Also: Clarkson is not good. I would hate getting him, let alone for Grimes.

SSS, but lineups with Quickley/DDV on and Hart/RJ off had a defensive rating of 131.5, good for the very first percentile.

How many minutes and who else was in the lineup?

As it stands it is too vague to support your argument.

And please don’t give me any of this shooting guard vs small forward nonsense.

I’m going to give you the nonsense because it’s not a figment of Tom Thibodeau’s imagination that putting a lot of small guys on the court poses some defensive challenges. SSS, but lineups with Quickley/DDV on and Hart/RJ off had a defensive rating of 131.5, good for the very first percentile.

The most egregious example of Thibs giving minutes to a bad player is of course RJ Barrett

Josh Hart this year is every bit as egregious as RJ, if not moreso.

One out of every 7 or 8 games he’s a monster like he was against Philly but more often than not he’s taking valuable minutes away from a better player in Devo.

Thibs isn’t perfect but I still think he’s better than most of the options to replace him. Chances are the next coach is worse.

We have to get to past the point where criticizing Thibs leads to someone acting like his head was called for.

At no point did I suggest this is a fatal flaw. There are plenty of physical players with good offensive profiles. Leon just traded for a perfect one.

Well we ditched the guy shooting 48% on 10 2pt shots a night and it’s gone up a bit since

From the 7th game till end of December it was at 53.7%

In January it’s 54.3%

The problem is that the first 6 games were so atrocious that it sank our percentage to 51.7% overall in that handful of games.

The offense isn’t great at sinking 2s, but it’s not as bad as the season-long numbers indicate.

Don’t sleep on Johnnie Bryant being the next Knicks coach. He is beloved by the players and I always seem talking with Thibs and others about plays/strategy. Quinn Synder loved him in Utah when they had those good Mitchell/Gobert/Conley teams so hiring an in-house coach is not out of the question.

I like him, but most coaches are meh to bad. If he’s also good, then we’re lucky.

Of course, he could also get poached in the meantime.

My recollection is that there was ample skepticism about whether DDV’s shooting with the GSW was for real…and that some here voiced concerns that the inferior DDV would cannibalize minutes away from the superior IQ and Grimes, and that we were overpaying for the 8th or 9th guy off the bench.

I was in the camp that questioned his shooting in GS.

DDV’s shooting last year was a career best. To me it was unclear whether that was sustainable. I thought there was a pretty good chance he’d regress at least a bit (kind of like J Hart did this year) but conceded it was possible he was just improving. Instead he’s been even better than last year. I’ll take it, however, I don’t it’s certain what we’ve seen so far this year is his new normal either.

I expect J-Hart to play better than he has so far unless that bum knee is going to be chronic problem all year. Then we have an injured player incapable of earning that contract.

The most egregious example of Thibs giving minutes to a bad player is of course RJ Barrett, which is not being brought up because it doesn’t fit any of the conspiratorial narratives being spouted.

I’ve been avoiding a lot of this conversation, but this hits the nail on the head.

I think Thibs is a very good coach, but he has some quirks about minutes and lineups that IMO are a negative. I imagine my brother (who has Aspergers) as a basketball coach and I see Thibs.

I think the one thing we all agree on RJ.

I think everyone understood he was the weak link in the starting lineup except Thibs. He often played him more minutes than anyone else. To me personally, since I put a lot of weight on using the right combinations of players, that made even less sense because we had spacing issues that RJ was contributing to. We had too many players that wanted to take the ball inside that often found a wall of defenders waiting for them. Quickley should have gotten more minutes (next to Brunson), RJ less (maybe use J Hart more), and after that I didn’t have too much of a problem.