[Fox News] – Sun, 21 Apr 2024 11:11:00 GMT
- Ex-Clinton aide Huma Abedin spotted on date with George Soros’ son at Knicks game
- Huma Abedin and George Soros son Alex, lovebirds with 9-year age gap, spotted on courtside date at Knicks’ playoff game
[New York Post] – Mon, 22 Apr 2024 02:57:00 GMT
- Knicks’ Donte DiVincenzo sat in fourth quarter as Miles McBride erupted
- Knicks Playoff Notes: Miles McBride’s Game 1 confidence, how 76ers may adjust in NBA playoffs
- Deuce McBride can be the Knicks’ answer to the 76ers’ Tyrese Maxey
- NBA Playoffs: 1 Crucial series-changing X-Factor for every playoff team
- 4 Dark Horse Knicks That Can Power a Deep Postseason Run
[ESPN] – Sun, 21 Apr 2024 19:00:00 GMT
- Sixers aim to clean up on glass in Game 2 vs. Knicks
- Knicks 111-104 76ers (Apr 20, 2024) Box Score
- Full Joel Embiid experience showed just how much he’ll dictate Knicks-76ers series
- Knicks-Sixers: 5 takeaways from New York’s Game 1 comeback
- Sixers’ Joel Embiid returns vs. Knicks after injury scare
[CBS Sports] – Sun, 21 Apr 2024 13:35:00 GMT
NBA playoffs Game 1 winners and losers: Knicks’ Miles McBride breaks out, Lakers’ D’Angelo Russell goes cold
[CBS Sports] – Sun, 21 Apr 2024 13:40:00 GMT
- Why Knicks vs. 76ers revolves around Joel Embiid, whose injury scare and time on bench helped define Game 1
- No plans to shut down Joel Embiid after latest injury scare
- Joel Embiid appears to reinjure knee, returns for 2nd half of Sixers’ Game 1 loss to Knicks
- Joel Embiid channels Willis Reed in Game 1 loss to the New York Knicks
- Embiid questionable for Game 2 vs. Knicks; Nurse wants better showings from role players
[Sports Illustrated] – Sun, 21 Apr 2024 16:48:49 GMT
Mitchell Robinson Solves Knicks Present – And Future – Problem
[CBS Sports] – Mon, 22 Apr 2024 03:46:22 GMT
Knicks’ Josh Hart calls out voters for not having Tom Thibodeau as NBA Coach of the Year finalist
125 replies on “Knicks Morning News (2024.04.22)”
Missed this quote yesterday:
Hart can be maddening, but he is also among the most delightful personalities we’ve had on this team in quite some time.
How can you not love Hart? Telegenic personality.
Saw an MVP debate broke out last night. It’s Jokic until further notice. He is one of the best players to ever play the game in his absolute prime.
I have heard he was so happy to come to New York not just because he could play with Brunson, but because he dreams of a career in TV afterwards. He’s clearly got it, if he wants it.
Busy weekend but wanted to give a short report from being at the game on Saturday.
Amazing atmosphere for most part although I felt like the crowd was tired in the 3rd. Most notable thing that I don’t notice on TV — how quiet the crowd is from the moment a 3-ball leaves the shooter’s hand to how crazy it gets if it goes in. Just so much fun
Not sure if it showed up on TV but IMO – while Deuce was obviously amazing and his +67 net +/- seems literally fictional — Mitch was the guy that electrified the crowd and brought us back in the 4th. Just a tremendous effort by a guy who looked sort of lost at the end of the regular season.
Jalen was just horrendous this game. I can’t remember a single game where he just lost the ball so many times off the dribble. Hopefully a big bounceback game for him tonight.
Embiid – not sure anyone here watched Sixers games during the year, but I found it quite strange that he didn’t line up to rebound when a Knick was shooting FTs a single time the entire game — instead, he would take the pre-FT time to walk down to the Knicks’ end of the court. Now granted, often that took our center with him, but my sense from watching is that they want to prevent any extra exertion from him, even if it is jogging down the court after FTA. And what do you know – he looked absolutely gassed in the 4th. Some of that might have been whatever injury he sustained on that (completely ridiculous) play in the 2nd, but i just think he had no legs left.
Which brings me to this – while we were all wondering why Thibs was playing our guys so many minutes at the end of the season — is it possible this was all to stretch them out (ie. like baseball starting pitchers throwing more and more pitches each start during spring training and early regular season so they can get to 100+ pitches comfortably by early-midseason) for the minutes they’ll play in the playoffs? Hart played 42 minutes and was the freshest guy on the court the last 3 minutes of the game.
Thibs is probably a better CoTY candidate than Mosely, but not as good as Mazzulla. I think of it less as a snub and more of the wrong guy beat him out. I don’t see how Mazz was not a finalist.
Hart is also basically the Energizer (hustle)bunny, perhaps the best conditioned athlete in the entire NBA, in that he seems able to play these insane minutes loads for long stretches without it diminishing his effectiveness. I don’t know if Good Donte or Deuce (our other minutes monsters from season’s end) are quite as durable as him. But Josh Hart being the most energetic player in the closing minutes of a game is among the least surprising things that can happen in a game.
With Hart, it’s all about his ability — and more importantly his willingness — to shoot from downtown. A Josh Hart who fires without hesitation and hits things at a decent percentage is pretty close to a max player, because he’s so good at everything else.
The ORL-CLE series is the most NBA.TV series I can remember in recent history. And the first game lived up to that potential perfectly.
