I took Swifty’s concept and made it pragmatic albeit much less exciting.

Shoulda just stopped there.

This is where I start to defend Thibs. Because I know we’d have a different defense but it would probably still suck.

And here.

“And he held firm all year even when the results were horrible and it seemed like Mitch may never come back.”

The Knicks were on a 55-win pace before playing Cleveland and Boston. The only results Thibs cares about is winning. So I don’t see where “horrible” fits anywhere in this scenario.

“Z-Man was selling the ridiculous idea that Thibs had studied film of all the shooters in the league and was effectively training his players to funnel their opponents into shooting wide open shots they were bad at making. In fact, not only was he selling that idea, he was saying you were stupid if you didn’t think Thibs’ 3 pt defense schemes were for real! Talk about the dumbest idea ever posted on the blog; sheesh, that one aged about as well as Bill Cosby.”

Z-man posted an article at the time from The Athletic (I believe Fred Katz wrote it) that backed up what he actually said (which is not what Hubert wrote, but that’s pretty ironic coming from a guy who think no one actually understands the genius of his posting, not even ptmilo is up to the task:

“It was a brilliant takedown of what he thought I was saying.”

I feel pretty comfortable in assuming that Thibs, or someone on his staff, looks at film of nearly every rotation player on every team, and had all kinds of info based on that film. Otherwise, why would the Knicks sue the Raps for getting the former Knicks employee to share all of that inside info?

Not that the “funnelling” idea is rocket science. Anyone who paid attention watched the Celts daring first Hart and then Precious to shoot. Every coach in the NBA does this to a degree.

The article also mentioned that Thibs prefers that his defenders keep players in front of them and not go for steals. This was offered as a defense for RJ’s low deflection numbers.

And I would love for you to find the post where I said this: ‘funnel their opponents into shooting wide open shots they were bad at making.” If you can’t (and you actually can’t), you should be a little less prickly about being misquoted. But no one needs to do that to make you look stupid, as you are in this entire thread. My fave was this one from yesterday:

This team can win 50 games with Jalen Brunson, Josh Hart, and 10 league-average players.