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Why are Knicks allowing so many open 3s? What?s gone wrong and how they can fix it – The Athletic
11/12/2024 11:03:44
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11/12/2024 10:53:28
New York Knicks vs Philadelphia 76ers Prediction and Betting Tips for 2024 Emirates NBA Cup | Nov. 12 – Sportskeeda
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76ers vs Knicks: Injury Report, Depth Chart, and More Ahead Emirates NBA Cup Opener – EssentiallySports
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Knicks vs 76ers NBA Cup Predictions, Odds & Picks (11/12) – Betting News
11/12/2024 10:27:01
Sixers-Knicks preview: Which team made bigger improvements during the offseason? – PhillyVoice.com
11/12/2024 10:01:00
How Mikal Bridges morphed from ?Nova redshirt to ?Nova Knick – The Philadelphia Inquirer
11/12/2024 10:00:03
New hope for the Sixers | Sports Daily Newsletter – The Philadelphia Inquirer
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Knicks vs. 76ers: Start time, where to watch, what’s the latest – Yahoo Eurosport UK
11/12/2024 08:31:23
Knicks vs. Bulls Injury Report – November 13 – Times Union
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New York Knicks vs. Philadelphia 76ers: live game updates, stats, play-by-play – Yahoo Sports
11/12/2024 05:07:53
New York Knicks vs Philadelphia 76ers Prediction, Bet Builder Tips & Odds – Sportsgambler.com
11/12/2024 04:58:54
Miles McBride?s uncertain availability vs. 76ers could further thins Knicks bench options – New York Post
11/12/2024 03:59:00
Joel Embiid best prop bets for 76ers vs. Knicks – DraftKings
11/12/2024 01:50:14
Pacers secure win over Knicks, climb to 5-5 – NBA.com
11/12/2024 01:11:32
There is no quick fix for Tom Thibodeau?s lack of trust in Knicks depth – New York Post
11/12/2024 01:23:00
4 early Knicks takeaways from 2024-25 season – sny.tv
11/12/2024 01:27:05
Pacers Grades: Bennedict Mathurin and Tyrese Haliburton combine for 73 points in win over Knicks – iPacers
11/12/2024 00:25:34
New York Knicks Rookie PG Showing Progress – mmsport.minutemediabeta.com
11/12/2024 00:00:00
Knicks Already at a Tyler Kolek Crossroad – mmsport.minutemediabeta.com
11/12/2024 00:00:00
82 replies on “Knicks Morning News (2024.11.12)”
A lot of grit and grind in the NewsBot. Thibs is proud.
Someone posted clips of KAT showing that his defense is not as bad as the stats indicate.
I can no longer find the clip but someone will. Not convinced. It’s a cascade when your 5 is a sieve.
There’s a lot of cascading points with this team.
Our 1 is a sieve, too.
Every lineup we play has either 3 or 4 guys who rebound poorly for their position.
Our do-almost-everything wing doesn’t do the one thing that would make teams guard him on the perimeter in crunch time.
That seems like a lot for a coach to have to adjust to, and you only gave him 8 guys he trusts to do it with.
The best thing we can do is pray for Mitch. His offense is a cascading point, too, but it’s the one I think we can most live with.
i forget, who is the poster here who fell in love with tafka the IST so quickly i thought it was adam silver’s intern? the thing i do like about it is the run-up-the-score incentive. some of the games in group play that would normally be 2/3 garbage time like celts-wiz are more fun that way.
Far and away the biggest issue so far is Thibs’ ridiculous minutes distribution. Among the league mpg leaders we have 3 of the top 20 and 5 of the top 54.
It’s November. This is beyond short-sighted. And it’s not even working! We’re losing games anyway!
Big game tonight, NBA Cup group stage opener!
Owen,
I don’t think this is a Goldilocks scenario at all, but it depends what the lineup is. If Mitch or Precious replaces Hart as a starter, I don’t see a huge impact on Mikal’s usage, but in lineups where either Brunson, Towns or OG is out, then Mikal will be asked to do more. That’s one of the points I’ve been making to counter the idea that Bridges is being used poorly or not doing enough on offense to justify the price we paid. There are only so many shots in the game. We are potent on offense. So someone (maybe more than one player) will probably score less than they are capable of scoring at a good rate.
When we first traded for Bridges the question I was asking is whether he could be a consistent #2 option or #2a option with OG.
Once we got Towns, he became the #3 or #3a option in the starting lineup where he’s probably being underutilized a bit, but there ARE lineups where he’ll be asked to do more.
No one has really asked this question.
If Leon knew he was going to get Towns, I wonder if he would have paid so much for Bridges.
