Knicks Morning News (2024.01.17)

They’re no JD and the Straight Shot (*), that’s for sure.

(*) Now up to 996 YouTube subscribers!!!

I don’t see any indication that Leon Rose has any kind of basketball team-building philosophy at all. He’s certainly never enunciated one in any kind of intelligent way and the same tea leaves some use to discern one can be read in many different ways.

The way he’s actually run the team has been a combination of primarily (1) heavy deference to the personnel preferences of his flighty and ceiling-lowering head coach; (2) making the playoffs with no concern about purgatory; and (3) enriching CAA and/or the family members it employs.

i have my own thoughts but i thought this would be a good non-rage inducing discussion point….

The “rage” comes your way because they can’t (always) herd you into the consensus. It’s not substantive.

I’m a little frustrated bc based on the stories out there, it seems like we can convert those protected firsts into players that we actually need and we’re choosing not to.

That would involve investigating the full marketplace of players and assets, comparing possibilities, and maximizing value and return. The other GMs roll that way. The Knicks’ GM doesn’t.

That’s obviously frustrating if you’re a Knicks fan.

Siakam in fact is a rental, right? Can we at least agree on that? Or is that obvious fact somehow triggering of whatever it seems is being triggered these days?

I’m not sure why you think it’s so obvious.

Because his contract expires on July 1 and he’ll be an unrestricted free agent?

I wasn’t suggesting that the Pacers aren’t going to go all out to resign him, but that’s not a prerequisite to being a “rental” as I understand the term. Happy to use a better term if someone has one.

The point isn’t the nomenclature though, but instead that a player’s value is typically lower if his contract is up in a few months and he can go wherever he wants. (Which is what I understood djphan to be saying.)

Having to relitigate these words and concepts, particularly when everyone already knows them, isn’t really conducive to productive conversation.

There’s at least SOME risk that they’ll lose the player in unrestricted free agency. That risk, definitionally, reduces the player’s trade value.

The Raylan Givens thing works in real life, with normal interactions, normal social cues, face-to-face interactions, and all the other things that govern and lubricate normal social back and forth among humans.

It doesn’t really work on the internet.

Well then, as JK pointed out you shouldn’t get wound up into a tizzy when people point out that you’re being an asshole.

I think what he’s saying is that he is admittedly sometimes an asshole, but is being accused of being an asshole when he isn’t in fact being an asshole.

That’s perfectly plausible.

i don’t need internet strangers to validate that…

Yeah, but you know what? There are a lot of people who do seek out the validation of internet strangers for whatever reasons they have. And you’re more likely to run across those people on … the internet.

Yes, this is very hard to wrap ones’ head around — I’m struggling with it still — but if you’re a humanist, humanism is the study of human beings, and this is what human beings do and respond to in 2024.

Now, it’s correct that we’re talking here about a small subset of the population. The vast majority of people don’t go onto internet message boards and partake in the to and fro. You’re talking probably fewer than a million adult Americans who do that on any kind of regular basis — and that rough guess is probably high — and it’s a country of something like 330 million people.(*) But of those who do, bare minimum a distinct minority are looking for something deeper than just pure objective debate of intellectual positions.

(*) Let’s call it 10 million even. That’s one in 33 people. Make it adults only and it’s like one in 20 or thereabouts. What we do here is a tiny niche of what people do.

it was widely reported at the time of the trade that the Raptors wanted good players back instead of mainly draft picks.

Without getting all back into journalism and sources and agendas and the like, when you’re selling something you say you want a bunch of things hoping that you’ll get them. If someone is selling their house, their agent will talk about how the house is the best one on the block and the kitchen has all new sub-Zero appliances, and a brand new deck in back, and a beautiful new paint job, and the owner isn’t going to sell for anything less than $600,000 and yadda yadda, so don’t even bother if you aren’t going to bid at least that.

And then the owner winds up selling for $550,000. Or $525,000.

E, was that you ranting on KFS Study Hall right after the OG trade? Do you have a “Fire Thibs” t-shirt?

Unfortunately, no. Is he/she selling subscriptions to their newsletter?