Knicks Morning News (2025.01.21)

We have a better or very similar record than all of them and we’re at home. We should be favored in all of them.

We have a better record than all of them because we have played the easiest schedule in the league. By SRS we are worse than HOU, MEM, and DEN and trending down.

We’re also not better at home than on the road. There’s no reason to believe we’re favored in any of those games except LAL and SAC. SAC is even doubtful the way they’re playing under Christie.

Maybe we should try that whole ‘fire the ineffective coach’ thing.

Pags, I’m curious, do you ever feel bad that you’re wrong so often? I mean you’re right now and then (see ‘Huk’s not playing tonight!’), but for example most of your in-game thread comments are horribly wrong (see last night). Are you just enjoying the reverse-jinx shtick? Because if I were as wrong as you are so frequently, I’d really re-think my tendency to publicize my predictions, if nothing else.

I’m not wrong that often. Yes, I reflexively predict doom in every game thread, but that’s facetious. Outside of game threads, I post my genuine takes and I’ve been broadly right on the overall state and trajectory of the team. It seems to be sinking in among most posters now that we are not a real contender and have no reasonable path to becoming one within this ‘window.’ I’ve been saying that’s the case since iHart left, and it is.

What can I even be possibly wrong about in the post you’re responding to? SRS is a factual metric. Do you dispute that we have lower SRS than DEN/MEM/HOU? Do you dispute that we are 30th in strength of schedule? Do you think we should be favored against teams better than us just because we’re at home, when our road/home records are the exact same?

As for fire the ineffective coach, seems an odd take after perhaps the first game where it was almost impossible to find fault with his decisions (decent bench minutes, only OG breaking 40 [ok, that’s still demented, but less so than usual], interesting rotations that worked, gritty defense).

I don’t think one okay game negates the trends we’ve seen over 44 games: a paleolithic defense that concedes the most valuable shot in basketball, terrible asset management, failure to develop end-of-bench pieces the way every other team seems to have no trouble doing, terrible ATO plays for years on end now, etc etc.

Pag, – I’m not sure all these regular season team are better than us. Playoffs is a completely different game.

You think SRS and/or all other advanced metric ratings are accurately capturing “tired legs” component of the players missing shots and defense in 2nd half of games?

If anything, our SRS is inflated by our playing starters more minutes than any other team. A large part of the tougher competition in the playoffs is that teams play their best players more. This is basically why Denver won the championship in 2023 after a very mediocre 3.04 SRS season — increasing Jokic and Murray’s minutes from 33 to 40 made them a lot better.

Other teams have a lot more room to improve in the playoffs than we do because we’re already playing our Game 7 of the Finals rotation most nights. Add in the fact that we’ve had pretty good injury luck while a team like MEM has been missing their best player for a third of the season and it’s clear that we are not in their class.

If we do somehow make it to the playoffs with the starters healthy, we won’t have an extra gear to go to while all our opponents will. We’ll be fortunate to make the second round again.

Agreed, but it only works for a month or two. If you played them both 40+ minutes the boost effect would dissipate and tired legs effect would take over causing guys like OG to shoot career low from three and miss defensive assignments in 2nd halfs.

Ok but we’re doing that all season so how do you suppose we’ll play any better in the playoffs if we’re getting there with 3 more months of tired legs on top of what we have now with our starting wings under 35% 3FG?

In your head. There is, in fact, an actual argument on this thread.

You may disagree with it. That’s your prerogative.

Where is the argument? A blithe conclusory statement does not an argument make.

Their SRS is better. They’ve played tougher schedules in a tougher conference. They’ve been further from full strength than we have. They are younger with more assets to improve. They are better coached. Those are all strong arguments in their favor. Which one is false?

What strong arguments are in our favor? Why should we expect to get significantly better?

The 1999 Knicks made it to the NBA Finals and their SRS was only 1.45! The following season their SRS was 1.30 and they made it to the East Finals!

My 45 off-suit won against pocket aces one time when we went all in pre-flop! Should I keep making that play?

Anything unusual about that ’99 season, like say, the number of games played?

OMG.

Pags, did you used to write only in lower case with ellipses instead of periods…?

Nope, I’m not djphan. I only comprimize on speling and grammur to anoy Downton Dookie Braun from time to tyme.

Not pictured: a substantive argument against anything I’ve said.

I’d need at least 2 championships, like I said.

