Knicks Morning News (2024.12.15)

For those leaning on our middle-of-the-pack defensive eFG% numbers to conclude we are decent defensively, please keep in mind that we have played one of the easiest schedules in the league and nearly every opponent has had a dumpster fire offense and/or been missing their best offensive players.

If it’s looked like our defense has been trending up, that’s because the last 10 games or so have been against even worse opposition. Once the schedule balances out it’d be miraculous for us not to be bottom 10.

BPL, the inverse of Strat’s theory is that in terms of plus defenders, 1+1 = 3 sometimes.

I think that’s what happened with OG + iHart. Elite perimeter defense and rim protection are both exploitable on their own, but combining them yields a benefit greater than the sum of its parts. This is basically OKC on defense. OG’s contribution was highly visible, but we’d have probably seen a similar delta in the defense if we started with just OG and added iHart.

Not giving iHart the third year really is the fatal flaw that sabotaged our rebuild. I saw someone argue here that maybe he wouldn’t have accepted it, and that argument is not convincing. A player is ALWAYS better off from a contract negotiation standpoint if his existing team has his bird rights. Other teams would have had to bid against us instead of automatically getting him if they exceed our paltry early bird exception. We could have matched the $30m and simply kept last year’s great team together, jettisoning Bojan to stay under the 2nd apron if we had to.

Man, if we’d just had iHart’s bird rights, kept Grimes, and passed on Bridges, we’d be on track for 60+ wins and have 5-6 excess picks to play with. Now we’re all in with a worse team that is deeply flawed, and the kind of player we need to fix it (a switchable, rim-protecting, floor spacing PF) would cost the price we paid for Bridges, if he even exists.