“Which brings me to this – while we were all wondering why Thibs was playing our guys so many minutes at the end of the season — is it possible this was all to stretch them out (ie. like baseball starting pitchers throwing more and more pitches each start during spring training and early regular season so they can get to 100+ pitches comfortably by early-midseason) for the minutes they’ll play in the playoffs? Hart played 42 minutes and was the freshest guy on the court the last 3 minutes of the game.”
With the same injury/roster issues, Thibs probably would have done that in November. However, I do think that he has instilled the mindset that players should be prepared to play all 48 minutes every night. I also think that he just hates to not have Josh Hart on the floor, for better or worse (obviously it was for the better on Saturday!) so my guess is that he continues to play big minutes. Brunson as well.
The good news for the Knicks is that these guys playing huge minutes are not only used to it, they are healthy and in the middle of their athletic primes. Nurse rode a clearly out of shape Embiid for 38 minutes on that gimpy knee. Lowry played 39 minutes at 38 years old. One would think that the big minutes are going to take a toll on the Sixers as the series wears on. Maxey, on the other hand, looked fresh as a daisy after running wind sprints for 44 minutes.
interested to see if thibs shakes up the OG on maxey matchup tonight. it just seems like it takes our best defender and puts him in a situation where he has a genuine disadvantage, while also limiting his help effectiveness. he really doesn’t look way above average at staying in front of maxey, and even on the pull-ups he can get caught off balance or behind the screen. when OG and our C both end up trailing the roll action we’re not in great shape, and it’s just as bad when we have to switch the C onto maxey and OG is too far behind the play to help at the rim. also not sure it’s a big difference maker whether OG or someone like Divo is the one to veer switch onto the embiid pop 23 feet out. would like to see more possession where OG can guard oubre with the plan to aggressively help off him and make him hit some late contest corners threes.
obviously this is like the main thing thibs is thinking about every second and he has 1100 human years of thinking about nba defense, so i guess we’ll just see.
pt, I agree on OG. Even when Deuce is not playing, I wonder whether they should just live with Divo on Maxey and go under screens, daring him to shoot pull-ups from the top of the key. OG should be playing the role that Lowry is playing for Philly – mucking things up inside by helping off poor shooters. Put him on Oubre and let him do his thing.
There’s only 3 guys on the roster who have a chance of staying in front of Maxey: Deuce, Hart and DiVo, in that order.
I agree (and said so before the series) that having OG on Maxey is a net negative.
There were a couple of plays where Maxey was effectively “funneled” into Mitch’s lair. But way too many times when he got all the way to the rim. I was a little surprised that he only took 2 FTs. Seems like there’s a bit of “let him get his” built into that.
In his postgame presser, Nick Nurse said that ignoring all the hubbub, the game came down to a 4th Q sequence where they missed 3 open 3’s in a row and we made 3 in a row. That’s a fair claim. However, it fails to take into account that our MVP candidate had an uncharacteristically terrible game that is hopefully not going to be repeated.
In a way, that muddles up the adjustments that Nurse has to consider making. One would think that he is not going to overreact to Josh Hart sticking those 3’s in crunch time, that he will be happy to live and die with that shot over a long series. So my wondering is, does Thibs have a strategy that does not depend on Hart (and to a lesser degree, Deuce) hitting those shots?
The fascinating thing about Game 1 is that both teams managed to assert their style in different ways, which doesn’t happen that often.
The Sixers managed to shut down Brunson and let role players beat them. They were also generally able to get Embiid and Maxey going. They would want that to happen 7/7 games.
The Knicks, on the other hand, were able to assert their physicality and controlled the rebounds. They won the possession game by a mile. It’s easier to be less efficient on a per shot basis when that happens (they also managed to keep Embiid away from the paint after the first quarter/injury).
The 3pt shooting variance is what it is, but it wasn’t egregious either – 45% to 35% for the Knicks, but the Knicks have a slight edge in how many good shooters they have.
One thing to keep an eye on, from Macri’s newsletter: Almost a third of New York’s FGs came from the short mid-range, and they shot 4-27 (14%) on these shots. It was their worst mark the whole season, by a mile (second lowest was 21%). Maybe some of it is Embiid altering shots, but if you look at the video, there are many barely contested misses (I-Hart’s first missed floater of the game is an example). I’d expect that to go up.
As usual I’m fascinated by what the coaches will do to adjust in Game-2…
Philly put length on JB (Oubre, Batum) with the quick hands of Lowry (what a great player…) ready to harass him and at times the Little General was too slow/stubborn to get rid of the ball and forced some unusual turnovers.
I’ll be surprised if JB doesn’t rebound in hte next game.
On the other hand I agree that putting OG on Maxey is kind of a “waste”, he can’t stay in front of him and the role limited his importance on other aspects of the defense.
Maxey went to the rim a little too easily in the second half, maybe we could try to challenge him to hit some jumpers instead of staying so close and let him burn us?
And will Nurse try to reinforce the paint to avoid the Knicks destroying his team with offensive boards?
How many minutes will Embiid play and how mobile he would be?
Can’t wait…
Embiid in game 1 – Sixers [+14] when on the court
[-21] off the court
Alan Hahn is on TV this morning and Mike Greenburg seems convinced the Sixers are the better team.
One more thing: I get leaving Hart open could be a winning strategy. But it does require assuming that Hart’s .310% for this season is more relevant than his .350% for his career. You’d expect that number to be slightly higher for wide open 3s. That’s higher than a point per possession, which I am not sure is a terrible outcome for the offense in a defense-oriented series, especially when the Knicks are dominating the offensive rebounding.
