I watched the game but was too tired to post after a long, busy day. Sort of taken aback by the alarmist posts. After two decades of suck, how can anyone be “depressed” about heading to the playoffs with our best, most fun, and most promising team since the Ewing era? Especially on the basis of a game where two key starters and our best bench player were inactive? And especially, especially in a road game that had little meaning in the standings?

BBA, really, wtf?

In other news, that overrated bum Julius Randle had a pretty good game in a must win for the T’wolves.

Yeah, it seems fine. No cause for alarm. I think people want to feel like we have some momentum going into the playoffs or something. I just want them healthy.

Re Volume scoring, every time a primary scorer goes down in the NBA it turns out that there is another guy or two who have some slack in their game and can absorb the load, if somewhat less efficiently. Linsanity was the most surprising manifestation of this but it happens all the time, including with OG when Brunson was out.

I’d probably trust Booker more than almost anyone in the league to heroball when the defense is loaded up against him. That’s often what separates this kind of player. I don’t think i’d want Deuce McBride being a primary scorer with two guys hanging on him in the same way.

But this player type still seems very overrated. Well, definitely in Phoenix.

“But this player type still seems very overrated. Well, definitely in Phoenix.”

I mean, that kind of player carried the Suns to the NBA finals.

Booker is a top-15-20 player in the NBA because he is excellent at the most important and valued skill in the game. Scoring at slightly above league-average efficiency on a 30+ usage when opposing defenses know that you will be jacking up lots of shots is an incredibly valuable ability. Now if that player is low-IQ or shrinks under playoff pressure, the value diminishes.

Booker is not having a particularly good year for him, but here are the guys with a usage of over 28% with a higher TS% than him:

Giannis
SGA
Ant
Wemby
LeBron
Jokic
Steph
Brunson
Poole (outlier year on a terrible team)
Durant
JJJ
Herro (outlier year)

In a better year for Booker, say last year, here is the list:
Luka
Giannis
Shai
Steph
Jokic
LeBron
KD

And again, he’s actually better in the playoffs. In 45 playoff games, he averages:
40 mpg
28 ppg
5 rpg
5 apg
49-39-90
.603 TS% on 30% usg

As somebody who’s always defended this current group and constantly talked about how good they are yeah I’m feeling a bit betrayed by them right now. Under Thibs the Knicks have usually played great heading into the playoffs and given us hope for optimism, this team has done the exact opposite.

Having said all that the Knicks are not gonna lose to the fucking Pistons in the 1st rd. Knicks in 5!

Meanwhile, the Bucks are suddenly hot as fuck, so I think the Knicks will still be much better off if they play the Pistons. Are the Pistons locked in as the #6 seed yet?

Pistons have a 93.9% chance of being 6th and 6.1% of being 5th, and the other way around for the Bucks.

All probabilities here: https://www.basketball-reference.com/friv/playoff_prob.html

It’s pretty simple, Detroit has to win both games this weekend vs Milwaukee to move up to 5th. If not then Detroit finishes 6th.

Milwaukee got Portis back from his suspension and it seems to have helped them.

“As somebody who’s always defended this current group and constantly talked about how good they are yeah I’m feeling a bit betrayed by them right now. Under Thibs the Knicks have usually played great heading into the playoffs and given us hope for optimism, this team has done the exact opposite.”

There was a lot more pressure to play great in past years due to seeding. But that said, going into the playoffs with a relatively healthy, rested team is something that hasn’t happened in a long time.

We also played pretty well vs. a suprisingly motivated Celts team and should have won save a couple of bonehead mistakes. They held up pretty well with their best player out for over 3 weeks. So I don’t get where the “betrayal” comes from.

Pretty simple, same reason the national media has basically shitted on this Knicks team recently, their record vs the top teams. They’re 0-15 vs Boston, Cleveland, OKC, Golden St and both LA teams. Hell they’re 1-3 against their most likely 1st rd opponent in Detroit.

They have swept Denver, Memphis and Milwaukee plus won the season series vs Indiana so it hasn’t been a total disaster against all the top teams. I predicted 53 wins so while they’re basically gonna have a record I expected it just feels a bit underwhelming.

