Knicks Morning News (2024.02.02)

Gotta love this team and Brunson is starting to get somewhat close to Isiah level.

Now go get DJM and try to win it all.

Primarily through the “Brunson Delta,” (*) Leon has built a team close to being a contender. Kudos to him. His every thought at this trade deadline should be getting them in the best shape possible to try to win it this year.

If he’s in “we have to keep all our draft picks to trade for an elite superstar in 2027,” mode over the next couple weeks, he needs to flip the switch.

(*) The difference between the value the association marketplace put on him when he was a free agent, and what he actually is.

All-in. This is their window.

DJM may well be a downgrade–

Time for a moratorium on nonsense. It’s winning time.

Four unprotected ones for LeBron? Two-year wide open championship window.

Mikal, IMO, would be available for a Godfather offer. Whether that would include “to the Knicks” is clearly an open question.

I pay zero attention to BPM. I’ve seen nothing in it to commend it and a lot in it to not commend it. It doesn’t add anything to watching players and evaluating and properly weighing regular statistics and metrics.

Dejounte Murray, however, is immune to a potential “playoff flop” because he has proven that he is a Playoff Ruff Rydah based on a five game sample.

Six games. Pretty much the opposite of a playoff flop.

He didn’t suddenly become a bad shooter this year anymore that he suddenly became a marksman last year.

Josh Hart has always been a bad shooter.

Yeah, it is in fact obvious that I ain’t doing extra homework to exculpate what might be your most embarrassing take in a line of takes that includes “Frank Ntikina is good,” “Cam Reddish is good,” “the 2022-2023 Knicks won’t win a playoff series,” and “Isaiah Hartenstein is an advanced stats mirage.” You are more than welcome to dig up whatever you want.

Like I said — it’s obvious why they won’t be posted. You keep doing you.

That’s all well and good that you wanted to acquire OG Anunoby, for free I suppose.

I don’t like my team overpaying for assets in a hypercompetitive marketplace, even for desirable assets. I mean I like my apartment a lot and am very happy I have it, but that still doesn’t mean I would have wanted to pay like 30% more for it.

But it clearly was not an overpay.

It is to everyone who isn’t an RJ truther. And more importantly, it is in the sense that it was significantly more than they would have had to pay if they actually negotiated properly.

Had they not overpaid, they’d have more assets for this trade deadline, one on which they’re on the cusp of contention. So the case for not overpaying is pretty obvious.

I don’t understand E’s take that this is an overpay,

They gave up more than they needed to give up to get the asset. That’s how an “overpay” is measured. There are no other factors. If a house is worth a million dollars to you, you don’t pay a million dollars if the seller will take $500,000. You pay $500,000 and take the other 500 and buy other assets. (*) (See, e.g., the trade deadline.)

There are no other factors to the concept.

(*) And if you do pay a million dollars, it’s no defense to a charge that you overpaid that “Well, it’s worth a million dollars to me!”

He’s just not very good, and we have gotten drastically better since he was traded away.

And they had a nine game winning streak after acquiring Josh Hart last year and yadda yadda yadda.

We seem to have lost both Brother Phan

Yeah, I mean gosh — how could djphan have not wanted to stick around? Who wouldn’t want to have their good faith words and opinions twisted all the time into something they aren’t, be called a bunch of personal names, and otherwise be made the butt of ridicule and ill-humor?

Strat, respectfully, it is unprecedented in NBA history for any player with as much bad play as RJ has recorded to develop into anything resembling a star.

He never played as bad as the haters continued to say (and apparently can’t stop continuing to say). When the hate is so deep that you hear that he played “shitty” in last year’s playoffs, you pretty much know you aren’t in the land of the objective anymore. You’re somewhere else.

If you’re rebuilding a classic car, sometimes you need a part that’s no longer being manufactured and you’re okay paying extra for that part.

Not if you’re competing with 29 other classic car rebuilders for only one classic car rebuilder trophy. And when there’s a salary cap and other rules as to how much you can spend on parts.

If your car doesn’t run, you’re not going to win

And you’re not going to win if you pay too much to fix it.

Otherwise he just claims victory no matter how laughably wrong he is…e.g. see above.

Everything you wrote in the “see above” is … is … /disposes of salty words that apply perfectly/ …. untrue.