I also loved that final action that got OG wide open for a 3, which brough both Mitch and Hart to screen for Brunson (Mitch’s roll freed OG). They should do more of that. Maybe also let Hart handle the ball more and play Brunson off ball.
It’s a bit surprising that the NBA would schedule a NYC playoff game on the first night of Passover.
One thing getting lost in the postgame discussion is that DiVo and iHart also had uncharacteristically terrible games. Can Nick Nurse count on three Knicks starters having bad games again?
Rangers have MSG booked tomorrow, so the NBA would have to have until Wednesday for Game 2
And this is why we will win the series.
Embiid is not going to be able to handle our two headed center monster, especially in his current state. If Mitch is truly back, it completely changes the series.
Lowry is tough as shit and the Philly role players aren’t soft. But in general our role players are going to be tougher than theirs, especially Hart, McBride, Mitch and OG. In the playoffs, when the overall talent level between two teams is relatively equal, that will win out.
But today is huge. Obvs you don’t want to be down 0-1 at home but winning both home games to go up 2-0 put so much pressure on them in game 3.
I think Embiid is going to tough it out but I just think we’re going to see these games largely play out the same way. Philly will hang with us and even have some leads in the first 3 quarters and then we will tire them out, especially Embiid, in the 4th and take control.
I think we showed a lot of first-game nerves—especially Brunson—but still got the W. Jalen tried to do too much on his own last game, so look for Divo and Hart to get the ball earlier tonight and help him bring it up.
The Sixers aren’t the best matchup for us, but I disagree with Greeny: we are the better team, especially with Embiid limited.
Philly is one of the worst defensive rebounding teams in the league, there’s not much they can do to fix that this series. Nurse mentioned playing Reed more with Embiid as a solution which I think would probably be great for the Knicks cause it would make Philly easier to defend and slower on defense.
They never played together all season – fewer than 20 possessions – so it would be a desperate thing for Nurse to try. They are not there yet, I think.
Nurse is clearly thinking about rebounds. In his post game comments he said he wasn’t sure it was as simple as not boxing out and that he would study film to learn what caused their lack of rebounds.
Looks like Embiid is “questionable” for tonight.
What caused their lack of rebounds is they’re 25th in defensive reb % and the Knicks are 1st in offensive reb %. It’s something that was obviously gonna be a problem for Philly going into this series and something that besides getting new players on the roster they won’t be able to fix no matter how much film they watch.
Looks like we’re moneyballin’ our way to another series win.
I wonder if Nurse will try playing Mo Bamba. Probably not, but it is an option.
“Sabonis played his games pre at night and in Sacramento, so he didn’t get noticed enough to make an all star team…….”
“Pre at night”? I have no idea what this means.
Re: Embiid being questionable for tonight. He was also questionable for Game 1, so I would take this news with a gargantuan grain of salt.
Maxey just listed as questionable with an illness.
Embiid was mostly a decoy after his injury, dragging Mitch & iHart to the 3pt line. It’ll be interesting to see if he can do anything else this game.
I’ll reiterate that Embiid went 2-11 against Mitch. He’ll need to force Mitch into foul trouble to win that matchup.
Yes, rebounding was always going to be something that favored the Knicks this series, and more so with Embiid not being able to jump. But I think their coverages compounded the problem? All the attention given to Brunson, and the effort to crowd the mid-range, is giving more space to Knicks players under the rim. It just felt like they were out of position for a lot of possessions – Brunson rebounded a few of his own misses from mid range, which just shouldn’t happen.
Apart from their impact on allowing the Knicks to have a solid offensive rating, the offensive rebounding also makes it harder for Maxey to fly in transition, so I hope they can keep it up.
If I am Philly, I rest Joel. Down 0-2 on the road is not a disaster, if he is a bit hobbled you probably lose anyway, by far their best chance to take the series is to have him close to 100% for 4 games and he would get 5 days rest, and on the off chance they win without him it changes a lot.
That is why I want Joel to play, play a lot, and have the Knicks target him relentlessly.
He clearly had no lift on his jumper, but look at the amazing job Mitch is doing on him:
https://x.com/JADubin5/status/1782386494071517545
Maxey also didn’t participate in shootaround.
I will assume they are all playing until tip off.
Knicks down to 18-1 to win it all.
Knickerblogger’s back!
Maxey not participating in shootaround is a slightly bigger deal than Embiid continuing to be listed as questionable. But, yes, I will believe he isn’t playing only when the team officially rules him out.
I am not interested in seeing the Maxey illness/Jordan flu game …
If Philly’s plan to rebound better is play less zone and not scramble on defense as much that should allow Brunson to do his usual thing. We all worry about how to stop Embiid and Maxey but the Knicks offense poses just as many problems for Philly’s defense which they may not have the answers for.
Embiid is going to be listed as questionable all series I imagine.
We should probably try to get out in transition more if Joel can’t run, but we don’t really run either.
Though I’m sure all the Jews in Oklahoma City are thrilled with the scheduling, the league could have given the Knicks the Sunday and Wednesday slot that the Pelicans and Thunder have.
The Lakers play tonight too, and the Kings don’t need crypto until Friday, and there’s a Florida team playing tonight as well, so it does seem as if the league just wasn’t thinking outside of its own needs at all (shock).
