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2023-24 Game Thread: Knicks @ Pacers (Post-RJ/IQ Opener, which is kind of a thing)

Hot off a stunning trade (especially since it was Leon Rose who made it, who seems to be more careful with each possible move than J. Alfred Prufrock), the Knicks have to head to Indiana to take on the Pacers without the services of RJ and IQ, but also without new additions OG, Malachi and Precious.

And apparently Grimes is sitting this one out, too, in protest of the trade (they say non-COVID illness, but we all know the truth. He’s pouring a brewsky in honor of his missing mate, IQ. But then maybe he’s trying to catch the poured beer to toast not having to play with RJ anymore? He’s likely going to get a big bump in usage with this deal, until he’s traded in a deal for Murray, that is), so this rotation is going to be interesting. I guess you start the NOVA guys, Randle and iHart, with a bench of Taj, Deuce and a dash of Archie (but really, 40 minutes from the NOVA guys and Randle)?

A loss tonight would be effectively meaningless, but a win would be a real treat, so let’s hope that they pull it out! It’s not like Randle and Brunson aren’t still here, ya know?

Let’s go, new Knicks!

86 replies on “2023-24 Game Thread: Knicks @ Pacers (Post-RJ/IQ Opener, which is kind of a thing)”

interesting detail, all on reasonable volume:

OG L corner 3 – 50% this year, 46.7% last year

DDV R corner 3 – 64.5 (!) percent this year, 44.7% last year

Both OG and Grimes are better from the L corner, so maybe DDV will stay in the starting lineup….

We did the Pistons a huge favor by leaving the Raptors very shorthanded for tonight’s game against them. We should have gotten the Pistons to throw in a pick for us.

I am very sad to see IQ go. But not watching RJ clang open three after open three is going to do wonders for my sanity.

Boy, you take RJ out of the starting lineup and the Knicks are unstoppable. Too bad we didn’t try that earlier…

fournier will get 20 tonight and after the game thibs will call him a “pro’s pro”…

mon dieu…he looks a bit rusty though..

I don’t know if Brunson is worn down or something, but beyond the subpar shooting he’s committing some uncharacteristically dumb turnovers the last few games

I’m sorry but Deuce can’t get burned by TJ off the dribble then foul him for And1.

tj mconnell torches most of the league…. one of the most underrated players in the nba….

Was it when TJ was in Philly that he hit a game winning buzzer beater against the Knicks?

Okay, that was a fun half. Ball moved, Knicks with 15 assists (yeah, Hali has 11, what’s your point), not a lot of painful iso, lots of cutting.

We’re not winning, but it’s enjoyable basketball. For at least one half.

Was it when TJ was in Philly that he hit a game winning buzzer beater against the Knicks?

Yes… sigh…

I feel like we’re gonna crumble in the 3rd because of the short rotation and the back to back tiredness, but it’s been a fun first half at least.

Hopefully one day the Knicks will stop sending the entire team to defend the paint at the slightest hint of penetration and prioritize taking away 3pt shots instead.

Tyrese Haliburton is a very good point guard. Too bad he can’t get that funky shot off at the professional level…

Randle trying to win the game by himself. He’s also putting himself into rugby scrums under the basket with triple teams, with the expected results…

We would have won if Quickley had played.

We would have lost by 40 if RJ had played.

i wish donte saved some of those points for later in the season because we’re going to need it….

Forgot we had a game. Guess I should give them a mulligan tonight, but I still feel like we could’ve beaten the Pacers.

Rough 3 games against teams who are theoretically our peers.

As head-scratching Randle’s plays were, and as much as the beaten-up Brunson lost his magic touch recently, offense was not the issue tonight. Defense was the issue once again, particularly perimeter defense. Indy made 23 from deep, the majority of which were wide-wide open. A poor and mightily struggling defense went against one of the best offenses in NBA history. What made anyone think we had a chance? Let’s hope the OG trade will bring this defense together in January. Happy New Year to all!

No surprise but it’s the first 3-games losing streak of the year and things could get worse before they get better, because now we are the team that needs to adjust.

We’ve lost a lot of usage in the trade and we must re-distribute it better than we did tonight albeit with the caveat of being shorthanded.

Indiana shot 23 for 42 from 3pt range…

And still we continue to pack the paint every time someone feint a penetration, leaving the shooters open… it’s a dangerous defensive philosophy in 2023…

Well if Indy lost to a depleted Knicks team at home after we were extended against Orlando last night and had to travel, plus deal with a major trade, then I’d be thinking about them being a sham.

We should have played better, but I’m better with this loss than I was with the Orlando loss.

I would say that the season starts in earnest on Monday.

I had to watch with the Pacers’ feed and they treated this game like we were at full roster, it was hilarious and infuriating at the same time 🙂

Forget this game. Other than iHart athletically looking older than Taj, nothing to see here. I’m a little concerned he may be playing hurt again. Hope its just fatigue.

Most said Leon coudn’t get neither Mikal or OG. Well, he got OG and corrected his own mistake albatross contract in the same move. It cost him IQ + 31st pick. It’s a very reasonable price. Now, people don’t like OG becuase he immediately begins to suck and Leon didn’t get him for free.