I guess that depends on what he thinks of his defense, playmaking, rebounding and other non scoring skills.
The 76ers are getting healthier. They are going to be load once they are 100%. Embiid and George are playing tonight. I’m also sure some of these guys had tonight marked on their calendars after we eliminated them last year. Thankfully Maxey is out. That gives us a better chance to take one on the road, but I’m expecting the 76ers to come out very prepared and full of energy. If we blow this one, I may have to skip looking at tomorrows thread. 😉
There is a part of me that wonders if Towns was traded for under the assumption that we might send him out for Jokic or Giannis if either become available.
There’s also a part of me that wonders why we did these 2 trades and blew up a team with great chemistry and all of our picks.
Losing iHart hurt but it’s not like we couldn’t build up a replacement for him. Last year’s team without iHart and an injured Mitch and Precious would also probably struggle though. But at least we’d have a boatload of picks still and could have used them to draft more bigs.
The bench situation is fucking ridiculous. Leon needs to talk to Thibs about this. There is no reason Kolek, Huk and Dadiet can’t soak up a few minutes each half. Its November, for christ sake. Every team plays at least 10 players except for us who are acting like it’s an elimination game in the playoffs.
Turns out that Hubert is actually Macri. Who knew.
“Don’t make any major scheme or rotation/personnel changes before 20 games.”
Reports indicate that we knew we could get Towns if we added Donte for some time. We spent the whole summer trying to get them to accept Mitch instead.
It also seems like we knew Hartenstein was gone before we made the Bridges trade, as seemingly there was a professional courtesy on Presti’s part to let Leon know he was planning to blow us out of the water.
Connecting the dots, it seems like Towns was part of Leon’s plan when he made the Bridges trade. It only happened late because he spent the summer hoping Minnesota would back off their Donte demand.
Also given that it’s known they were trying very hard to get the Wolves to accept Mitch instead of Donte (and that they shopped Mitch around after the Towns trade), it’s impossible to credibly argue that maybe the plan all along was to pair Mitch and Towns.
I’d probably wait 50, Raven. You really gotta let these Gen Z kids know you’re not going anywhere before they accept that they’re the ones who have to change. KAT’s probably thinking “If I just keep this up for a few more weeks they’ll either fire Thibs or ask Mitch to do this shit.”
(I know I’m wishcasting with this KAT-as-Gen Z-kid bit, btw.)
Mitch is gone. He hasn’t spoken to the media in 5 months. Leon let it be known that he tried to trade him multiple times, including for KAT. Lots of things need praying for, but Mitch is toward the bottom of my list (other than he gets healthy enough so he is flipped for better value).
Yeah, things are weird right now. We only have 6 usable players apparently which is pretty unusual.
I didn’t feel like I was going full Pangloss the other day, there is definitely a way through to being a very good, well rounded team, but a lot of things have to fall into place.
Bridges is a good team defender who struggles trying to guard 1’s, especially coming off screen actions.
Brunson isn’t a good team defender and can’t guard 1’s very well either.
So the solution has been to take the guy who is good at something (Mikal) and have him do something he’s bad at, so now you have two useless defenders on the floor instead of one.
Just let Brunson try and fail to guard opposing 1’s, and let Bridges play the team defense he is actually good at playing. (Insert galaxy brain emoji)
Mitch just been playing with his trucks on instagram.
He looks a little heavy, though.
Hollinger notes that Jarred McCain, a Sixers rookie guard, has been playing great so far (27 against Charlotte). So look for him to smoke us tonight.
this was an interesting data point…just to be clear, – when I say, shoot more threes, this is what I mean and not off the dribble, step back or well defended shots, – an offense thats specifically designed to create wide open threes.
Thibs motto is to read the defense, see what it gives you and make a decision. The motto with this team needs to be, you confuse the defense, trick them and force them to “scarmble mode” via ball movement, cuts and penetration so that you create and take the three point shop you want to take.
https://www.reddit.com/r/NYKnicks/comments/1gowo1j/tommy_beer_according_to_nba_tracking_data_of_the/#lightbox
So it’s “defend the three better” and “shoot more and better threes.”
Interestingly, both Edwards in The Athletic and Macri review our three-point defense. Macri looked at every one of the made Pacer threes. Not sure I picked up a particular lesson in the noise, except we’re doing a lot of things badly. Some of which should improve with experience, some of which may need some tweaking.
https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/5915004/2024/11/12/knicks-defense-video-3s-bad/
https://knicksfilmschool.substack.com/p/under-the-microscope?utm_campaign=email-post&r=1yb8qs&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
You gotta cut him a little slack for all the charges he draws. No one else on the team does, that’s for sure
“i forget, who is the poster here who fell in love with tafka the IST so quickly i thought it was adam silver’s intern?”