Yeah, they focused very hard on stopping Brunson and it worked well, but that focus made them vulnerable on other aspects, namely allowing open 3s to the other players and having no paint presence to stop offensive rebounding. They picked their poison and it didn’t work.
Honestly, I expect them to double down on the same strategy. With Embiid injured they can’t really win the battle in the paint, so their best hope is that Jalen can’t figure out their defense and our role players miss more shots.
On the one hand, Thibs was once again the runaway winner for the coach NBA players would least like to play for in The Athletic’s anonymous poll: https://theathletic.com/5433545/2024/04/22/nba-player-poll-2024-lebron-jordan-goat-celtics-nuggets-rudy-gobert-timberwolves/
On the other, Katz has a great story about why the guys on the team (with lots of quotes from the SuperNova trio in particular) love playing for him: https://theathletic.com/5433289/2024/04/22/knicks-tom-thibodeau-player-poll/
I like the second story better.
This is what I was saying yesterday about how putting all that pressure on Brunson is/was their only move. They showed it in game one. I could never coach and NBA team and nurse is a good coach but I feel like he showed his hand going to that move in game one. He should have played Brunson straight up for one game to see if they could beat us before making that adjustment.
The poll is 77 players. It’s a stupid story that gets trotted out every year.
Half of the players in this league we probably wouldn’t want playing for us anyways.
Here’s hoping Maxey sits out, but opposing star players listed as questionable historically have about 100% chance to play against us, usually playing particularly well.
If he does play I think we are cooked. Game 1 was about as ominous as a win could possibly be — our entire offense has been reduced to Josh Hart threes, we are completely helpless against Maxey, and we owe the win entirely to Embiid’s injury scare and the demoralized Sixers minutes that followed.
If we do somehow pull game 2 out I will allow myself to feel guardedly optimistic about our chances. Until then, I’m sticking with my prediction of Sixers in 5. They are just too talented and too well-coached.
Whatever happens, I really wish we had avoided them. Not only did they easily manage to make Brunson ineffective, but we can expect the playbook to be copied by subsequent opponents even if we do advance — it doesn’t even require an elite defender like OG, just a couple of wings with some length. I think it shows that at this level, you really can’t be a tentpole scorer at a certain size without elite quickness. Brunson isn’t quick enough to blow by Oubre the way Maxey can blow by OG, and he’s become notorious enough from his regular season exploits that they paid attention to the film on his crafty tricks and figured out how to thwart them. What’s left is a PG who can’t score and isn’t an elite playmaker or plus defender. I’m not sure any coach other than Nurse or Spoelstra would have been able to neutralize him so completely — I think he’s set to have a 2021 Randle-esque series where he’s under 35% from the field.
I’m glad the site took a lunch break because it made it easier to catch up with this excellent thread.
I mentioned before the series my stab at how to best utilize OG would be to start DDV on Maxey and OG on a less threatening player like Tobias or Oubre, with the intention of letting OG roam. Nothing I saw in game 1 changed my mind about that being the best option, so it’ll be interesting to see if we make any adjustments there.
I’m glad Macri pulled those floater-range stats, because it was absolutely killing me while watching the game. Hopefully those turn into makes tonight.
The annoying thing about this is he’ll obviously play and maybe get some of our own guys sick in the process.
the rangers played yesterday at3pm..to change the ice over to hardwood …means that game would be late game and would be 10pm start on the left coast…not happening..
I think that saying Denver is a worse team without Jokic than OKC is without Shai ignores the fact that Jokic has been the tentpole of Denver for 7 years and the franchise has been built around him, whereas OKC is a hodgepodge roster of accumulated assets that have been glued together by the sublime play of their standout leader. It’s a case where I think the award shouldn’t just be a Highest BPM Award. I mean, the coach gets credit for being best coach, but there’s a much more obvious person who deserves the credit there.
Mi rilassero quando stiamo avanti 2-0 e non prima. Pure vincendo 50 partite, mi sento male se perdiamo la prima serie dei playoffs.
Se manteniamo OG e iHart saro ottimista per l’anno prossimo. Ma non voglio aspettare per vincere, voglio vincere adesso!
Our transition frequency on the season is middling, but we have some lineups that like to go-go and that actually includes the current starting lineup. Brunson/DDV/Hart/OG/iHart is in the 85th percentile in transition frequency per CTG. I would expect them to make Embiid prove he can keep up as much as possible.
Okay Pags, but that means that if we win tonight, nothing but sunshine and rainbows from you the rest of the playoffs. You said relax, so we’ll hold you to it…
In Game 1 Knicks outscored Philly in fastbreak points 27-11.
Okay, because you’re relatively new here, I’ll explain this one to you.
Pre at night is a reference to the great mid-distance runner Steve Prefontaine dying at night on the west coast, so nobody noticed it. Then, in 1998, both Billy Crudup and Jared Leto made movies about him, and at the end people in New York were like “yo, I don’t know pre died in 1973. Why wasn’t that in the Post?”
(It’s a pretty common reference on this site, coined by Jon Abbey shortly before his exile, and popularized by the “Andy goes for six” episode of the Fields and Rautins show (season 1, episode 112).
On my honor as the Great Clown Pagliacci:
If we win tonight, not a peep of pessimism unless we lose all of games 3, 4, and 5.
I may be very nervous about 5 if we lose 3-4 but I will try very hard to stay positive. Really it’s playoff home games I struggle with, I much prefer playing with house money on the road.
gotta go fast
Are we even talking about Shai for MVP if Chet doesn’t Chet all year? He is the reason they made the leap more so than Shai.
