feel about this franchise/team right now…one of my favorites “running to stand still”…
if we’re sticking with this boring ensemble roster….i would at least try this ….
watching these bucks and celtics games is kind of like me watching my cat hunt in our backyard….find the mouse…bring it to the porch in mouth with just enough pressure on the neck to stun it…but just enough energy left so that it attempts to escape the batting paw…not knowing it is fruitless…then the next morning i come out and all that’s left is the spleen…
Watched the 1st half on replay and RJ wasn’t the only reason the Knicks got outplayed. IQ and Grimes gave them nothing, Hart and DDV were blah, rebounding was bad, transition defense lackadaisical, and the Bucks hit everything in that 1st quarter. Brunson & Randle, while excellent players, aren’t good enough to carry this team against a Milwaukee.
Purgatory is being an 8 seed or just missing the playoffs.
We’re currently in the mezzanine—below the top teams and can win a series, not real contenders.
Yes, we can’t win a series against them, but we were competitive against those top teams last season. They run us out of the gym this season. This is worrisome.
RJ’s numbers post-migraine are godawful: .387 fg%, .260 3p%, .497 TS%, 4.4rpg, 2.1apg.
Amazingly, his ft% is still up at .855.
His 3-10ft shots are back near his career average, .345 this year, while it was up to .400 last year which is looking like a fluke. It’s a big problem when he takes nearly 25% of his shots there.
His 3pt shot looked much better early this year, it looks broken to me right now. Idk how, but he needs to get that fixed again.
So Begley says many in the FO think Dejounte is the ideal target except there’s the Rich Paul issue. I thought Leon was supposed to make it easier to deal with agents not harder…
Rather than kill each other, Swifty and E, perhaps take a moment to acknowledge that each of you has recently come off long-held positions in the face of insurmountable evidence: E is no longer an RJ Truther, and Swifty admits we’re not a contender.
We are practically in an unprecedented era of agreement on knickerblogger. Just in time for the holidays.
Merry Christmas!
One of the many things djphan has been right about is that Leon only makes it easier to deal with CAA clients. Klutch clients are unlikely to ever play here.
And if the FO thinks Murray is the ideal target, god help us all because they don’t have a clue.
The CAA issue predates Leon; Dolan made Woodson change agencies to CAA before hiring him permanently (*). Leon is best seen as just another CAA preference of Dolan, but of course now Dolan’s weird, bizarre CAA obsession (**) is getting in the way of improving the team.
It’s just never, ever just about basketball around here.
(*) Or extending his contract; I don’t 100% remember exactly which but my best recollection is the permanent hiring.
(**) I have some sense that the obsession’s ultimate source is something like the Eagles or the Eagles’ agent, which means the true ultimate source is Dolan’s ridiculous band.
My theory with regards to RJ’s playing time and wholly undeserved extension (what does he get as an RFA?) is we’re trying to puff our chests and pretend we regard him as a great asset for future trade purposes.
It’s just not going to work if he continues to suck. All we really need is for him to be half-decent enough for another team to not view his contract as actively detrimental–just be okay enough to be “matching salary” in Macri’s words–but he’s not even meeting that bar.
So eventually we’ll have to decide whether we want to give up on all that, which, to be clear, would in fact be brutal for our trade prospects, and play him more commensurately with his production. There’s almost definitely some low-hanging fruit wins wise by bleeding some of his minutes to Hart et al.
There is a clear need on the team for another high-usage player, and ideally a high-usage, two-way wing. So I kind of sympathize with the attempt to try to pretend RJ is that guy all these years. But we’re in year 5, and it’s probably time to stop playing pretend.
We’re 0-3 against Milwaukee and 0-2 vs Boston this season. Opening night against Boston we were up 6 with 3 minutes left. The first Bucks game (in Milwaukee) we were winning with less than a minute left. The other 3 games, I’ll grant you, not so good, but not sure getting “run out of the gym” is fair.
I really wanna see us step up tomorrow and grab the win at MSG. It’s really hard for any team, even Milwaukee, to beat the same team twice in a row so we need to take advantage of that.
What a great song! Love it! 😍
But i guess i love all about U2 pre-2000! 😉
Frank will back from the 23rd injury of his career in early January assuming he doesn’t get hurt during the national anthem . 😉
For the record, Li’l Penny, Swifty is correct. Purgatory is a term that we all used here for a decade to describe the Isiah Thomas / Phil Jackson teams that were just good enough to ensure we draft 8th but not good enough to actually make the playoffs.
IMO, Leon did not get us out of purgatory, though our ascension to the true middle did coincide with his arrival.
Julius Randle got us out of purgatory. His unexpected ascension to second team all NBA forward is the biggest reason we stopped being an NBA laughing stock. Julius Randle, of course, was already here when Leon arrived.
And to E’s point, Swifty, Julius Randle is the face of something. It’s not purgatory. But he is too good for us to be bad, and not good enough for us to be great. He is an entrapment of some sort, whatever you want to call it.
If we add LaVine I might buy a Celtics Jersey. 😉
If I remember well, even in those ‘close’ losses we were 15 or 20 behind at some point and stormed back when they took their foot off the pedal. It was obvious we were not on the same level as them, even for one game.
