Knicks Morning News (2024.05.10)

Hindsight is 20/20 on the Bojan and Burks trade. But Bojan was useful in the playoffs before he got hurt and his injury had nothing to do with age or playing too many minutes.

I don’t think we can say Bojan’s injury has nothing to do with his age. His wrist was wearing down prior to the foot injury. Also, the foot injury doesn’t look that bad and I don’t know if a younger and more athletic player would have been taken out in the same way.

When you bring in 35-year-old players you are baking in higher injury risk. Luck plays a part but when you take risks you raise the opportunity for bad luck to happen.

It is the same with playing players for too many minutes. It raises the risk of something bad happening. That doesn’t mean luck isn’t a factor but to simply wave away our rash of injuries as simply bad luck is ignoring the long history of Thibs and overuse.

But it’s not all on Thibs, Leon did not give him a lot of options other than to overuse his starters since the end of our bench is so bad.

Add Obi, or keep Grimes (he was shut down on a tanking team due to “muscle soreness” six weeks ago I’m sure he’d be healthy by now), or make picks in 2021, or 2022, or trade back in 2023, or even manage the waiver wire better and we might have had the depth to prevent Thibs from giving in to his worst roster management tendencies. Instead, we are facing playing Precious out of position at the 4 while also playing Burks and Milton for major minutes in the Eastern Conference semifinals.

Come on, Ben. He fell on his wrist, it wasn’t “wearing down.” His foot injury was caused by a guy falling on it, and there’s no reason to believe that a younger player would have not gotten similarly injured by the same occurrence. Younger guy Quentin Grimes was just as injury prone and had to be shut down because he couldn’t recover from whatever injury he had before being traded. You can make a valid argument without embellishing it with these stretches.

Bojan did not injure his wrist on that play only his foot. The wrist was already bothering him and he was always planning on offseason surgery. The foot injury was not directly due to his age but he is unathletic and older so it is not surprising for something like that to happen. That is the risk of older players. It’s just like Mitch or KP or Embiid, each individual injury is not due to them being fragile but their fragility sets up opportunities for those injuries to happen.

I don’t think Grimes was shut down because he couldn’t recover. He was banged up and Detroit had nothing to play for. If their games had mattered he might never have been sat down at all or at least came back after sitting out. They called it muscle soreness and he hasn’t had surgery so I don’t think it was serious.

Hubert –
Burks, Milton, and Sims are not great 11-13 men in the NBA.

Indy has Jalen Smith, Doug McDermott, and Jarace Walker as their 11-13. Much better than us.

Philly has Payne/Heild you choose who is lower on the depth chart, Mo Bamba, and KJ Martin as their 11-13. Also better.

Burks also has shot below 40% from 2 over the past three seasons. His struggles are not surprising. Especially considering our offense is more iso oriented than Detroit and all our wings have to cook their own shots at least a little. On top of that, we got him specifically because we wanted shot-creating not just a spot-up shooter. If we wanted spot up shooting we already had a better version of that in Grimes.

Who would not be available right now because he’s injured. I guess he played too many minutes for Thibs before we traded him.

We do not know if Grimes would still be injured. I seriously doubt he’d still be out if he was on a playoff team. He did not have surgery and was shut down for “muscle soreness”. And was shut down 6 weeks ago. Tanking teams often shut down banged up players because why have someone fight through injury when the outcomes don’t matter and shutting down players helps the tank.

Hubert – Covington was the 9th man before his injury. I think Hield and Payne are 10 and 11 but that does not really matter. I do know I’d take either before Burks, Bojan, or Milton.

You are right about players outside the top ten in most rotations coming with problems but ours are particularly bad. Burks is the only one you can make a legitimate case for especially considering Thibs never tested Milton so he is unproven in our system. Most teams have young players who could overachieve or vets with experience at the end of their bench. Outside of Burks we have neither.

I am not defending Thibs. I think if he had used our back bench more Leon would have prioritized it more I’m just saying there is blame to go around and Thibs’s main rotation mistakes were in the regular season not in the playoffs. If he had played those end of benchers more he might have more faith in them and trust them enough to give his starters more rest.

I think the only minutes problems in the playoffs were once we closed out Philly. We needed to expand the rotation for the beginning of this series to let our exhausted team recover a bit from a grueling 1st round series.

As for Bojan. We traded for a physically declining 35 year old player and he got hurt. It is not a surprising circumstance even if the injury wasn’t necessarily age related. I mentioned his age and injury potential when the trade happened so I am not just making shit up. Old players get hurt, it is the biggest factor that ends careers.

Grimes was shooting 21% from the field and 14% from 3 for Detroit. He also sat a bunch of games before getting shut down. So I’m pretty sure he was actually hurt.

I don’t doubt Grimes was hurt but it was 6 weeks ago so I think there is a good chance he’d be healthy by now since the problems were muscle soreness and not anything structural. I’m not sure at all but the chance he’d be helpful is a lot higher than Bojan and probably higher than Burks as well.

Ben, just stop. You’re way over your ski’s.

In what way? I am legitimately curious.

We have no way to know if Grimes would still be hurt, and if he was healthy he’d most likely be pretty helpful right now.

We traded Obi for nothing of value and could have easily kept him and still signed DDV and traded for OG.

We didn’t need to move Grimes to turn Fournier into a non-expiring contract.

Bojan and Burks are not helping our team at all right now.

We signed one waiver wire pick-up and then kept 5 players who are neither future prospects nor helpful right now.

Where am I wrong? How am I out of line?

We are doing a lot of things right as a team but these are all clear and foreseeable errors.