I’d prefer to keep my relationship with Mr. Silver confidential.
Yeahhhhh..I share the sentiment that it is way too soon to go with a tight rotation- regardless of trust issues and injury. Toppin, Hukporti, Kolek, and Dadiet need to play while they can- because once Mitch and Achiuwa are back, there will only be garbage time minutes available. Probably scarcely available, knowing Thibs
We knew this team was gonna be thin after the KAT trade, but it really has brought out Thibs’ worst tendency even further.
That said, injuries league-wide are apparently up 35% from last year at this time, so perhaps “incredible depth” is the new “big three”?
As for Thibs, I just hope he doesn’t do any long-term damage to OG et al. because I think next year was always going to be our best shot. In 2025/6 the rookies will be a year older, we’ll be able to add a few extra veterans to the bench, and our top players will know the system by then.
In other words, I’m a long way from panicking rn, even though Mikal looks like ass. We just need to get (and stay) healthy.
The worst part of Thibs overplaying our starters for shitty results is that we’ve actually had very good luck so far to have Towns and OG still playing in the context of this season where injuries are up 35% league wide. With Deuce questionable for tonight’s game what is Thibs gonna do, play a 5-man rotation?
When OG gets hurt the wheels are really gonna come off. Without him we might be WOAT level bad defensively.
It’s just staggering that we misapprehended Mikal Bridges’ talents so severely. That was a trade of entirely future assets for entirely present value. A trade like that should feel great in the short term as the cost is felt years down the line. That it feels terrible now is extremely ominous.
Even the Eddy Curry trade didn’t feel all that horrible right away. He even put up 20 PPG one year. But later on, when we realized a C who would never even be average cost us LaMarcus Aldridge and Joakim Noah (the actual good version from before we signed him)? Brutal.
I’m out on Thibs. Playing 2004 style on both offense and defense with this group is not just bad for winning, it’s also gonna get our players hurt. We work so much harder to grind out our shitty two pointers than the other team does just lofting 45+ threes. His biases are our ceiling.
Love how after 9 (NINE) games we have an analytical take on the Mikal v Eddy trade.
The Eddy Curry trade is why I first came to this site – it was the only place where people were saying what I was saying, that it was a terrible trade and we should have targeted Tyson instead. It was an immediately obvious blunder. Like the trade for Bargnani.
Rama and I arrived at the same time and yes, comparing the two trades is completely asinine
Knicks Blunders That Were Obvious The Moment They Were Made
Eddy Curry trade
Bargnani trade
Joakim Noah signing
Kevin Knox pick
Ron Baker player option
Or Thibs needs to talk to Leon about it!
Look at what he provided Thibs with for the 7-12 spots on Sunday:
Jericho Sims
Tyler Kolek
Pacome Dadiet
Ariel Hukporti
Jacob Toppin
Matt Ryan
Come on. I like our rookies but there’s G League teams with better NBA ready options than that. And this is a team that’s a hair away from the second apron!!! We’re going to have to start losing pieces soon to make the money work!
Bravo, Leon. Bravo.
Way too short of a list, JK. Add:
McDyess trade
Ewing trade
Glen Rice trade
Marbury trade
Zach Randolph trade
McGrady trade
Amare signing
Calderon trade
Melo trade
Mega max melo
Lance Thomas trade (seriously, look it up)
Robin Lopez/Afflalo/Derrick Williams/Kyle O’Quinn 2015 summer FA haul
2021 summer FA haul
Various 1rp incinerations
Derrick Rose trade (first stint)
Really most of our moves in the last 25 years have been unequivocally bad right away
If you’re going to open it up like that, I suppose that despite his lovely eyelashes, you’d have to include the Frank pick in there.
Some of those on your list were kind of defendable when they were made. Don’t get me wrong, I hated most of those moves right from the jump, but the five I listed were so obviously bad my brain processed them as comedy.
Raven, if we’re including draft picks then there are quite a few other strong contenders:
Knox, Hill, Sweetney, Obi…
I don’t know why people are upset about the minutes, if we just blew every team out by 60+ Thibs would only play them for 36 minutes, then sit them for the 4th. You gotta look at that.
Kolek has a 92% eFG right now. Huk and Dadiet haven’t been horrendous so far. Matt Ryan is the kind of guy who would destroy us on the Celtics’ bench. We’re not gonna make it through the season with our top 8 healthy the whole way so it’s imperative that we see what these guys have or find a way to bring in alternatives.