Knicks starting backcourt last night

10-33 for 27 points

Cade 16-24 for 36 points

McBrides shooting is down from his career year last season

Also the Knicks were destroying teams first 3 months hence why their net rating was so good. But lately watching them build big leads then struggle to finish off games even against shitty teams has also been a bit annoying to watch.

But by next weekend everyone starts from scratch, I do feel like moreso than most teams the Knicks will benefit greatly from having 5 to 6 days off before the playoffs start.

It was a dispiriting loss, but I’m not too worried, as putting OG on Cade should make all the difference, and having someone like Mitch on the back line makes all the free trips to the rim by Duren (9-9, shame on you KAT) more of a non-factor.

It was, however, dispiriting. Nobody should have seven turnovers. And no game should have Precious, 39-yr-old PJ Tucker and short homeless guy Landrey Shamet as your clear three best (only decent) players.

Tip o’ the cap though to Precious for The Revenge Game (against us). Still not convinced he should see time during the playoffs.

I mean, that kind of player carried the Suns to the NBA finals.

Through a sea of mezzanine putty. This years Knicks would have cut them to shreds. They didn’t have to beat a true contender by Pags and Hubert’s well established metriculations.

I have to say that getting here and the pessimist one being BBA was not on my bingo card at all.

Too bad i don’t live near* you, or else i’d invite you to go drink some beers and try to cheer you up. 😉 You’ve done that for me, with your optimistic takes, a lot of times in recent years so it’d be only fair to give back. 🧡💙

*we have ONLY an ocean between us 😀

I’m also sticking with the NBA.com write-up of today’s game about yesterday, which is a much better narrative than most:

“The New York Knicks didn’t want to show the Detroit Pistons too much Thursday night in a potential preview of a first-round matchup in the NBA playoffs.”

It would be a very Thibsian “Look, I can play chess, too!” kind of game…

Put Original Gangster on Cade and we have a different outcome…KAT played like he was on a hot tin roof… Brunson will be much better in the playoffs…

Don’t worry cyber, I’ll definitely relax this weekend! When I’m annoyed outside of sports I get even more frustrated with the Knicks and Yankees. But by next weekend I’ll make sure to be refreshed and ready for the playoffs.

I am ready to trade Karl Anthony Towns for Jokic. Seems like the only move that might get us where we want to be. (Not that I think it would ever happen.)

I am ready to trade Karl Anthony Towns for Jokic. Seems like the only move that might get us where we want to be.

Wait, did the Nuggets hire Nico Harrison?

D-Mar, I realized that might have come out more seriously than I intended, hence the too late edit.

I was just referencing the headline at the top, classic clickbait stuff.

I don’t really know how you could even put a trade package for Jokic together. So hard to get back even 75% of what he is worth.

If Jokic doesn’t sign an extension, I could see the Lakers clearing cap space for him.

Looks like Sports Illustrated spent some time reading last night’s game thread! LOL
—
New York Knicks Urged to Fire Tom Thibodeau, Hire NBA Champion – Sports Illustrated

I am 100% in favor of load managing when we’re probably going to be the 3 seed no matter how we play, but falling to 4 would hardly be clearly bad in any event. I don’t want to complain too much about last night because I want to reinforce this good behavior from Thibs.

That said, for my own Knicks related psyche I’d like to see another win before the playoffs!

I’ve said my piece on this already but it stuck out last night–we still take an unacceptably low number of 3s for a team that moved heaven and earth to get better shooters. We’re simply not playing to the strengths of the roster. At this point it is what it is and we’ll see how it goes in the playoffs.

yeah i’d like to see another win to clinch the seed with the magic number with the pacers being 1. not so much because i think it’s all that important to be the number 3 seed (tho i think i’d rather play the pistons over the bucks, at this point–different than what I ould have said a week ago), but more because i dont want to go out this season on that kind of a whimper

“I don’t really know how you could even put a trade package for Jokic together. So hard to get back even 75% of what he is worth.”

Pretty simple–3 team trade with Dallas as the 3rd team.

edit: just saw d-mar’s comment; this is a variant of it!