The distinction between saying someone “is good” and saying “I’m willing to take a risk on someone who isn’t good now because he might be good or even more someday” is fundamental. Yet you ignore them completely.

The motives for that are certainly open to question. Can you help?

And my “takes” don’t require a “falsifiable prediction” anymore than anyone else’s — less, really.

A course on the concepts of risk and reward would probably be beneficial for you.

it’s funny, i always viewed the discourse here at KB as though we were all sitting down at a large table together to eat…

I like that idea, but the reality of a sports discussion on the internet is that it unleashes the “dude seven beers deep sitting on the corner stool at an outer borough bar kitty-corner from the rub-‘n-tug” that lies deep (*) within most of us.

(*) Or in some cases, maybe not so deep.

Let E be out there. He’s not a troll, he’s just quirky. But like all of us he is sensitive and when you gang up on him you create Defensive E. And Defensive E is a dick. He pricks your sensitive spot bc you pricked his, and now you’re in a blood feud. (It’s same thing with djphan.)

Now of course things have gotten all weirdly meta and navel-gazing, but I would suggest instead, simply reading the words in the posts I write, considering them and responding intelligently. Or not responding at all. Or not reading them at all. There’s no rule of the universe that says people simply must respond to every last thing on the internet.

In terms of “quirky,” while the caricature of me might be, I kinda am … not. Professionally, I oversee the preparation and presentation of decidedly non-quirky evidence-based material and while this is not a professional setting — obviously — the spillover from professional life is likely pronounced. I’m pretty sure that when I see things that are BS and based on nothing, professional life spills over.

In terms of basketball, which again is what I’m interested in, the following statements are all plain vanilla, mainstream basketball statements with widespread concurrence throughout the basketball world. There isn’t the slightest bit of “quirk” in any of them.
I’ll pick a few:

1. Kristaps Porzingis is an excellent basketball player.
2. Dejounte Murray is a better basketball player than Donte Divincenzo.
3. Donte Divencenzo has been bad in 26-ish playoff games (*)
4. RJ Barrett is neither a “negative asset,” nor does he “suck.”
5. Cam Reddish had high-level tools that could be worth taking a shot at developing.
6. Tom Thibodeau is 31-41 in the playoffs, far below his regular season record.

I can think of plenty of others, but you get the drift.

(*) “And it’s right for a team in the Knicks’ position to worry that he will be again this spring” is also plain vanilla and mainstream without the least bit of quirk, but I won’t include it in the body.

You’re quirky in this forum because you have relatively peculiar and unexpected takes. That’s all.

Consider on the other hand that we’ve had a long list of claims today that Masai Ujiri, one of the best GMs in basketball, whom pretty much everyone on Knickerblogger has salivated over for like a decade, sold one of his best assets at cut-rate prices prior to even setting up a last-minute deadline bidding war … because he was fooled by RJ Barrett’s pointzzzz.(*)

The terms “quirky” and “peculiar” may at that point take on different meaning.

(Hubert can advise as to whether this is the fan in people talking — it might be and that’s fine. It can’t possibly be the analyst in people. I’m in pure analyst mode at the moment, given the possibilities in front of this team. That very well might be a bit off-beat. So be it.)

(*) TL:DR — there’s no way in holy hell Masai Ujiri thinks of RJ Barrett as a “negative asset” or even close. He jumped on him and IQ before barely even putting OG out for bid. Leon paid for no bidding war.

At the end of the day, though, it just isn’t that compelling of a discussion.

It’s not compelling at all, actually. It only matters because the asset chest is a lighter than it would otherwise be, but that shouldn’t stop them from getting a DJM or someone similar. (If we hear that they were close to getting a DJM but Leon “just couldn’t pull the trigger on that many draft choices,” then it will matter.)

2. What would you have traded OG for that you think Toronto would have accepted other than RJ and IQ?

One or the other of them, not both, plus draft picks. They needed to still have IQ for the trade deadline.

My “plan” for the contending team post that TNFH won’t post was RJ-plus for OG; IQ for DJM.

I’ve always thought the hoarding draft picks for a superstar idea was a bit lame and now with Brunson’s emergence, it needs to be dropped entirely.

You say you work with evidence, then ok, what is the damn evidence you could possibly have that Masai Ujiri “jumped on him and IQ before barely even putting OG out for bid.”?

He traded him a month (ish) before the deadline.