I don’t really think it’s true that the end of our bench is particularly weaker than most teams. In the game we’re discussing against Indy, they played Johnny Furphy, Enrique Freeman, and Quenton Jackson for 25 minutes combined. That’s two second round rookies and a G-league scrub. I don’t see an appreciable difference between those guys and Dadiet, Kolek, Hukporti, Ryan, etc.
I didn’t like the Chris Childs for Mark Jackson trade.
You guys are sleeping on Steve Francis
[Won’t dignify Mike flaunting his gif powers like this with a response]
How far back do the archives go, Mike? I tried searching for posts from the Eddy Curry era and couldn’t find them. But I could swear I was here back then. I was definitely here for the start of the D’Antoni/Walsh era, but that stuff’s not searchable, either.
Definitely seems like Matt Ryan should get some minutes, otherwise why did we sign him? Must’ve been someone out there that Thibs would give minutes.
From what I’ve seen, the rookies are all liabilities. Maybe not Hukporti. Of course our starters suck on defense anyway, so throw Kolek out there.
throw me in with the echo box saying the minutes distribution for the team is most certainly not a-ok…
I found this blog the day Isiah was officially fired!
Mike wrote a long post about Eddy Curry and it would be a tragedy if it no longer exists. Although I feel like all the old posts got the axe.
Oh boy, today’s thread is “let’s debate the worst moves in Knicks history”
I’m depressed enough by the election, and now this )-:
The Obi Toppin pick and the incineration make the cut for me.
I would say trading the 11th pick does, as well, but some people still defend that so I guess it’s not blindingly obvious like the others.
Constant drop coverage leads to same result over and over and the coach changes nothing. How are you coaching your team to play that defense in the 3 point era..
I can’t remember exactly when I started reading this blog. I read for at least 6 months to a year before I started posting. But I would say it was sometime around the time D’antoni put Nate Robinson in the doghouse for no explicable reason.
I remember a VERY funny fan fiction post the day that season ending about Donnie trying to resign David Lee after all the major free agents of 2010 decided to go somewhere else.
Which of course reminds me of my greatest Knicks fandom cope of all time: You know, I’m almost glad LeBron didn’t sign here, because then we wouldn’t have been able to trade David Lee for Anthony Randolph, Ronny Turiaf, and Kelenna Azubuike!
Upon further analysis, the Bridges trade is most like the Bargnani trade:
-Knicks coming off a good season with a 50-win team that made the 2nd round and is looking to get other the top
-Target’s pedigree far exceeds their actual production (#1 overall for Bargs, DPOY runner up for Mikal)
-Draft compensation given far in excess of the player’s value (1x 1RP for Bargs is almost as bad as 5x for Bridges because Bargs was secretly one of the worst players in the league)
-Player immediately forgets their signature skill upon joining NYK (Bargs shot .278 from 3, Bridges forgot how to both 3 & D)
-NYK gets worse
-(In progress) Team is locked into futility until next rebuild cycle
I was excited for Azubuike. He’s up there with Cuttino Mobley and that Spurs coach for best trade acquisitions to never step on the floor.
AntRand was so innately talented. The Cam Reddish of his time.
Mitch to Minnesota didn’t make much given they already had Gobert and Naz Reed to play C. If you have Gobert and are going to trade Towns, you look for starting PF that can score to replace Towns’s scoring (Randle) and something else you need.
I heard a rumor the Knicks were trying to find a 3 team deal that moved Mitch somewhere else for something Minnesota wanted, but no one wanted to make that move until they saw Mitch play again.
That’s almost as bad as the stat where teams are finishing 99.9999% of the time when Towns is the defender in the paint.
(OK, So I exaggerated a bit).
We do have some happy days around here!
Leon is very lucky they wanted Donte instead with how bad the rim protection is.
How’s this for spin?
I’ve been cursing the day we drafted Knox over Bridges all these years, but now that I’ve seen Bridges play defense, it still was a disaster, but less of a disaster than I thought. 🙂
Bridges needs a mean streak, he plays soft and looks uninterested most of the time.
THIS. I haven’t watched the team A LOT yet this season but so far he looks very VANILLA, for lack of a better term. Like a longer, slightly better shooting RJ. Passive, unemotional (but not in the stoic Brunson, fuck all y’all kind of way).
Most of the T-Wolves teams with Towns starting at C were terrible on defense (even with Thibs coaching). That doesn’t mean it was all his fault. It’s just not encouraging.
I found one encouraging season.