Funny you mentioned that TNFH cause James Edwards just tweeted the Knicks are 27th in 3PA this season while finishing no lower than 13th past 3 seasons.

Someone mentioned last night, but KAT not shooting ten threes a game sticks out as a major system fail. He ain’t getting that magic back on the other side of the ball and his tight whistle is a pain.

The Strickland
@TheStrickland

KAT is the team’s best 3-point shooter and he’s shooting his lowest volume of 3’s per 75 possessions since 2019.

Completely in favour of load management, 3v4 be damned. But I would love to get the 3 just because we’ve been 3 since December 15, and to drop down on the last day at best is a non-factor. Contrast to last year, where in the month of April we went from 5 to 2, and from 3 to 2 in game 82. Completely different set of circumstances, but game 82 was fun as a fan.

Yeah. it just doesn’t feel good.

Cade has had 4 great games against us this year. not good. Tatum Giannis Zach Lavine have each had 3 great games against us. At least we have no chance of facing Lavine

My views have little to do with last night’s loss. I don’t care about that. I’d rather we rest players from time to time and possibly lose a game short term for longer term benefit. That’s what I’ve been asking for all season. But last night did reinforce some of my negative thought on where we are now and where I’d like us to be next year.

1. Hopefully I’m wrong, but I don’t think we can win a championship with the Towns/Brunson combo. We can win a lot of games, but the defense is always going to be too big an issue.

2. Maybe Towns/Mitch could fix that, but we don’t even know going into the playoffs because Thibs didn’t use the combination enough. Maybe he already knows it won’t based on practice, but if that’s the case then #1 is still a problem.

3. IMO Thibs gets his players to play hard almost every game (a positive attribute) and coaches like every game is game 7. So he maximizes wins in the regular season. But come the playoffs, every team is going to show up every night. IMO we are not quite as good as our record. Other teams take games off even if not against us.

4. IMO, even though we aren’t quite as good as our record, we are more talented than our record. IMO Thibs is just so inflexible in his coaching he’s not getting as much out of the talent as he should even though they are playing hard for him.

I think we should beat Detroit. If we don’t it would be a debacle because we are WAY more talented. But I am way less sure we’d get by a team like the Bucks at full strength or the Pacers the way they are playing now or any number of teams out west.

IMO, unless they put t all together quickly, we need a couple of big off season moves to be considered a contender (and I’m not talking about Bridges or OG)

IMO, unless they put t all together quickly, we need a couple of big off season moves to be considered a contender (and I’m not talking about Bridges or OG)

The players who will be available will be older injury prone players like Durant and Anthony Davis.

Re tonight, kinda not looking forward to it, plus it’s a back-to-back for both; however yesterday:

‘Mitchell sat out his second straight game Thursday, when fellow starters Darius Garland (left toe), Evan Mobley (rest) and Max Strus (right knee) also were inactive.’

It’ll be interesting (sic) to see who plays on both teams.

It’ll be interesting (sic) to see who plays on both teams.

Well, Vegas has us as 7 1/2 point favorites, so I guess they think the Cavs are resting everybody

I don’t know about the Cavs, but the Knicks need to play Brunson to get him back in peak form and it would be nice to give some minutes to Towns/Mitch. I don’t care if they play 10 minutes each as long as most of them are together. The only reason not to is if Thibs thinks it won’t work and won’t try it in the playoffs. I don’t think he’s saving it up for the playoffs. That’s not his style, but it would be nice.

The players who will be available will be older injury prone players like Durant and Anthony Davis.

I don’t think Davis will be available, but I’d add Giannis to that list if the Bucks flame out quickly. Then again who thought Luka would be available. Crazy things happen.

https://x.com/HotHandTheory/status/1910692359081189532 not good especially when all his value is on the offensive side.

@jledwardsiii.bsky.social‬
Knicks have every starter except Mikal listed as questionable for tonight against Cleveland.

Cavaliers have until 2pm to report.

My kingdom for the power to upload a tank gif right about now.

Tanking to avoid Boston? Pacers can lose on Sunday and the Knicks will be the 3 seed .