We agree on the following: let’s have another look tomorrow. I very-very much hope I am wrong and we are competitive against the Bucks.
We are on pace to win 47 games this season. We are what we thought we would be. We have made some costly unforced errors with this roster, but this is a watchable team. Playing for the fourth seed and maybe winning a round in the playoffs is not the end of the world and much better than spending a year hoping the ping pong balls fall our way. We can get better through the draft, we can make a trade, or we can use those picks to clear cap space for a free agent. I remain optimistic at least until I see what happens between now and this upcoming offseason.
IMO it was Quickley and Josh Hart that got us out of purgatory. Those are the two guys that have been wildly outplaying their respective roles relative to other teams and adding the extra wins. The evidence for Hart’s impact was very clear last year when we traded for him. Quickley’s impact is harder find evidence for but if we trade him I think the loss will be obvious.
Of course Payton to Brunson was huge also because Payton had become such a massive negative, going to a plus player moved the chain a lot. However, imo as good as Brunson is on offense, he’s a clear negative on defense. So sometimes I wonder how big his overall contribution to winning actually is.
Randle is having a great month, but I haven’t changed my mind a bit about the past in saying he wasn’t adding as much to winning as the boxscore suggests. I want to see him sustain this through and including the playoffs and then I’ll say he’s much improved and consistent.
I never seriously considered us contenders. I think I threw around the term pseudo contender a lot this summer. I just don’t like people who dismiss getting to the second round as being in purgatory or saying we’re a middling team.
There seems to be three clear cut contenders – Denver, Boston and the bucks. Philly and minny I’d say could also be in that category but remains to be seen. Then there are a lot of teams that next level down which were a part of. I’d argue we’re at the top of that pack but that is debatable especially post Mitch injury.
I think there’s a pretty big gap between those 5 teams and the next pack of goodish teams.
What I hate is people saying we’re in purgatory when we have lots of picks and a roster full of mostly young players with two starters who are all star caliber players. Or dismissing Randle and blaming him for putting us in this supposed purgatory when he’s been carrying RJ’s ass for five seasons now.
Get rid of RJ for a decent wing who can shooteven if it means we lose our “third option” and watch us immediately improve. All those open threes he clanks from Brunson and Randle double teams if half of them were made we would have been competitive yesterday.
RJ is the problem. He’s always been. He’s overrated and also had an overinflated sense of how good he is.
My whole thing with this mezzanine complaint is some people here want to go from being a laughing stock for a decade to becoming championship contenders overnight. The Knicks have finally become a very good playoff team and some people already are bored with them after 1 season cause they’re not yet at an elite level.
Teams spend years at this level before breaking them up. Recently look at teams like the Blazers, Raptors before trading for Kawhi and Buddenhozer’s Hawks teams. During the 80’s-90’s you had teams like the Cavs winning 50+ games every year and never getting out of the 2nd rd, hell Dominique Wilkins never played in a Conference Finals.
We finally have a team make the 2nd rd of the playoffs after 10 years and some people are already bored watching them cause they didn’t make any moves the following season to be considered an elite team. Many here preach about tanking and rebuilding which could take years to produce a good team yet you can’t bother watching a solid playoff team for a couple of seasons because they’re not championship contenders?
Well, we’re on pace to win 47 games, so clearly SOMEBODY is contributing to the wins, right? You make the case all the time that Randle doesn’t contribute much, and now you’re making the case that Brunson’s impact is overstated.
How do we ever win games?
It’s an issue of ceiling. You look at this roster, the respective ages and ceilings of the best players, their trade value, and the surplus assets we hold, then you look at the approach and creativity of the front office, and it’s hard to imagine the team improving much from where it is.
Internal improvement is not going to cut it, as we have no high-ceiling young players who could break out. Trading for a bona fide superstar seems out of the question, because we don’t have the assets. Acquiring the Josh Harts of tomorrow via trade isn’t going to get it done either. Leon Rose doesn’t seem to be a creative problem solver, so it’s also hard to imagine an out of the box move that moves the ball forward much.
So it kinda seems like… this is it. We have arrived. We’re staring the shortcomings of the hybrid method directly in the face. Teams that did a more aggressive rebuild focused on the draft and collecting assets have brighter, or at least more open-ended futures.
I hope after you’re done wondering you realize the answer is “extremely big.”
It all kinda stems from the raging asshole who acted like the Knicks won the championship when we beat the Cavs. The idea is not to dismiss the Knicks, just the stupid notion that Leon’s mission was accomplished.
To me the difference is that last year before a game I feel we could beat any team*, including the top ones, or at least we can stay in the game and give them a scare.
This year, save for the first meetings with Celtics and Bucks (when they were experiencing brand new lineups) the losses against top tier teams are kind of “non competitive”.
I really hope (and maybe need) we’d put on a strong show tomorrow. This 2 games homestand against the Bucks is the closest thing to a playoffs serie you can have before the real thing.