I don’t care if Shai wins, would be great to have a Canadian MVP, but Jokic is a lot better.
For some reason, the fact I mentioned recently that there are only 2800 people over 7 feet tall in the world, has really been on my brain. Everyone hates the WOW but Berri’s “short supply of tall people” continues to resonate for me. You have to be insanely good at 6’6 to be the best player in the NBA. At 6’11, with such a tiny pool of people your height to compete against, it’s possible to be very dominant just because you are so much more athletic than your similarly heighted counterparts.
I don’t know, it has always seemed obvious that being tall and skilled and huge is a giant head start on the court. You don’t forget matching up with Dan Gadzuric I guess.
One thing about Pags is that he does actually attach falsifiable predictions to his shtick, so while I do think he is trolling to a large degree he is at least willing to face the music if he’s wrong. It doesn’t make it that much less annoying but it’s something. There are…other posters who do all of the doomerism-at-full-tilt but don’t even participate in the series prediction threads.
Regarding the players poll
Eh, I don’t think Rudy is most overrated player in the NBA. He is a huge reason why the Timberpups have the number 1 ranked defense.
FUCK KYLE LOWRY!
ha, josh hart is brilliant…
he’s also may be one of the most important players on the floor this series…
philly has to try to do something about the boards…
they have to stop josh, isaiah and mitch from grabbing everything off the rim/backboard…
was I imagining things – or did at one point mitch hit some one with the ball as he was in the air, out of bounds…
https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/39990299/new-york-knicks-villanova-wildcats
oh yeah – almost forgot what i really logged on to say…
you know how they say – no matter how many baseball games you’ve watched, you are still apt to see some shit you ain’t never seen before…
aaron boone just got thrown out of the game for some stuff a fan was yelling at the home plate ump…in like the first inning of the game…
boone: it wasn’t me
the ump responded: i don’t care
i love sports for this…it’s just so honest at times…
When the question, ‘Who’s the most overrated player?’ came up, the 81 players asked gave Gobert the most votes with 13.6%, while Jordan Poole followed with 8.6%.
They answered the question like I would have—who is the biggest dick in the NBA?
“Okay, because you’re relatively new here, I’ll explain this one to you.
Pre at night is a reference to the great mid-distance runner Steve Prefontaine dying at night on the west coast, so nobody noticed it.”
I’m not new on here at all. I’ve been reading and posting for several years.
That just muddies the waters rather than clarifying, Donnie. What on earth does Steve Prefontaine have to do with Domantas Sabonis of the Sacramento Kings? Also: The Internet seems clear in saying that Prefontaine was a long-distance runner, not a mid-distance runner, at least based on what I saw.
Yes, because only Philly could be smart enough to realize that the best chance of stopping us would be to apply as much pressure as possible to our MVP caliber starting point guard. No other team would think to even do that!
i hope all is well in the world for you pags, and those of you whom feel like pags, but don’t wanna say it…
other than anger and anxiety, i have a large thing of paranoia going through me…
it’s made me very risk adverse in my behavior…
i got to the point where i did not trust my own decision-making…particularly in regard to my temper and own health-care…
got poked and prodded on by a bunch of doctors to get a clear evaluation of the situation…hooked up with another doc to find the path forward – turning towards trying to be jedi like…
challenge yourself pags – purposefully imagine a successful path forward…figure a few ways things can go…apply percentages…if there’s only like a 68% or so of this negative outcome – commit just that much to your emotional expenditure towards embracing dread…
examine your triggers…don’t let it let be knicks 🙂
Lol, if we win tonight not a peep out of you ever again.
SÌ. Su questo siamo entrambi d’accordo. Go Knicks!
Diventerà molto fastidioso molto rapidamente se molti di voi inizieranno a pubblicare in modo casuale in italiano senza motivo.
jeez…i got my time zones messed up..i guess they could have done it on Sunday late…but it would be a logistical headache….if there were game 7’s involved…maybe…but for early in the series…opening round…Silver probably just sucked it up…
Confido che tu sappia tutto su ciò che è fastidioso.
EDIT: But. What a great game. Let’s see more tonight 😉
oh, sad face…boone is still in the game…totally ruined the experience for me…
that A’s lineup is like a who’s who of a Triple A roster…
i think the pitcher is an ex Yankee prospect who we gave up for the great Frankie Montas…
The website goes down and when it comes back, everything is in Italian. It’s like a really terrible Twilight Zone episode or a fairly normal Black Mirror episode.
We have decades of experience of players turning into horrible coaches, GMs and talking heads to know that there really isn’t a correlation between basketball knowledge and the ability to play it at a high level, so I don’t care about those polls at all, honestly.
why can’t aaron judge just start hitting the ball…
I would argue that Jalen Williams has been equally important for them. IMO he is the MIP, pretty much turned into an ideal hyper-efficient secondary scorer. 22/5/5 per36 on a scintillating 58% from 2 and 43% from 3!
He is basically the second coming of OKC James Harden.
But you’d be passing up a rare chance at happy, optimistic Pagliacci!
Maybe I’ll just switch to Italian full-time. I need the practice…
alright – boone is gone…let there be joy once more in the telling of that tale…
You heard it here, folks: Tyrese Maxey > Jalen Brunson
Pagliacci, if Jalen Brunson is actually not very good, and is only a fugazy fake regular season player, what difference does it make when we play a good team? Certainly any good team is going to kick our ass, given that our best player is a slow and ineffective bum who is easily thwarted by the likes of Kelly Oubre, right?