Indiana resting all 5 starters tonight but so is Orlando so that’s gonna be an interesting game.

@jledwardsiii.bsky.social‬
Mitchell, Hunter and Jerome out for Cavs.

Which team wants this game less?

“I predicted 53 wins so while they’re basically gonna have a record I expected it just feels a bit underwhelming.”

Well that’s a “you” problem. Winning 53 means losing 29, i.e. you are going to lose 1 out of 3 games plus a random loss here and there.

The issue is that a 53-win team on paper is sort of the same team we had last year, and that’s hard for some to swallow. We essentially traded all of our picks in the process of converting the rotation spots of iHart, DDV and Randle into Mitch, Mikal, and KAT. As I have stated many times, I don’t think that we improved enough to justify squandering all of those picks, and the season thus far has borne that out. Now the playoffs might change some of that, but we haven’t been fully healthy in the playoffs for the last 2 years so even that is hard to quantify.

But we are largely where I kind of thought we would be. The unexpected twist of the season thus far has been Cleveland’s wire-to-wire dominance, but even that is not a shocker. My hope was that we would play Boston in the ECFs but it wasn’t really ever an expectation.

We’ll see what this team is made of in the next few weeks. Then it will be up to Leon to use that information to improve the team.

https://x.com/HotHandTheory/status/1910692359081189532 not good especially when all his value is on the offensive side.

This is a good, concise thread and highlights my primary Thibs grievance this season: generating 3PT shots for Karl-Anthony Towns just does not seem to be a priority for our offense. This is despite the fact that Karl-Anthony Towns is one of the better high-volume 3PT shooters in NBA history.

To be sure, some of this is just on KAT. I don’t think he’d get benched for taking a few more threes. But at the end of the day coaching boils down to “telling players what to do,” and we don’t seem to be emphasizing this at all.

After two decades of suck, how can anyone be “depressed” about heading to the playoffs with our best, most fun, and most promising team since the Ewing era?

As I’ve said before, this simply isn’t true. Last year’s team was objectively better. Higher SRS with a lot less roster continuity and injury luck. Brunson/DDV/OG/Randle/iHart with Deuce/Mitch/Hart off the bench was a 60-win core. All we had to do was find a reasonable replacement for iHart, and we probably wouldn’t have had to spend 5 picks to do it.

Thibs has no idea how to use KAT. Has he ever attempted 13 threes in a game like Porzingis did when he torched us on Tuesday? If we can’t maximize him offensively he’s just a fatally flawed player.

The only thing sadder has been watching Bridges try to guard the likes of Tatum or Cade.

Second round would have been our floor with the old team, and now it’s our ceiling. We are at best about 55% to beat DET and they’ll be better than us from next year onward. This really isn’t anything to be overly excited about — we’re all in on an okay team. Yay.

I need to go back to being optimistic so I don’t sound like Pags…

IHart is out of reach but I bet we could trade KAT and Bridges for a haul that can net us Julius and DDV with a loss of 1-2 picks at most from where we were last year at this time. And I would posit the lost pick(s) was worth the opportunity cost to see what our current lineup can accomplish. And as of today we don’t know. But already being nostalgic for last year’s team…Cheer up, Pags

Yo-yoing aside. The playoffs will happen. We are going to have to go through one team that is substantially better than us this year to make any noise, possibly two. If we flameout Thibs is the beginning of how to adjust for next year. If we make any headway in the playoffs, but fall short, analysis will be available and then it’s still likely Thibs that is the beginning of how to adjust. The world is at its weirdest and parabolically speaking it’s only getting weirder faster. We’re on the y axis nowadays. Ride the wave or not. I’m gonna skip the game tonight and get some Peking Duck glory at Hwa Yuan. So excited.

Our hopes in the playoffs rest with Brunson getting back to being an All-NBA 1st or 2nd team caliber point guard, and getting his teammates involved. And OG being the second best player on the team. We need Mitch to play like a starting C. I have no trust in Towns in high pressure situations — he’ll either completely disappear, or do dumb low IQ stuff on both offense and defense, especially when he’s being doubled or pressured (which is def happening in the playoffs). The only players I trust under pressure on this roster is Brunson and Hart, and to a lesser extent OG, b/c he’ll bring it defensively regardless.

