More succinctly, if we don’t do well come playoff time, it will be way more about our roster than about coaching.

Putting the minutes distribution aside for a minute, I think falling apart in the 3rd and 4th quarters can definitely be attributed to coaching. I’d be more worried that Thibs was generally out-coached the last two games than who played how many minutes.

But if you look at the last five games, where all five starters are at 37.9 minutes per game or more (five of the top nine), that’s pretty egregious. If you look at the last 10 games, really only Mikal, Hart, and Jalen are too much, with Jalen at #8 overall with 36.8.

Plus, if we are going to do this, shouldn’t we be looking at minutes per game, not total minutes? Thibs doesn’t control how many games the Knicks have played in comparison to the number of games played by other teams. Then we get:

1. Mikal
2. Hart
3. Fox
4. Joker
5. Maxey
6. JMurray
7. OG
8. Dame
9. Banchero
10. Jalen Johnson
11. Booker
12. Ant
13. Tatum
14. KD
15. Trae

Yes, that’s still three of the top seven, and that’s quite something, but it’s not nearly as much as we keep talking about. You’d have to go down to 27th to pick up Brunson, and then down to 32nd to pick up KAT.

This is a fireable offense for Thibs.

Who posted this, literally yesterday?

There’s another angle to this besides injury risk: fatigued players just don’t play as well. There’s growing evidence that the Knicks fade in the fourth quarter a lot. It’s really not too controversial to suggest that a more rested team is going to play better at the end of a game. Then there’s the additional factor of the bench players getting very few reps in actual meaningful game time.

We’re goosing our win totals right now, but I’m guessing we’re not going to like it a lot when the bill comes.

Is there another example in NBA history of one team dominating the minutes played leaderboard to this extent?

On the leader board, the #9 guy and the #30 guy are separated by 1.5 mins. Is your contention that 1.5 minutes of extra exercise every few days fatigues professional athletes to the point of injury? If so, there is validation to be gleaned from the mountains of data out there.

Here’s the top 5 in minutes per game:

Deng 39.1
Rose 37.4
Noah 32.8
Boozer 31.9
Thomas 22.7

So other than Deng he really wasn’t overusing his starters. The knock on Thibs back then was that he drives his players too hard in the regular season and they flame out in the playoffs, but those minutes aren’t nearly as high as his current Knicks squad