I’m sorry but your analysis just kind of sucks.
I’m sorry but I think it’s awesome to be playing Philly. Game 1 was a great, intense game and beating Philly with Embiid means a helluva lot more than beating Indiana or Orlando. The team is embracing the challenge so the fans should too.
We have three players with BPMs above 3.0. All three of them had very subpar games. We still won.
are you being actively disingenuous in your words pags…
awwww man, don’t do that…
we’d still love you with out the fake stuff…
disingenuous…somewhat of a leaky vessel for trust…
Fun fact from game 1: Deuce had a TS% of .815 and a BPM of 17.6
Kenny Smith on Friday predicted the Knicks to win while Barkley and Shaq kept harping about who’s gonna score besides Brunson and the Jet said the Knicks have several guys capable of getting 15 pts to help Brunson. One of the few times there was some actual smart analysis about the Knicks on Inside the NBA.
I don’t know, it has always seemed obvious that being tall and skilled and huge is a giant head start on the court. You don’t forget matching up with Dan Gadzuric I guess.
too obvious by half owen. almost everything is a head start. maybe if we had some easy measure of proprioception X dynamic shin angle X height, sga would be seen as born into a pole position of 10 human adults in history. oh but that’s more interesting that height? okay, but if you want to make it the dos equis award and not the head start award, joker is here for you. if basketball is conway’s game of life, and interesting is the computational space between how you play and how other people with your simplest trait play, jokic might be the most interesting player in nba history.
p3 said that of the 1000 or so nba prospects it had ever measured, jokic had the single worst vertical; head starts should include backward steps, too. if he doesn’t have one of the outlier real time visual-motor systems in world history he’s not even a rotation player. why is that combination less interesting to you than some other equally unlikely combination of traits with less of a single-component outlier? if i had to pick among bad options, i’d say sga looks more like allonzo trier than jokic looks like dan gadzuric.
edit: multitasking and i’m pretty sure this responded to a phantom post that owen didn’t actually write; probably i assumed it when i saw the reference to dave berri’s short supply of tall people, an argument i find incredibly poorly thought out. but i’ll leave it here for posterity.
The Knicks should have done some better things at the deadline but it doesn’t matter now because they still have a puncher’s chance to win it all. None of that shit matters now, including Game 82, and the player poll re Thibs sure as shit doesn’t matter now.
He needs to keep playing Bogie, DDV and OG need to pick it up, Josh Hart needs to keep playing above established trend.(*) Those things happen and it will continue to be a very fun season-that-matters.
(*) I still think they’re “one weapon short.” That can be overcome through above trend play by certain players — Deuce is another — over the relatively short sample size the playoffs comprise.
The weapon they’re missing is Randle.
My analysis may suck, but you’re not actually responding to it, just the straw men next door.
I didn’t say Maxey > Brunson in a vacuum. But in the context of his series, it seems the conditions are in place for Maxey to significantly outperform him. If the positions were reversed and Brunson were a second banana behind the best scorer in the league, I’m sure Brunson would easily outperform Maxey. And if Brunson was the quickest player on the floor instead of the craftiest, I suspect he’d be less likely to be shut down in the current context. Basketball is a cruel mistress that often rewards god-given attributes over skill. Even a genius like Jokic might be unplayable if he were 8 inches shorter. The sample size for small guards who aren’t A) super quick or B) Steph Curry leading deep playoff runs is virtually nonexistent, so perhaps you can understand my concern.
I don’t think any “good” team would kick our ass. I think we’d beat the Pacers, or the Bucks with Giannis. Brunson cooked both this season, especially the Bucks, so he’d likely have fewer issues in the playoffs. Conversely, the Sixers shut him down in 3 of our 4 games this season.
I view the Sixers as better than good, on par with the Celtics with Embiid. Not impossible we’ll win, but every matchup with a team like this greatly reduces our chances of advancing — that’s probability, not pessimism. Moreover, letting the Sixers play against other teams improves our equity against them by giving Embiid chances to break down.
Pags Brunson has already proven he can play extremely well in the playoffs. He played well against Cleveland and Miami last year and played well in the playoffs with Dallas.
Having one bad game doesn’t mean that he’s been figured out. It’s one fucking game. MJ had bad playoff games.
Priceless line from Pepper’s Villanova article:
‘But Brunson and DiVincenzo usually ended up bonding over one specific thing more than any other that year, a topic that brought them together and forged the foundation of a lifelong friendship: Josh Hart was an incredibly annoying person.’
The MLB is insane nowadays. If someone had Mason Miller’s stuff just, like, 12 years ago they’d be put on a witch trial.
The thing with the playoffs is that noisy stuff often gets talked about as if it is truly meaningful. Writers need to write, internet posters need to post. Brunson had a bad game, and we keep worrying that it’s because the Sixers finally “solved” him. But here’s the thing: Brunson faced weird coverages all season (remember the 4th quarter of the Lakers game in MSG?) and last year too. He is more likely than not to play to his usual standards, despite what the opposition is throwing at him.
I have done my best to forget the Heat series, but remember how they left Hart alone so that they could make things difficult from Brunson? Remember Spo’s wizardry? I feel like we talked about this all year. And yet, Brunson had a .632 TS% on 28% USG. I think he’ll be fine, and if he isn’t, it’s probably not because of Oubre or Lowry or Batum but because weird shit happens sometimes and it doesn’t necessarily mean anything.
