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54 replies on “Knicks Morning News (2024.12.13)”
Well, I guess we can finally rule out Anthony Randolph contributing to the next Knicks title.
https://www.realmadrid.com/en-US/news/club/announcements/comunicado-oficial-retirada-randolph-13-12-2024
Reminding me once again of my worst sports take ever: “You know, I almost don’t want LeBron to sign with the Knicks, because I’m really excited by this reported Plan B where we trade David Lee for Anthony Randolph, Ronny Turiaf, and Kelenna Azubuike!”
David’s numbers compared very favorably to LeBron’s at the time.
I watched a little of the Celtics-Pistons game last night, and Boston rested Tatum and still blew the Pistons away with ease
That team when healthy is basically unbeatable
The one team that handled them at home recently was Memphis. The Athletic had an article about how their strategy was to leave Holiday wide open and dare him to shoot 3’s, and he proceeded to shoot 4-17 from there.
If the only way to beat Boston is to deploy the ISM, good luck to the rest of the league!
I hope this was written with tongue firmly planted in cheek.
Where’s the O’rly Owl when I need it?
Maybe the wildest statement ever issued here. “At the time” was the conclusion of the 09-10 season:
David Lee VORP 3.5 BPM 2.5 WS/48 .163 PER 22.2
LeBron*** VORP 10.3* BPM 11.8* WS/48 .299* PER 31.1*
* = led league
*** = league MVP
Yeah, I didn’t check the numbers on LeBron versus Lee at that time, or at any time, because I didn’t that I needed to. I thought it was an odd statement, to be sure.
James Edwards has thrown in the towel on Mikal’s POA D ( from today’s Athletic:
And JUJu Randle showing consistency to TWolves beat writer:
I really like Mikal and think he’s been better lately, and Caruso hasn’t been good or healthy, but they might have been better off in the long run sending Chicago 2-3 picks for him instead.
The only silver lining to the debacle vs. ATL (btw Trae sez f u BBA) is that there is no travel to Vegas and 3 full days off to regroup, practice, tinker, heal, etc., then another 3 full days off before playing MIN on the road. There is an assortment of minor injuries that players have been battling through…KAT, JB, Hart, Cam…and Bridges has looked tired at the end of games. OG’s been playing unsustainable minutes.
Honestly, I’d be thrilled if they rested most or all of these players for the Magic game, or at least cutting all of their minutes into the 20’s. Sadly, Thibs can’t process treating this week as an extension of preseason where a loss wouldn’t really matter.
It was funny!
*What* was funny?
The Anthony Randolph trade turned out to be the Ronny Turiaf trade. That guy not only started at center, but he was, until Payton II came along, the coolest dude to have played pro ball this century.
I was a pretty big David Lee fan back in the day.
Still am!
The best jokes are the ones you have to explain right?
I fell for the Anthony Randolph hype. I’m not sure what I was drinking at the time, but I’m glad I stopped.
Only to one person
“The best jokes are the ones you have to explain right?”
I understood the bad joke just fine. But there was zero way of knowing that he was even referencing the joke, since it wasn’t funny.
The important point I think is to try to be funny. Some of us don’t always succeed but I see great things in your future on that front, once you dedicate yourself to something other than nitpicking. Pags was funny the other night, anything is possible.
I legitimately laughed out loud a little at the very obvious joke
To each their own, I s’pose! 🙂
I always like to qualify my baseball opinions by saying I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about, but as a casual fan, I love that the Yankees seem to be focusing on creating a top notch pitching staff instead of worrying about replacing Soto.
The pitching staff should be very good with the gargantuan “if healthy” caveat, but they’re definitely still very worried about replacing Soto, as they should be. Last year’s lineup had 6 guys with a wRC+ over 100, two of them are gone in Soto and (presumably) Gleyber, one of them was Stanton who is always a risk to miss 6-8 weeks and/or just fall off completely, and one of them was Jazz who can’t be relied on to hit like he did post-trade.
We absolutely need another bat or four.