Not sure what the Deuce extension means…but if he’s not the backup PG it really doesn’t make much sense…

@Director NYC

I had the same concerns, he looked slow and more “grounded” in the last few games.
Let’s really hope it’s just fatigue…

In a way, we went from “What do we do if Randle goes down?” to “What do we do if Brunson goes down?”

If they keep playing like this they’re gonna give up 130 pts and get blown out…

BBA you were on the money except they scored 140 instead of 130.

The way they were collapsing into the paint it was inevitable the Pacers were gonna go on a 3pt barrage. In the 1st quarter Hart and DDV were flying around doing a good job contesting 3s and getting in the passing lanes but there was no way they were gonna be able to keep up that defensive energy for the entire game.

We really gonna complain about a 3yr-13m contract to a player many here would like to see get some more minutes??

Bondy saying it’s a decreasing contract.

Presumably that makes him the backup PG with the Knicks thinking he’ll outplay that value the rest of the season.

we’ve been playing the these losses don’t matter and this money don’t matter game for a long while… and it’s starting to catch up to us….

if we need trade fodder there’s much better ways to go about doing that… like on actual nba players…

Looks like I picked a good game to miss. Nice to see that DDV can go beast mode, though.

In the 1st quarter Hart and DDV were flying around doing a good job contesting 3s and getting in the passing lanes

Correct. More or less all of them were staying with the shooters for roughly the first seven-eight minutes of the first quarter. That led to Indy missing shots and us leading.

Looking for for this Woj bomb when I wake up tomorrow.

Cleveland gets: Grimes, Mitch, Fournier and 4 picks/2 swaps

Knicks get: Donovan Mitchell

Hard to believe Miles is one of two recent draft picks to still be on the squad. And Grimes is probably as good as gone, too.

Man I’m now going from being happy to being sad about this trade.

Not so much for OG, who I like, but just thinking about how Leon’s first draft was Obi and IQ and now both are gone.

Obi was a bad pick but Leon made up for it with IQ. But then he gave RJ that dumb extension. Extension of not you’d still have the issue of Brunson blocking a lot of IQ’s minutes but if we’d not given that extension to RJ, we maybe could have gotten OG without giving up IQ, who is the best young player we’ve drafted in forever.

IQ and Brunson would work with a long wing like OG.

And it feels like the “hybrid” method is now leaning squarely towards the “sign and trade for vets and free agents” method. Like who we got that is homegrown now? Grimes and McBride and Mitch? This time last year it was those three plus IQ, RJ and Obi.

All I know is while in happy to get OG here in a little bummed the youth movement is over for the most part. And whatever big move Leon makes next, I hope he has some picks left over so we can get back to drafting players again, preferably at least one in this upcoming draft.

I hear you, Swift. I’d love to see a mostly homegrown team blossom into something great, but unfortunately that is not the path we’re taking. And when it comes to our homegrown guys, we haven’t done a great job of selecting them in the first place. It hurts to lose Quickley, who was like a ray of sunshine compared to most of the other stiffs we have drafted. Obi was fun at times but very limited. RJ is an Andrew Wiggins type that I could never really believe in.

I’d be more upset if we really broke up a promising young core, but honestly we never had that.

I will say at least the players Knicks are acquiring and building around are youngish players who could be around for a long time. They have a relatively young core despite none of them being drafted, at least this isn’t a Clippers situation.

it was never the ‘hybrid method’…. when you start incinerating picks .. then trading those maybe picks for end of rotation guys… and then also trading out of lotto picks for even more vets… while also spending picks on low upside 3 and D guys with the scouting report.. ‘immediate contributor’ … it was always ‘win right now right this second’….

they hung on to RJ and IQ and Obi until the last possible second to see a breakout and simultaneously find a suitable vet… IQ was going to get traded no matter what…

this whole hybrid strategy needs to be wiped from the vocabulary… very obvious at the time and now in hindsight that was never the plan…

Moving on from the young players hurts because they were fun, but in recent years we missed several opportunities to draft the kind of players that would have changed the franchise. RJ was certainly not that kind of player. Losing Quickley could come back to haunt us a bit, but we are now clearly only 1 player away, the pieces we have left fit together well, and we have the assets to land that last piece. Assuming we don’t totally empty the cupboard landing Mitchell (or whoever) it makes sense to start drafting and developing again also.

Moving on from the young players hurts because they were fun, but in recent years we missed several opportunities to draft the kind of players that would have changed the franchise.

In 2017, we drafted Ntilikina 8th over Donovan Mitchell (13th). Anunoby was also drafted 23rd that year. In 2018, we drafted Knox 9th over SGA (11th) and Mikal Bridges (10th). In 2020 we drafted Obi 8th over Haliburton (12th) and Tyrese Maxey (21st). Sad to remember those blunders but we are not the only team that committed them.

Apropos Tyrese Maxey. Something inside me tells me that the Raptors got their own Maxey today. I hope I am wrong.

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