Nope! The scenario I specified was, “If you were looking at a snapshot of the greatest team of all time very early in their storyline — say, halfway through their first championship season — what would you expect that team to look like?”

Pags says we’re 10th. An opinion not supported by data?

Raw data says we’re 7th based on SRS, which takes into account net rating and SoS. It does not factor in injury luck, where we’ve been luckier than almost every other good team.

One thing that’s important to understand is that where we are now is more or less our ceiling. We’ve been as close to fully healthy as we’re likely to get, our players are all at their peak of ability, and we have minimal flexibility to improve the roster. The teams above us have more upside on all of those dimensions.

The teams below us in SRS are far from their ceilings. ORL for example was looking better than us before losing their top 4 players, who are all young with high upside. They may not be better than us here and now, but they will be imminently. ATL is much the same situation with Daniels, Johnson and Okongwu developing fast.

MIL and IND have also been much better than us of late and it’s a good bet one of them overtakes us.

That leaves us as the 10th best team. And that’s assuming we’re still better than DAL, who has a young top 5 player and made the finals last year. We could easily be overtaken by several other teams currently behind us in SRS.

As in other cases, my gloomy predictions are just the median outcome, and the chance of worse outcomes is very real.

And Pags, to be clear — I’m not really arguing against your opinion. I don’t really agree with much of it, but it’s more that when doom and gloomers come on, I tend to go all Swiftie pollyana-ish out of pure churlishness.

Thank you for acknowledging this. I’ve found that humans in general have a baseline bias towards optimism that I don’t, and so I’ve often had the frustrating experience in life of seeing negative things coming that others are willfully blind to and having to watch them slowly come around to realize that Pagliacci’s bleak vision of the future was actually just the chalk.

Lots of good examples of this in the realm of US politics.

But the main reason I’ve been posting is because you’re stating your opinion, backed by some stats, which is great, but then you state that your opinions are thus facts written in stone.

But I don’t do this! I’ve only ever characterized my opinions as opinions. I think they are well supported by arguments based on facts and data, and as a law school survivor I argue my opinions forcefully. That’s all!

And when people offer up other data and ways to interpret it, you studiously ignore them, say nobody is providing counterarguments, and restate your opinions as facts.

What data points have I ignored? Any factual support marshalled against me, I have addressed, time permitting. Can you show me where someone has pointed out facts adverse to my argument that I’ve ignored, rather than ?

Again, you might be right. I don’t actually have a crystal ball, and rarely make predictions. I think we’re good, I will root for them to win the championship, and I’ll be pleasantly surprised if they do so.

But you could also be wrong.

And I hope I am! I’m just usually not on the long-term trajectory stuff. I wasn’t convinced we had enough assets last year to build a real contender, especially if we lost iHart. Well, we spent all our assets, lost iHart, and are not a real contender.

We could have incredible luck like BOS had in the playoffs last year with all our opponents’ stars being hurt and a weak opposing finalist. We could run solar hot from 3 for 16 games while all our opponents run cold. We could draw a 2023 Denver-like playoff run where all the great teams shit the bed and we don’t end up playing a single team over 50 wins. Unlikely outcomes could happen. Would those make me wrong? No, because my argument is about what is likely: which is us having minimal or no championship equity.

You’re so well spoken and make tons of sense for your perspective. I think the rub for me is in your using of the phrase “real contender”. The qualification dilutes the frank and efficient way everything else comes out. What’s a real contender.

Thank you, Mr. Beeks. Glad to see I’m slowly moving from complete pariah to cranky semi-pariah on this board!

Your question is very fair. Going purely by SRS, here are my rough goalposts:

10+: GOAT candidate tier consisting of MJ Bulls, Dynasty Warriors, OKC, and the ’24 Celtics.
8-10: Superteams that are generally the presumptive favorite to win the championship. Only the ’70 Knicks are in this category for us.
6-8: True contenders with a solid chance (15-25%+) to win the championship in most years unless there is a reigning GOAT or Superteam. The ’73 and ’94 Knicks are in this range for us.
5+: Fringe contenders with an outside shot if everything breaks right. ~ 10% championship equity in most seasons. Our ’93, ’69, and ’71 teams are in here, all of which lost in the ECF.
4+: Pretenders. Only 9 of the last 45 champions were in this range and 5 of those are past champions mailing in the regular season. This year and last year’s teams are here. 2nd round is a reasonable expectation.