PT – I’d be interested to hear why you thought it was poorly thought out. It remains convincing to me.
Cut for time due to concerns over brevity in my original post was the fact that what makes Jokic remarkable is that he has the touch of Brunson and court sense of Chris Paul in a lumbering, unathletic 6’11 body. And also a musing on how dominant Shaq was and how damaging not being able to shoot free throws was.
I agree it’s not just height. And I agree it’s not just athletic ability. But if Jokic were 6-5 he’d be in the Adriatic League.
I’m with BBA on this, it’s awesome to have a meaningful series right away.
We all understand that a lot of things have to go right for this team to win a championship this season, and that it is unlikely to happen. The Celtics are a better team, there are 3 very strong teams in the west at least and even the Bucks might be great if Giannis if back in full force.
So I’d rather watch a dogfight against Philly to see what this team is capable of, than winning a much less meaningful series against the Cavs / Magic / Pacers / Heat and then have a meaningful challenge in round 2.
Nobody remembers who lost in the second round anyway, unless it’s to make fun of teams with higher expectations that were stopped there. Let’s face the best teams and give them hell.
no…his last name would be Doncic
Owen sent me on a total tangent.
Am I the only one who is unconvinced that there are only 2800 people taller than 7 feet in the world? I get that this is the number you get by calculating a normal distribution (although I didn’t re-do the math), but hear me out.
According to this list, there are 29 7-footers in the NBA.
Let’s assume that 50% of those 2800 taller than 7 feet are between ages 20-40, and that they are all men. That would mean that 1 in every 50 7-footers in the world age 20-40 play in the NBA. That seems preposterously high, not to mention the fact that almost all NBA 7-footers are from North America or Europe (you’d expect many more Chinese, Indian, Indonesian, Pakistani or Brazilian players in the NBA – even if height is not evenly distributed, but we are talking outliers here). So are we arguing that if you are a 7-footer in the US or Canada, you have a 1-in-5 or 1-in-6 chance of making it in the NBA? I don’t think that’s realistic at all!
Excellent Thibs piece in The Athletic. Partly in contra to the poll.
https://theathletic.com/5433289/2024/04/22/knicks-tom-thibodeau-player-poll/
scarcity is complex. singling out one variable as the denominator because it’s available and obvious is unhelpful. there is also a very short supply of people who can throw 100mph with top percentile accuracy. we can define the pool of possible pat mahomes vs the pool of possible jokers or sgas into endless poorly defined sets. height is nothing but a capricious fish in the sea. in no way will it be obvious which denominator is a more salient contributor to what is being asserted: causing predictable difference in the ultimate distribution of production.
basketball is a sport with many trials (possessions) per game and per season. it also has relatively few players and a relatively large ability to optionally invoke singular players in given possessions. this inherently makes it unsurprising that competitive balance might be lower from the reduction of randomness and the outsize potential contribution of players at the very tail of the distribution. merely noticing that basketball players possess an obvious and unusually population trait without doing literally a lick of analysis to figure out whether this actually generates different distributional results to explain an outcome you would already expect anyway is unimpressive at best.
But if Jokic were 6-5 he’d be in the Adriatic League.
well for one this kind of elides the costs of height. if jokic was 6 5 he might be more agile and his handle would surely be way better, and he’d probably max out his 3. but like, also, if sga were as slow as jokic he’d probably be an assistant coach on that adriatic team.
No doubt Brunson can play in the playoffs. I was honestly expecting him to hold his own yesterday as he has shown an improved and extremely resilient scoring game this year.
However, it seems that PHI is just about his worst matchup in the entire league, and that’s disappointing because Oubre and Maxey aren’t exactly regarded as a defensive stoppers.
The stats were bad yesterday but the eye test was apocalyptic. He looked like me out there — barely able to hang on to the ball or get a shot off. I’m sure we all said after Randle’s game 1 in 2021 that he was an All-NBA guy and was bound to regress to the mean. But he never did, he didn’t shoot even 40% from the field in a single game. He was just completely neutralized.
If that was going to happen to Brunson in a series, Game 1 was exactly how it would start. As with 2021 Randle, there doesn’t seem to be any adjustment he could make with the current make-up of the team.
Nurse is and should be very happy with the trade-offs of open Josh Hart threes and some extra offensive rebounds leading to some extra opportunities in which we still mostly can’t score (23 OREBs led to only 20 points, less than 1 point per possession).
In the realm of falsifiable predictions, I hereby proclaim:
-Brunson will be under 50% TS for the series
-Brunson will not shoot over 50% from the field in any game.
I desperately home I’m wrong and it’s a vintage Brunson banger tonight, but he just looked so outmatched. Roast me all you want if I’m wrong, but this is my sincere opinion based on what we’ve seen, and I’m sorry that it isn’t rosier.
Is it over dramatic to say the Yankees are the worst 15-8 team in baseball history?
Their pythag is 13-10. There have probably been 15-8 teams over baseball history with worse 23-game pythags, but 13-10 is kinda mediocre in the grand scheme for a 15-8 team.
The rotation is solid and will become very good once Cole returns but this is easily the worst bullpen they’ve had in a decade. They went from having a ton of strikeout guys to having the worst bullpen in baseball in terms of strikeout %. The offense should improve once Judge and Gleyber remember how to hit but there are still some holes in the lineup.
In all seriousness I’m thrilled with the 15-8 start and they should easily win 90+ games but gonna be tough to win the division with the juggernaut offense Baltimore has built.