* And maybe lose to anyone, we’re much better on this now
The Knicks didn’t make any big moves in the off season
While teams who were already better then them added big time talent to elevate their teams. Its should not be a surprise the Knicks are way behind these teams. Those 2 teams [celtics and bucks] who the knicks have no chance against as do many teams in the NBA at the moment were contenders last season and have been for several years now
Knicks biggest issue is they have a scrub who they drafted number 3 overall who does nothing to effect winning. He has an extremely high usage and it kills the team. Randle for some reason gets more smoke then RJ despite being light years better at basketball for him. Between the media and fans the RJ hate seems to be way to low for a guy in his fifth year who is still a terrible player and now on a 100 million dollar contract. Other teams know he sucks and to get off his deal they will need to add valuable picks or a guy like IQ to get anything truly valuable back
Randle was the keystone, but our star that year was Thibs’s defense anchored by Noel who played twice as many games as Mitch.
He brought in Derrick Rose for a pittance, which is when we actually became a good team. Before that we were 11-14.
Our bench unit of Leon’s guys won us most games, led by Burks, Rose, & IQ. Randle & the starters mostly played to a draw.
Even though Randle was the best player by far, we were a lotto team without the guys Rose brought in.
The Raptors pre-Kawhi years looked like this:
48, 49, 56, 51, 59 wins
The key driver of their growth was drafting and player development. Siakim, FVV, Norm Powell, OG Anunoby… they were drafting these guys all along.
On the other hand, the Knicks are pretty flat: 46 wins (adjusted for the 72 game season), 37, 47, and on pace for 47.
This is why people are killing Leon. If we had Jalen Johnson, Jalen Williams, and all these other guys Leon didn’t want, we could expect the kind of growth Toronto saw. Instead we’re flatlining at 46/47.
Budenholzer’s Hawks won 60 games, btw.
And the Mark Price Cavs won 57 & 55 games before being broken up.
You’d be hard pressed to find many teams that really locked in to 47 wins. The Blazers are perhaps a good example, but being compared to the Lillard Blazers is actually insulting. They wasted one of the most brilliant players.
Relative to Payton and the other garbage PGs his impact is huge.
Relative to a starting PG that’s average on both sides it’s more debatable. We see and measure all he adds to our offense. We don’t see and measure how much he gives up on defense to offset some of that gain. There are reasons our defense has been an issue at times and it wasn’t Mitch and Grimes. They were helping offset the others.
Arguably more important than the players was what Leon did to overhaul the rest of the staff, poaching highly regarded coaches and FO staff from other teams.
Walt Perrin, Brock Aller, Kenny Payne, Johnnie Bryant, and even Thibs are all top notch coaches & execs.
Even regarding Randle, perhaps it’s not a coincidence that Randle’s breakout came after the Knicks hired his favorite college coach, one of the most highly regarded big men coaches in the country, to work with him.
They would be better starting quickley and get rid of brunson – a guy who no shows in the playoffs and every big game against elite comp the Knicks play
All of our rotation players are adding wins.
The question I’m raising is “how much are they adding relative to perceptions or average two way players at their position?”
I think Quickley and Hart are adding a lot more than people think. Until recently, Randle has been adding less than people think. And I think Brunson’s impact on offense is huge, but not enough consideration is being given to what he’s giving up on defense.
I understand Hubert but my point is the Knicks are only 1 and a half seasons into their stretch and many people here are already tired of this group. If this was year 4 of the same thing I’d totally understood, heck if at the end of this season they don’t get to the 2nd rd and therefore regress a bit from last season then sure it would be annoying to go into next season without changes.
But shit at least give this current group a full 2nd season to see how far away they truly are from taking the next step and not after every loss declare they’ve hit their ceiling already and the future is bleak.
I beg to differ. He has a significant impact on winning. It’s just a negative impact.
When Leon doesn’t make picks, the value of those assets do not go to zero. He can make extra picks in the future or trade those picks for a player. We shouldn’t have to debate this nonsense anymore.
If people want to say “I would have picked x, y, or z player and it would have worked out great” that’s fine. If you can do that consistently, maybe you should be working for an NBA team and Leon should be posting here. But that’s not the value of the pick. It also doesn’t prevent us from having the flexibility to either make picks or make trades later given that some teams prefer making their own picks over taking players we selected.
Also, we have a surplus of SGs we can combine with picks to trade and have an contract asset they clearly WANT TO trade.
Fun to come back from a day of travel and find the Barrett hate so intense I don’t have to say a thing.
BBA, I like your term ‘elite.’ I’ve always struggled with the term ‘contender’ as I have a broader understanding of that term than some here (and others seem to be that way too, leading to a lot of pointless arguments). We’re definitely second tier, or at least were before Mitch went down and Barrett imploded. A puncher’s chance if everything went well. Which to me is a low-level contender. But not equivalent to that top tier, who are elite.
And as a few folks have said, we kind of just got here, and it’s a fuck-wad better than the last 20 years. The moves to ‘elite’ are few and far between, so patience is a virtue. Not a trait we find on Knickerblogger, of course, so to be expected that the basic story line is we’re doomed to be second-tier forever, because that’s where we are, and all things are only and forever of the moment.
The Detroit pick is worthless. Will never convey. The Washington pick is worthless. Will never convey. It’s very likely that we’ll end up with a few second rounders as a result of those paper clip trades.
Turns out that trading a first round pick (a lottery pick at that) for the heavily lottery protected picks of the truly worst, most hopeless sad sack teams in the NBA doesn’t bring back commensurate value for the perfectly good draft pick you traded away.