This situation reminds me of the movie Moneyball where Billy Bean was trying to make the point that they couldn’t replace Giambi’s production with a single player, but they might be able to replace it by upgrading 2-3 other positions for less money. It’s not like they don’t have other holes to fill and the money to do it.
https://video.search.yahoo.com/search/video?fr=mcafee&p=moneyball+movie+replace+giambi&type=E210US1250G0#id=1&vid=e128f1f84121fb45769dee930667fbeb&action=click
absolutely love the youth brought in with volpe, gil and especially austin wells…
always hear about the importance of a great centerfielder and shortstop, but a young quality catcher – that’s like the best…
I am not yet sold on jasson dominguez, he looked waaaaay overmarched in the post season…at 5’9″ he seems kind of short for the position…
luke weaver and devin williams are a pretty nice way for the yanks to close out games…
back to basketball :), looking at the nba games today, nothing too exciting to look forward to…maybe pacers/sixers a little interesting…
Very little.
Knicks need a quick response with status as serious title contenders already slipping away
I mean, come the fuck on with that headline, right?
I wonder where jimmy butler lands after he’s traded – anyone have any guesses on where he might be headed?
I’m hoping, but not terribly confident, that Leon pulls another rabbit out of his hat with a deadline trade. The OG, Hart, & Rose trades turned our last few seasons around. I just don’t have a clue what the move is this year. Whatever the move, it probably needs to replace one of the starting 5 and I just don’t know if they’ll commit to that kind of move so soon.
Whatever the move, it probably needs to replace one of the starting 5 and I just don’t know if they’ll commit to that kind of move so soon. I’d rather replace Thibs than one of our top 6, if that were the choice. Player talent and locker room chemistry seems to be there.
The 2 weaknesses at this stage are Bridges and Thibs. Both are bets to improve but they need to show It.
So I guess the answer to the question some of us wondered about last January — “What are they going to say when they picked up OG to fix the defense and the defense isn’t fixed?” — is:
“We still need an elite on-ball defender.”
Strat, here’s some 4s for you that might fit your criteria:
* Myles Turner
* Larry Nance, Jr
* Jalen Smith
* Dorian Finney-Smith
Dallas has a bunch of those guys, but I’m not sure they’d give any up:
* Naji Marshall
* Maxi Kleber
* PJ Washington
Once upon a time, Marcus Morris wouldn’t be a terrible answer. We could just sign him as a bench 4, but he’s probably cooked.
It’s not ideal, but slotting KAT next to a rim-protecting, non-shooting 5 is probably the answer. Maybe we could swing something
some of us wondered about last January — “What are they going to say when they picked up OG to fix the defense and the defense isn’t fixed?”
Don’t remember anyone wondering about that last January. When the defense seemed to be fixed. But please feel free to enlighten all of us who “some of us” are.
“Strat, here’s some 4s for you that might fit your criteria:
* Myles Turner
* Larry Nance, Jr
* Jalen Smith
* Dorian Finney-Smith”
But Turner and Smith are centers, and DFS is much more of a 3 than a 4. Dallas would probably give up Kleber, but the same reasons they would give him up are the same reasons that we shouldn’t have any interest in him. Anyone want to re-visit Brandon Clarke?
hmmmm, zero chance to stream this stuff…just bought what appears to be the only currently available copy of:
The Godfather Saga
The Godfather Epic
on dvd – in the whole wide world, literally there’s only this one copy i can find anywhere at the moment, from someone in australia…
oh well…watch party at my house gentlemen, mmmmmm yum, imagine the good food we could cook to prep for that viewing 🙂
If I’m throwing darts, we could trade for Jaylin Williams who has been injured all year and I doubt cracks OKCs rotation when he’s healthy.
He’s shooting 38% on 257 threes in the NBA despite being a not so great shooter in the draft. He’s an excellent passer and probably set a record for charges drawn in college.
I think he’s a guy Thibs could make great use of.
Also, do they need Kenrich Williams?
Keldon Johnson? K.J. Martin? Sandro Mamukelashvili? Marvin Bagley?
OK, let’s just get Tari Eason and call it good.
I like this idea, he only makes about 2 million, which is almost exactly what Sims, Kolek and Matt Ryan make. Dadiet makes a little less at 1.8 million – I’d like to keep him as a long-term project but I’m not sure which of the other options OKC would care about. They are pretty thin at center, so I suppose Sims makes some amount of sense for them as a big person who can nominally protect the rim and rebound in case IHart goes down.
That said, they don’t need more youth, we don’t have much in the way of picks to offer and I’m not sure which vet we could stand to lose that would interest them if they don’t want Sims (and I’m not really convinced they would).
Shams:
This is what happened.
In terms of roles we improved the offense by going from Randle and DDV to Towns and Bridges, but we did not replace I-Hart’s defense.