I gotta know milo – do you talk like this to folks at work?
or is it like – this is the way you wish you could speak?
I’m surprised by the Shai backlash here.
LOL
pt, mostly just conjecturing here, but I would point to the opportunity that being extremely tall presents just on perception alone. The reality is that no one looks at a 6’1″ mediocre athlete with limited skills and says “Hey, let’s see if we can develop this guy.” Who is the Hasheem Thabeet of the 6’1″ set?
I would also guess that at 7′ or above you have very limited sports options. Seven footers are extremely rare in any sport other than basketball and volleyball. No one 7′ or above ever played in MLB. the record for a NHL player is 6’9″. Only one 7 footer in NFL history. None of note in soccer.
It is also likely the case that many outstanding athletes who would have been exceptional basketball players opted for other sports because they simply liked the other sports better, or grew up playing other sports. If Hakeem was 6’0″ instead of 7’0″, he probably would have stuck with soccer. But what sport could excellent athletes like Mitch or iHart become millionaires playing?
Basketball and volleyball are the only sports where simply being tall gives you a very obvious advantage. Things like speed, vertical, hand-eye coordination, footwork, peripheral vision, anticipation instincts, etc. are transferable to other sports. It seems like a high center of gravity is actually a disadvantage in sports like football, soccer, and hockey.
From that Athletic piece on Thibs:
Likewise, ptmilo should gather some of us every day in a pre-thread thread. Get it wrong, you’re doing it again. I’d be in that “early group.” 😉
I gotta know milo – do you talk like this to folks at work?
well geo i can tell you i speak exactly like this to my 7 year old which is perhaps why he hasn’t looked up from minecraft in five weeks. like many people, i think if i could wave a wand i’d speak a bit more like i write and write a bit more like i speak. i know doogie, not you.
Z-man, thanks for posting Deuce’s bpm from Saturday. I meant to post it yesterday. Single game bpm is much more interesting to me than single game plus/minus. Saturday was definitely the Deuce game on both sides of the ball.
I don’t think it’s so smart to leave Hart open from 3. He is very streaky. Didn’t he shoot over 50% from 3 after we acquired him?
Hart was 5-21 vs. the Heat last year (not that he was alone in that regard, but still…). If I were a coach, I’d certainly challenge him to prove that he can consistently make that shot. The risk is somewhat mitigated by our offensive rebounding edge, but Hart has not hit 4 threes in a game all year. You can bet that Nurse is not a believer quite yet.
That espn Villanova article is wonderful. Real insight into our three supernova guys.
when it’s time to tell your whole story milo, I want in…we can get BC, AL and some others to put down the words…
surely with all the artistic type folks here, someone can draw and ink…
I, I could just kind of hang out, eat food, walk the dog occasionally, get high, get high some more…
and, you know – make sure everyone is drinking enough water…hydration is important stuff…
I’m there when you call milo…
There could be four if we still had Grimes. 🙂
The whole gamesmanship with game time decisions seems silly (and Thibs has used it as much as Nurse). We know that Maxey and Embiid are playing, come on.
When has Thibs ever used it? One of my critiques of Thibs is that he tends to avoid this kind of thing, such as working the refs in post-game comments in the many times we’d been jobbed.
Pretty sure Brunson was a game time decision several times, as was I-Hart. Not to mention that Mitch and OG went from indefinitely out to playing in like 6 hours.
I’ma takin’ two victory laps here. One is never doubting Deuce, ever (at least in public…). The other is decrying those who forgot Mitch’s defensive mastery in favor of iHart’s shiny new penny (okay, more like an 1888 Morgan silver dollar, but still).
Not to say that I ever imagined even in my wettest dreams that Mitch would morph from tree trunk to Giant Death Spider in the few days between the end of the season and the start of the playoffs.
May both last. If not, well I’ve snuck in my victory laps. What will be will be, as geo would say.
(Note that I’m not saying [healthy] Mitch is better than iHart. He is in some ways, he is not in a number of others. They’re actually a rather perfect tandem. I seriously hope we can keep them both.)
Pags this whole schtick of yours is just how you deal with the anxiety, right?
My anxiety typically manifests around the coach. But my new mantra has been helping with that: “stop worrying and love the Thibs”.
This incredible old picture of Thibodeau rocking one of the best mullets I’ve ever seen has really helped me embrace him:
https://www.thescore.com/nba/news/1011650
That photo is something. The before and after is basically a case against overwork.
You’ve got me there, Hubs. It’s funny, there are some areas in life where most people feel anxious, but I don’t. I’m a dynamite public speaker, for example, and I never fear confrontation (at least the verbal kind).
But something where I care irrationally about the outcome? Over which I have zero control? In an area where I have PTSD from getting let down over and over for thirty years? I turn into Ben Simmons under the basket with the game on the line.
Having an outlet makes these feelings more tolerable for me, at the cost of pissing off some of the people here who I generally like. I think some of y’all have come to understand that I’m not really a troll per se; my thoughts are always sincere even if they aren’t sane. I’m just a sad clown trying to cope with a terminal case Knicks fandom as best I can.
Like you said before your edit, if we do win tonight I’ll be as happy as anyone here, and I’ll gleefully pass the time until Game 5 gleefully reading Sixers fans’ lamentations in their subreddits and fora, all the while masturbating furiously.
I love Shai. I just don’t think he is Jokic.
Scarcity is complex and you can be a dominant NBA player without being 7 feet tall. But it sure helps.
Game thread up