And we have all been over the Cam Reddish/incineration scenario. That pick was turned into ashes.
Since we’re sitting on all these great assets, should be easy to convert those super valuable fugazi assets into something good, right? And if those turn out to be a bunch of second rounders that never amount to anything, you’ll be the first one to say “gee I was wrong about that,” correct?
Seems like to you, we’re 1.5 years into the Brunson era.
To others, we’re in year 4 of the Randle/Thibs era.
Both true, I suppose.
Year 4 of the era of Thibs, Thibs’s quirks, and Thibs letting Randle do whatever he wants.
Writ large, the needle has barely moved. Year 1, 46.6 wins, Randle played like shit in the playoffs, they lost in the first round to a lower seed. Last year, 47 wins, Randle played like shit in the playoffs, they ran into a Twin Towers inside-based team their Moneyball system matched up well against and won a round, then lost to a lower seed.
This year, project to win 47.
The needle hasn’t moved because rj barrett sucks
Not because of randle or thibs
For a while there was a narrative going that Leon was going to pull off a big consolidation trade that brought in a cornerstone player.
Does anybody still believe that? All of the trades and moves we talk about here are for more incremental, nuts-n-bolts kind of players.
The ship has sailed on the big consolidation trade that brings in a star, right?
The ship hasn’t necessarily sailed but they’re no more likely to make such a trade than any other team in the history of the four major North American sports that was a good trade for a star-type away from moving from the mezzanine (TM) to true contention.
And they never have been.
It’s a hope, not a “strategy.”
And it always has been.
I don’t think you have a great understanding of the offense/defense tradeoff at the individual level in the NBA. For guards, it’s immensely more valuable to be elite offensively than elite defensively. It’s not terribly difficult to hide a poor defensive guard on the opposing team’s worst offensive player, but it’s an enormous drag on a team’s offense to give big minutes to a poor offensive guard.
This is easy to demonstrate empirically–Jalen Brunson has the 14th ranked offensive EPM, and the 306th ranked defensive EPM. In your view, you would average the two to get his overall ranking. However in the real world where a guard’s elite offense is much more valuable than his poor defense is detrimental, Brunson has the 29th ranked overall EPM.
Relatedly, elite guard defense only takes you so far in an NBA dominated by threes and shots at the rim. Plenty of elite defensive guards play big minutes for teams with mediocre defenses. Alex Caruso is awesome, but the Bulls have the 20th ranked defense because Vucevic sucks. If Alex Caruso was as good offensively as he is defensively, the Bulls’ offense would not be 20th.
Lol
Everyone is aware of this. People have critiqued Leon when he has traded away picks for worse picks. This is not difficult to understand, and it is not difficult to evaluate the NPV of picks in real time.
Leon Rose traded the 19th pick for a pick people knew immediately might not even be a first-round pick, and literally could not be in the lottery. He simply reduced the value of the asset, whether it was used as a trade piece or to draft a player.
When Thibs took over the Knicks were expected to be a bottom 5 team in the NBA, I believe ESPN had them winning 20something games that season. I mean they weren’t even decent enough to get invited to the freaking bubble to even play a few regular season games.
Thibs first 2 seasons turned the Knicks from horrible to respectable, the signing of Brunson and trading for Hart turned them into a very good playoff team.
So yeah for me the Knicks really became a good team and now should have 2nd rd of the playoffs expectations once they signed Brunson. I guess it’s fair to call this year 4 under this regime but I guess I look at it from the point of view of how awful they were when Rose took over to becoming a 2nd rd playoff team in 3 years is a pretty good accomplishment especially since they did so without having to make any future crippling trades or signings.
But yes eventually something is gonna have to change to take the next step I certainly am not arguing against that but I just don’t mind watching this current team right now and I actually enjoy rooting for them.
A franchise can absolutely turn around in 3yrs, maybe they don’t, but it’s a crazy notion that Cade, Duren, Ausar, and whichever high-end pick they get this year has no chance to be the 10th worst team in the league by then.
Second Rd picks aren’t worthless either, it’s another silly notion people here like to perpetuate. For a team whose best best player was a 2nd Rd pick, whose best defensive player was a 2nd Rd pick, and in a league whose best player is a 2nd Rd pick… maybe we shouldn’t pretend 2nd Rd picks have no value.
The CHA trade was bad, but barring a complete collapse from the Bucks next year, the worst outcome is:
* A low 1st from the Bucks
* Three 2nds (two guaranteed to be high 2nds)
* And Isaiah Hartenstein, signed with cap space, who is currently outperforming Jalen Williams by EPM and DARKO
“It all kinda stems from the raging asshole who acted like the Knicks won the championship when we beat the Cavs. The idea is not to dismiss the Knicks, just the stupid notion that Leon’s mission was accomplished.”
Merry Christmas, Snuggums!
-with love from your lifetime lease tenant, Z-man
Macri points out that the Bucks have hit 50% from three (at least 30 attempts) four times this season. Three of those times were against the Knicks.
Make of that what you will.
And if you offered all that to Sam Presti for Jalen Williams he’d hang up before you could tell him about iHart’s DARKO.