The hope was that since Randle wasn’t a consistently good defender anyway, the loss of defense in the frontcourt (I-Hart) would not be so bad because OG would move to PF to replace Randle (upping the defense) and Bridges would replace DDV (upping the defense).
What happened was the gap between I-Hart and Towns on defense has been larger then hoped for and the upgrade on defense from Bridges relative to DDV has been almost non existent. That compounded itself into a bigger problem because if we aren’t guarding the perimeter at a high level, Towns being a weakness is even worse. That’s my -1 + – 1 = -3 theory.
So net, we more or less gave up a pile of picks for Bridges and instead of having a better team, we have a similar team that’s better on offense, worse on defense, and absent a lot of pick ammo and flexibility.
But I could sum it up much easier.
What happened is that we lost i-Hart for NOTHING, he was a key piece in what made that team work defensively and one of our backup options defensively at C (Mitch) can’t seem to make it back to the court to even run and train.
The thing that really hurt was losing I-Hart for nothing.
They weren’t playing Bryant, anyway (less than 12 minutes per game over 10 total games). He’s the Moses Brown replacement in Indy.
I’m not sure I like any of those.
I’m thinking more along the lines of a Jonathon Isaac type player, but maybe not even him.
We may just do the best that we can with what we have and make a more significant move in the off season.
We’re basically league average on defense. When you’re playing Brunson and KAT, this is fixed.
Even with our high level offense, imo we still have to be a top 10 defense to be considered a contender, but we are still going to need some help from the gods to beat teams like Boston and OKC (and Dallas is really growing on me). Ideally we want to be better than 10.
“We’re basically league average on defense. When you’re playing Brunson and KAT, this is fixed.”
When you say “fixed,” do you mean that it’s a given with those two in the line-up that we’re only going to be league average (“glass half empty”), or do you mean that the defense is “fixed” because that’s about as good as we can hope to do with those two in the line-up (“glass half full”)?
It vexes me. I’m terribly vexed.
It’s perhaps worth noting that Minnesota led the league with a 109.0 Drtg last year. This year that figure would be 7th (slightly behind this year’s Minnesota team).
OKC: 104.0
HOU: 105.4
ORL: 106.6
GSW: 107.9
MEM: 108.4
MIN: 108.7
Some of these will fade. Offenses get better league-wide as the season progresses point. Three point luck could also dry up as 5 of those 6 are 1-5 in opponent 3p%, Orlando is the outlier all the way down at 20th. Regardless, several teams seem to have broken new ground on what’s possible on the defensive end of the court.
We’ve talked a bit about Denver’s championship run when they were 16th in defensive rating, exactly where we are now. Their 114.2 Drtg was 3.6pts behind the league leader. By comparison, we’re at 114.6 and 10.6pts behind OKC.
Honestly, given that we lost iHart for nothing, the fact that we have as good a team as last year means the front office did something right.
Logistically, let’s say that the Knicks had not picked up Bogdanovic’s option for this season, would they have had the cap room to keep both OG and iHart?
They lost IHart because of CBA rules that limited the amount they could pay him, not cap room. The most the Knicks could offer him was 4/72.
Right, but if they had the cap room, then obviously they could have signed him with cap room. I’m asking whether they would have had enough cap room to sign him and OG had they not guaranteed Bogdanovic’s money. What was OG’s cap hold? Could they have created enough space under the cap to offer iHart more? Were they already over the cap from just OG’s cap hold whether they brought back Bogdanovic or not? If so, then there was nothing they could ever do to bring iHart back.
Logistically, let’s say that the Knicks had not picked up Bogdanovic’s option for this season, would they have had the cap room to keep both OG and iHart?
no they were still way too high with og’s cap hold, which was like $30mm.
The blunder, and it was a huge one, was trading out of the 2022 lottery to create room for i-Hart and then not giving him a three-year deal to get full Bird rights. (If he wasn’t going to sign one at that price point, they should have known that in the planning process, too.)
This FO has done some good things, but they’ve also blundered more than you’d like.
It’s also possible that iHart’s agent wouldn’t agree to a 3 year deal for the exact reason it worked out for him. In that scenario, should we not have signed him? I’m going with no. (That is, we should still have signed him!)
For the pick that could have been Jalen Williams? No chance.
Imagine if we went all in on Jalens and had Brunson, Johnson, and Williams.
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