In the 21-22 season Towns was the starting C and D’Angelo Russell was the the starting PG. They had the 13th ranked defense. If that combination could get to 13, this team with OG, Bridges and Hart should be able to do that or better.
Yeah, even Donte who isn’t a good defender played with some dog in him. Bridges plays like he just wants to collect his check and that’s good enough for him. Playing for the Nets nobody gave a crap, but he’s going to start hearing it from the fans if he doesn’t start to show some emotion and effort.
They had multiple great defenders in McDaniels, Beverly, and Vanderbilt. We have OG.
I suspect that individual defense is just the first thing that declines. Maybe Mikal’s mileage with the iron man streak made him lose a step that OG hasn’t (Mikal has played 4k more minutes). Maybe he played through something he shouldn’t have to keep the streak going. He seems to play 5 years older than he is.
Kings currently have the 11th best defense starting Fox, Derozan, Huerter and Sabonis at Center. Thibs is currently getting a pass for his inability to adjust.
Donte was better than he gets credit for. He’s never gonna lock a guy down but he’s very quick. He rotated well and recovered fast. He was a good team defender.
It’s no longer certain to me that Bridges is actually better than Donte on either side of the ball. I hope he wakes up soon.
nobody feels even a little bit guilty drawing really strongly worded conclusions from 9 games worth of data?
There was a Thinking Basketball episode on it: https://youtu.be/tEOoE48p7Oc?si=BbL144nY9INpG2ou
That team had Jarred Vanderbilt, McDaniels, AntMan, and PatBev. They were ultra aggressive, ranked 2nd in opponent TOV%. Bottom half in the other factors, including 27th in rebounding and 30th in ft/fga.
* DLo played a very effective free safety and defensive organizer. (Do we have anyone vocal on defense?)
* KAT blitzed and played at the level.
* Vandy was excellent at the PoA.
* McDaniels and Vandy were long and could fly around.
* They mixed in zone.
* They gave up 3s to take away the paint.
it won’t go down as an all timer because he played well and helped us win a playoff series, but i could have used knickerblogger in high school when we trade a sophomore rod strickland for a rather well marinated mo cheeks. i was a big strickland fan, even though he was ridiculously on that infamous bomb squad poster having making 19 threes all season.
My first memory of the Knicks is their playoff series vs Boston in 1990 and Mo Cheeks was great in Game 5.
Mikal has shot one free throw in the last five games.
Personally, I feel guilty that it took me this long to realize we’re doomed. I didn’t trust my instincts telling me that the Bridges trade was Bargnani level bad and iHart was our 2nd best player last year even fully healthy.
Be careful what you wish for. He’s 50% on 8 attempts so far, which should be very unlikely for a guy who usually shoots in the upper 80’s… unless his shot is broken.
I had a long post years ago about how, due to Isiah, not only were the Knicks bad, but they were going to be bad for the then-foreseeable future, that he had basically robbed us not only of a good basketball team, but for any hope of a good basketball team. I think it was something like “This is the winter of our fandom discontent.”
I am very happy we are past those days, where there was no foreseeable end to the terrible basketball.
These are nothing compared to the strongly worded conclusions from before the season started 😉
It would be confirmatory of the broken shot shown by the eye test if the sample was a bit bigger. As it stands, it’s certainly suspicious.
🤣
My family and I are now making small offerings to various deities, requesting that tonight be the Mikal Bridges breakout game. 25+ points and all the requisite box score stuffing. We are not particularly good people, but we are trying.
FWIW the only strongly worded conclusion I’m making is that Leon’s work since the OG trade (beginning with the Bojan trade) has been shoddy and reminiscent of his terrible 2021 season.
I still think the team will get better, settle into the mezzanine area, and provide moments of joy (perhaps as soon as tonight when KAT fucks up Embiid). But I’m more than willing to state for the record today this team will not live up to the exuberant expectations of the preseason, and that it is well short of where a team with that is up against the second apron and has no tradable picks left should be.
Anyone who wants to get rich just has to bet Jarred McCain will set a new career high tonight. Easy peasy.
Look, just like the Knicks!
Ten games into the season, the Warriors are playing 13 players between 28.3 (Stephen Curry) and 12.4 (Gary Payton II) minutes per game, with all of those players appearing in at least half of the games.
Tank mode
That doesn’t make sense… how could 13% of subscribers cost 74% of revenue? Were they on the ultra platinum plan?
“Anyone who wants to get rich just has to bet Jarred McCain will set a new career high tonight. Easy peasy.”
You’d lose, because that’s not his name. 🙂
Operating income is profits not revenue, and a TV network has (I assume) very low marginal costs, so a modest decline in subscribers can basically erase your profits.