It was a terrible trade.
“If people want to say “I would have picked x, y, or z player and it would have worked out great” that’s fine.”
One of those people went on and on about the great Keon Johnson for a while…hmmm, can’t remember who that was…must be old age.
gee thanks jk…now i can spend the next few hours wallowing in catholic guilt over jane bainter’s blessed resurgence and my totally callous lack of belief in my fellow humans…go jane go…
i bet she hits better now too 😛
I know Jalen Williams is a nice young player and was the 12th pick in the draft so he obviously has some pedigree but doesn’t he have a negative BPM this season?
I’m not a big fan of BPM or really any single stat to evaluate NBA players similar to WAR for MLB players but I find it odd that I hear his name brought up so much because the Knicks traded the 12th pick that season and so far despite his 17ppg this season he’s actually been a slightly negative player for OKC this season.
Serious question, is he poor defensively? He’s an efficient scorer despite not being a high volume 3pt shooter but he doesn’t really fill the box score up besides scoring. 4 rebs and 4 asts per game is nice but again I assume his defense has been somewhat poor this season despite looking like he had decent defensive metrics last season.
all things are only and forever of the moment.
that is both comforting and confounding…
The other problem with that trade is that it punts all the assets way out into the future, when we are ostensibly a “win now” kind of team. You’re trading a quarter today for two dimes and a nickel three years from now.
And for what, exactly? You can acquire fungible assets like second round picks fairly easily, while #11 overall picks don’t exactly grow on trees. Be aggressive! Draft a high ceiling guy that you can develop for a while, and then maybe you end up with a REAL asset. The back of our roster is all guys who should never play a minute in the NBA. It’d be nice to have at least one guy back there with some upside.
You might draft a bust, that is true. I’d take my chances on a busted pick over the Fugazi Draft Pick Pupu Platter any day.
Leon simply has to value draft picks more (and make better draft picks, of course).
Trading a first for a few months of Cam Reddish? Poor value. I love the guy, but a first for Josh Hart who, less than a year later, absolutely could not recoup a similar first? Bad value.
Trading firsts for marginal rotation guys isn’t what, say, Pat Riley does. Firsts are for the “chrome and leather” guys, as JK calls them.
So if we don’t make that mythical “all-in” trade, I hope we make this year’s picks for some guys with serious upside because we are pretty low on upside these days.
Leon’s guys are virtually (or entirely):
1. Inherited (Randle, Barrett, Robinson)
2. Generated and/or significantly assisted by non-scalable family ties (Toppin, Brunson)
3. The non-scalable weirdo Kentucky ties-cum-obsession (Quickley)
4. Thibs’s archetypical boys (Hart, Grimes, DDV)
He never says anything publicly. He never ventures into the normal player channels. (*) It’s fair to wonder if the guy even works.
(*) He likely never thought for a single second of drafting Tyrese Haliburton. It’s one thing — forgivable — to strongly consider, scout, and then pass. It’s quite another thing to eliminate him from the get-go because he’s not part of your dorky (and actually kinda slimy conflicted) sourcing channels.
All that being said, I am appreciative of Leon/Thibs for giving us a playoff team and a general sense of competency. That’s nothing to turn your nose up at, especially with Dolan always lurking.
I just have some New Year’s resolutions for them:
Leon — make at least one first-round pick each year based SOLELY on talent… not what Worldwide knows about his family, if there’s blood in the soil, or if his agent calls you daddy.
Thibs — simply give the best players the most minutes. That’s it.
I don’t think anyone (other than strat, sort of) prefers that the Knicks FO punts draft picks out into the future rather than making them now. Personally, I understand the logic behind the general concept, but a) would prefer that they just made the picks, and b) agree that even within the logical framework, the execution has been inconsistent.
Still, here we are, a team that as constructed has a 50-win/second round exit ceiling…but that also has a better portfolio of draft assets than it has in a long, long while.
The path from here to a 60+win title contender is totally dependent on luck. However, there are lots of ways to bump the ceiling up another 5 games or so without forfeiting any chance of landing a big fish, either via trade or through the draft. Not ideal for sure, but considering what we’ve been through, and the limitations of rooting for a team owned by James Dolan, I’m pretty good with where we are at right now. I don’t see a clear path to a championship banner more than anyone else. But I also don’t see a return to the pitiful laughing stock that we have been since Allan Houston’s knees turned to jelly.
Hopefully the Knicks will give us more May basketball this year.
When Dolan sells the team, it will open up avenues of discussion that are simply unrealistic right now.
question for you, zman. not meant to be provocative, at least not in the kb folding chair from the turnbuckle sense of the word. we all went back and forth about the potential luck component of our (and thibs’) well documented ISM domination. I found this thread as one of the biggies, but there were many. At one point I even looked at every single three point attempt by opponent expected pt per shot, but I’m not sure where it is.
https://knickerblogger.net/2023/03/02/knicks-morning-news-2023-03-02/#comments
amazingly, since that thread happened, we are literally last in the entire nba in opponent 3P% allowed at 38.67%. to be sure, this is a significantly smaller sample that the overall record, although unlike the record it is quite out of sample, so to speak. but it’s not a tiny sample, either: 4586 possessions and 1655 3pa. does this at all alter your view on how large the luck component might be to three-point defensive effectiveness?
hold on hold on hold on…
you mean to tell me that out of nowhere, on Christmas Eve, ptmilo brings up an old thread in which Z-Man at his peak insufferable assholiness said:
AND you’re telling us, ptmilo, that from the moment he said that, the Knicks have had literally the worst opponent 3P% defense in the entire NBA over a massive sample?