First round exit. Thibs gone, they’ll bring in Malone and cue the I’m Coming Home bullshit.

We’ve seen this all before people.

Just popping on for a quick rant — while I think both are deserving of the MVP, and personally I’d vote for Jokic as he’s having the best season of his multi-MVP career, I will never, ever understand the ‘Shai wins because his team is doing better’ argument.

Shai’s team is much, much better than Jokic’s. But this isn’t a Most Valuable Team award. Jokic has hauled a bunch of junk and a coach who lost the locker room (and just got fired) to fourth place.

If Jokic’s team wasn’t going to make the play-in, sure, pin some of that on him. But really, for me it’s such a last-thing-to-weigh part of the process. Makes no sense.

And take each of them away from their respective team, and OKC still wins 50 or more. Denver would be lucky to crack 35. 30?

Not just portis coming back. Kevin Porter averaging like 21 7 and 6 over the past four games is a thing

This straightforward study is a useful contribution to the Thibs minutes discourse, but I think a myopic focus on games missed due to injury only elucidates so much (though not nothing). I’d like to see empirics on a “burnout” effect–do players who play high minutes totals, whether coached by Thibs or anyone else, lose effectiveness later in the season/in the playoffs, even if they aren’t “injured” per se?

Interesting https://x.com/DJAceNBA/status/1910515215717871920

Knicks are going to have a week off before the playoffs begin, longer than the allstar break. I think a bigger issue than “burnout” is that when the pedal leaves the metal, things come undone a bit. Like when Josh Hart got injured resting and had to miss a game back in february.

talyor jenkins >>> michael malone

neither though for next knicks’ coach…

jerome, hunter and mitchell all out tonight…hopefully KAT, josh and OG all sit out tonight…

let’s get everyone together on sunday for a scrimmage against those guys wearing nets’ jerseys, wait to clinch third then…

hopefully we don’t get blown out tonight…

more delon, PJ and precious tonight…

if KAT ends up our 3rd best player (real possibility at this point), maybe it would be time to trade him and that salary…

we need him to dominate offensively for more than a single quarter a game…and shoot more threes please…thankfully neither him nor OG clog the lane much…

i’m latching on to the KAT/mikal for giannis fantasy…

the thought is waiting patiently in the background…let’s see what’s happening in a few weeks…

been waiting all year for the playoffs, almost here…

i’m latching on to the KAT/mikal for giannis fantasy…

Ironically, KAT + the picks we traded for Mikal would probably make us a favorite to land Giannis, while KAT + Mikal has little to no shot.

That one trade, man… It’s the Trump tariff policy of NBA trades.

don’t sell the farm yet pags, we still got to wait to see what’s up with this season’s harvest…

sure his advanced stats have not looked so great the last 2 seasons, still, plenty of value in his play…sometimes – availability is the best ability…yeah, so there 😛

that, and there are degrees in the value of those first round picks we gave up…

do we even want all those picks back, yeah, okay probably, but still…just kidding, too late, can’t go back, time to move forward…

How many games would the Thunder win without SGA?

I think it might be north of 53. They are a good team too to bottom. I think their 5-10 might break 500.

Interesting question, SGA does so much creation for their offense it’s hard to say. I am not sure who is inititiating possessions for them if he’s gone, but the defense would still be elite.

sure his advanced stats have not looked so great the last 2 seasons, still, plenty of value in his play…sometimes – availability is the best ability…yeah, so there 😛

I’d accept the stats if the eye test didn’t show him being cooked by Tatum and Cunningham so badly in the last week. Reggie Miller called it child abuse…

I thought that I heard Miller say “child abuse” the other night, but ehn thought i misheard—he couldn’t have said that. Very uncool phrasing to use—surprised he didn’t get in any tbouble for it I’m not one for that kind of political correctness but that one was prtty bad.

Miller used to abuse Chris Childs.

Have the Knicks announced their starting lineup for tonight?

Allan Houston used to abuse Reggie Miller.

That fails as a pun.

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