We’re not worthy.
There literally isn’t enough time in an association regular season to prep your team for 82 games of funneling.
And yet it’s not nothing, which is the claim I’m responding to and quoted.
Hartenstein is outplaying Jalen Williams this year, we are winning more now.
Swap Williams for iHart right now and we’d be dead in the water this year.
“amazingly, since that thread happened, we are literally last in the entire nba in opponent 3P% allowed at 38.67%. to be sure, this is a significantly smaller sample that the overall record, although unlike the record it is quite out of sample, so to speak. but it’s not a tiny sample, either: 4586 possessions and 1655 3pa. does this at all alter your view on how large the luck component might be to three-point defensive effectiveness?”
Not really. In that thread I linked some back-up to the proposition that the ISM nonsense was, in fact, nonsense…beyond a pittance of statistical variance…like what one would expect when flipping a fair coin 8,000 times.
If the schemes that were successful in the past are not working as well currently, I would be far more inclined to look for concrete reasons, such as changes in personnel (including individual efficacy), or in league tendencies, or in opponents’ making adjustments that are not met by effective counteradjustments, or that Thibs is plugging holes elsewhere in his schemes that are opening up better looks from 3 for better shooters, etc..
I would simply not ever default to “just random variance” when talking about large samples. Even the smallish but far from tiny 1,655-sized sample almost certainly has a more logical reason than “hey, we were just lucky then and are just unlucky now.” Even if I couldn’t pinpoint the reason, I would assume that something was there but was escaping detection.
Except that they don’t play the same position. Guess who Williams would actually be replacing? A shitty player named RJ Barrett. Jalen Williams is comfortably better than RJ Barrett.
Finding a wing who can put up a .600 TS% on 20+ usage is a lot harder than finding a solid backup center. Assuming basic competence from Leon, you’d have to think a decent Isiah Hartenstein caliber center would have been available somewhere.
And then there’s the fact that Jalen Williams is 22 and on a rookie contract, while Hartenstein is 25 and on an expiring contract.
Think Sam Presti takes the “better” player Hartenstein in a trade for Jalen Williams? Or does he laugh hysterically at that trade offer? Which player do you honestly think has more trade value?
I can’t believe I even have to type these words into the little box but here we are. We’re really making the case that trading that pick away was fine because we got two years of a backup center out of it?
Just for clarity, I am neutral on the issue.
IMO, a front office should weigh the value of the pick they have and look at the players available to them in that slot to see if they like someone as a long term addition. They should consider what they can get for that pick by rolling it out, trading up or down and the potential for using that pick to either make a selection or trade at a future date. Then they should go with the option that provides the best value and chances of meeting their long term plan.
I’m not a draft guy.
I have no ability to outperform a relatively competent front office evaluating players eligible to be drafted. They have WAY more information than I have. I just know the average player that typically gets drafted at each slot. So I just assume that Leon and his staff know the values well enough to make moves that make sense given their long term plan. The results could be favorable or unfavorable after the fact, but that often has little to do with the values.
It’s funny that ptmilo said “not meant to be provocative” when he linked that thread, and while I knew it would predictably trigger Hubert, I answered in good faith.
What Hubert failed to mention was that he was in the middle of a (too) short-lived self-imposed 5-post limit, that came about because he was (too briefly) self-aware enough to realize how literally psychotic he was sounding. And in that very thread, he broke his own self-imposed limit to flatter himself by accusing me of specifically trolling him of all the many ISM truthers that fit the bill.
Hubert has definitively stated that (presumably for the sake of his own mental health) he no longer reads my posts. I have made it a practice not to respond to his unless specifically provoked, as I was today when he said this out of the blue:
“It all kinda stems from the raging asshole who acted like the Knicks won the championship when we beat the Cavs. The idea is not to dismiss the Knicks, just the stupid notion that Leon’s mission was accomplished.”
And just the other day, when he said this:
“Reese, I don’t get why you’re doing this today. It would be one thing if Z-Man came on here smoking his Leon Rose victory cigar telling all the haters to shove it, but nothing of the sort happened. Everyone’s been kinda cool.”
Really, Hubert, you seriously need help, or better help. The depth of your continual rage is very unsettling, and I mean that very literally. Everyone has made it quite clear that things are better for everyone on the board when we willfully ignore each other. I have been doing my best to hold up my end. Please try harder to do your part. Thank you.
You have no idea what I think, but I’ll tell you straight up I think EPM, BPM, WS48 etc.. are all pretty much garbage for different reasons.
What I know is that his defense is not neutral. It’s enough of a negative to get him targeted in the playoffs and even on some nights in the regular season.
I also know that in general Brunson was very underrated when he came here (and I made the case he would have a hugely positive impact relative to expectations at the time), but now I think people are not paying enough attention to the defensive issues that lead to easy buckets. So whatever you subjectively think he adds on offense (which is plenty), make sure you SUBTRACT on defense. How much is debatable, but make sure you subtract. With a guy like Quickley I think it might be appropriate to add to his offensive contribution.
“Finding a wing who can put up a .600 TS% on 20+ usage is a lot harder than finding a solid backup center. Assuming basic competence from Leon, you’d have to think a decent Isiah Hartenstein caliber center would have been available somewhere.”
I think this muddles things quite a bit. First, Isaiah Hartenstein was a proven commodity at that point. His floor was “top-notch backup center.” His ceiling was (and still is) middling starter at C. A draft pick is an unknown….and that assuming that Jalen Williams would have been the pick, which we have no way of knowing. Second, you not only have iHart, but the picks netted out of the trade. Third, there is no reason to believe that Jalen Williams would have been the guy, since drafting a replacement for the guy you just extended on a 9-figure contract doesn’t seem to fit this FO’s MO.
Fourth (and I don’t disagree that Williams would be a much better fit than JR), “Assuming basic competence from Leon, you’d have to think a decent Isiah Hartenstein caliber center would have been available somewhere.”
This comes up all the time, and yet we’ve had a number of weeks of threads since Mitch has gone down and nobody seems to be able to find that iHart caliber center just lolling around out there. We’re all like, “Butterstumps?”
There are great loads of crappy backup centers. There are very few iHart caliber centers, and most are unavailable. So we should bury this particular take, I think…
But it’s make believe, Raven, that we had to trade a lotto pick to sign Hartenstein. There was never an either/or. If you’re going to bury anything, bury that bullshit.
We could have dumped Obi Toppin one year sooner to sign iHart. We could have dumped Cam Reddish & Miles McBride to sign iHart. We could have traded Derrick Rose. We could have traded Evan Fournier.
There were dozens of ways we could have acquired Isaiah Hartenstein and still drafted someone with the 11th pick instead of making that terrible trade with Sam Presti.
This idea that we had to trade a prized lottery pick to sign Hartenstein is a total fabrication.
Masai Ujiri traded a 1st and two 2nds for Jakob Poeltl last year.
The Clippers settled for Mason Plumlee because they couldn’t find anybody good.
I don’t know why people think good Cs are readily available. We got Hartenstein for a song when he could be a starter for a lot of teams.
And I’m talking about your claim that it wasn’t a win now move. We made it and we’re winning as much—and probably more—right now.
Ah, yes, well I’m not arguing about HOW we acquired iHart. I tend to stay out of the draft pick/incineration arguments as, well, I don’t care enough. I’d like to see us make some draft picks someday, with the caveat that most of our first round picks have been the equivalent of incineration (Frank, RJ, Obi). There’s a good argument that franchise-crippling in recent years hasn’t been punting on picks, it’s been making picks. So you know, maybe not…
My only real point is let’s stop pretending there’s a garbage pit filled with good backup centers out there for us to sort through.
Right, exactly. You could have acquired the very same player in other ways that didn’t involve a blackened lottery pick.
Sure, there isn’t. You’re right. But it is easier to find a backup center than it is to find a lottery pick in a loaded draft.
“My only real point is let’s stop pretending there’s a garbage pit filled with good backup centers out there for us to sort through.”
Ironically, one of the best places to find a good backup center is in the draft. There were three decent options in that draft: Jalen Duren, Mark Williams, and Walker Kessler. Since backup C was a clear need (as opposed to starting SF in consideration of the RJ extension, his shitty prior play notwithstanding), what we really should be discussing is whether we should have drafted one of those three rather than trading the pick for the various cap maneuvering reasons, including signing iHart.
Anyway, having the result be iHart and a reasonable amount of draft capital is something that I find pretty easy to digest. To each his own!
https://twitter.com/i/status/1739048303709352069
Remember making fun of Steve Kerr for like a month
Unfortunately Knicks lost that game in OT but after falling to 12-12 they would have the best record in the NBA for the remainder of the season at 43-15!
i hadn’t actually reread much of that thread or i wouldn’t have linked it.
I would simply not ever default to “just random variance” when talking about large samples. Even the smallish but far from tiny 1,655-sized sample almost certainly has a more logical reason than “hey, we were just lucky then and are just unlucky now.”
but it’s not easy to come up with something concrete that starts in the middle of a season that began when 3p% against was low, and continues through a third of the next season under the same coach and most of the same players that doesn’t feel like a just so story.
i’ve been having bad dreams of getting mauled by a deer the last few nights…
i hope this is one of those situations where one team dominates the regular season series, and then the other team comes out on top in the post-season…
i don’t like the Milwaukee Bucks very much right now.
“but it’s not easy to come up with something concrete that starts in the middle of a season that began when 3p% against was low, and continues through a third of the next season under the same coach and most of the same players that doesn’t feel like a just so story.”
It’s not easy. But when an explanation doesn’t come easily, I don’t believe that it justifies defaulting to a position that requires no evidence other than a lack of sufficient evidence to refute randomness as an explanation.
This doesn’t mean that you should default to confirmation bias either. If you or others think that that’s what I’m doing, I probably won’t convince you otherwise, just like I probably won’t convince ISM proponents that they are engaging in confirmation bias.
But in that thread, I cited this article that referenced Thibs’ schemes as it applied to shot selection. To me, that confirms that there are schematic structures in place that were specifically intended to impact opponents 3pt%.
If the 46 games since March 2, 2023 are enough to confirm to you or anyone else that Thibs’ defensive principles had nothing do with their 3pt defense being top 5-ish for the prior 200+ games, and chalk everything up to random variance i.e. ISM, whatever. I know that randle was either hurt or recovering for a lot of those games, was that a factor, i.e. is the “real” sample smaller? Is Brunson being exploited more now than he was? Is the sample being skewed by a few outlier games?
My approach would be to learn what the defense is designed to do, and then to analyze stats and film to determine a) whether it was doing what it was designed to do, and b) if yes, why, and if no, why not? A team defensive scheme can only work as well as a) players execute it and b) opponents are able or not able to counter-scheme around it. It takes only one weak link to break the defensive chain. And it’s a copycat league…if a team finds a cheat code against one scheme, other teams will notice it on film study. It’s also a dynamic league in the sense that what worked well yesterday might not work as well today. For example, the Celtics and Bucks are both different beasts than they were last year and both of them seem to be racking up monster numbers against us from 3.
I’m thinking Leon wants to cheat and use the DPE exemption on a back up PF…who qualifies with an expiring making $7.8 or less?
Precious Achiuwa and Jaden Mcdaniels qualify.
I’m wondering, what is the going rate for a C that is statistically every bit as good as Mitch but at 60% of the cost? In other words, would one trade a back end of the lottery pick for Mitch at 60% of his contract plus a couple of protected picks? While concurrently creating the cap space to sign the best player on the team for free (minus a minor tampering charge?)
I tend to think that whatever it was, missing out on Jalen Williams (not that Leon would have drafted him anyway)was worth it.
And unless you are among those who would have traded Mitch on 60% of his salary plus protected firsts for Jalen Williams, you might want to re-think your objections to what happened in June 2022. Because iHart is essentially Mitch…unless we want to throw out all advanced stats…EMM, BPM, WS48, etc.
Acquiring iHart gave us 48 minutes of Mitch-like C play…and gave us a guy who could help make possible a 3-2 road trip with wins over Durant’s and Booker’s Suns and LeBron’s and AD’s Lakers after losing Mitch by putting up Mitch-like numbers in extended minutes.
“Precious Achiuwa and Jaden Mcdaniels qualify.”
I like both of those guys! Sadly, Jaden McDaniels extended for 5 years/$136M so he’s not even remotely in this category. And Precious plays for an organization that we are suing for $10M.
Late to the party, but: Player Most Similar to you is:
2018-19 Glenn Robinson III
Note: *Not* Glenn Robinson, who was pretty damn good for a bit of time, but Glenn Robinson, who was really never all that good. I sadly concur.
It was not an either/or choice. You could have signed Hartenstein (who was a free agent) and ALSO drafted Williams at 11. There were other ways to clear that cap space. We chose a dumb way because Leon Rose doesn’t value draft picks properly.
“It was not an either/or choice. You could have signed Hartenstein (who was a free agent) and ALSO drafted Williams at 11. There were other ways to clear that cap space. We chose a dumb way because Leon Rose doesn’t value draft picks properly.”
Nah, you just see it that way because of intransigence. There were other considerations…dumping (poorly conceived) merc salary, signing Brunson, and signing Mitch while a) keeping a modicum of cap flexibility and b) avoiding dead cap. More reasonable skeptics (e.g. TNFH, ptmilo) had a more nuanced understanding of the overall picture. You seem pretty dug in on the “it was an unqualified fuck-up” take.
But hey, if you think Jalen Williams (who almost certainly wouldn’t have been picked anyway) and his -0.5 BPM was our ticket out of the mezzanine, more power to you!
For what it’s worth, I think Leon has had the following major fuck-ups:
1. Hiring Thibs in a situation that called for a non-win-now interim or a young up-and-comer.
2. Drafting Obi over Hali.
3. Running back the mercs from 2020-21.
4. Prematurely extending RJ.
(5. not offering IQ enough, but that is TBD)
He has largely compensated for those fuck-ups by:
1. Stealing Brunson from Dallas
2. Not dumping Julius at his lowest value
3. Extending Mitch on the most team-friedly deal imaginable
4. Pouncing on iHart before anyone else did
5. Fillling out the rotation with JHart and DDV at the cost of a lottery-protected pick.
Leon lucked out by being rebuffed by Ainge. I give him no credit for accidentally avoiding all-in disaster.
Other potential fuck-ups: Making enemies with the Nets, Raptors, and Klutch. Banking on Giannis or Embiid becoming available.
This is the confusing one to me, because it sure has seemed right from the start of his tenure here that he was specifically targeting Giannis, right?
It seems like such an oddly specific strategy when, as it turns out, it’s not like he had some sort of back-channel connection to Giannis, he just sort of wishcasted that Giannis would come to the Knicks (and then, more recently, when that was obviously no longer going to happen, he’s pivoted to Embiid).
I would not blame Leon for spoiling our relationship with the raptors.