From Jared Schwartz:
The results might not have been what was desired. But the process quickly was evident.
The numbers from the Knicks’ 119-111 opening night win over the Cavaliers on Wednesday night at Madison Square Garden show just how much Jalen Brunson’s role on offense has changed.
He finished with 23 points but shot a rough 5-for-18 from the field and 1-for-9 from 3-point range. The way he got those shots, though, demonstrated coach Mike Brown’s desire for Brunson to play much more off the ball.
Seven of those nine 3-pointers were catch-and-shoot, according to the NBA’s official tracking stats, the most in any game he has played with the Knicks.
And according to PBP stats, just 10 of those 18 field-goal attempts (nearly 56 percent) were considered “self-created.” That’s the lowest of any game he’s played with the Knicks in which he’s taken at least 15 shots from the field.
Brunson averaged 4.26 dribbles and 4.7 seconds per touch — both were still team highs, but are significantly down from the 6.04 dribbles per touch and 6.06 seconds per touch he averaged last season.
It’s just one game, but those are interesting numbers.
68 replies on “NY Post: Whole new Jalen Brunson on display for Knicks next era”
Those are interesting numbers. I worry about Brunson becoming less efficient as he becomes less ball dominant.
I recognize he’s absolutely incredible, and don’t view anything he does as outside the rules, or even the spirit of them necessarily.
But I just don’t really enjoy watching Shai Gilgeous-Alexander play basketball.
“Brunson averaged 4.26 dribbles and 4.7 seconds per touch — both were still team highs, but are significantly down from the 6.04 dribbles per touch and 6.06 seconds per touch he averaged last season.”
I know I am getting old when I continue to be amazed by the level of data now available.
The Spurs are way ahead of schedule and could make some noise THIS year.
Me, neither. It’s like peak Harden all over again.
On the Brunson stuff, I think we’ve missed Julius Randle’s ball handling a lot more than people realize. Off-the-ball Brunson is a terror and that was a key component to our January comet (remember Brundle?). I assumed Bridges came here to replace Randle in that role but Thibs didn’t see it that way. He also had a rigid thought process about playing Brunson with any other small guard, whether it was Deuce or IQ, even though the data was always very good. It was refreshing to see Brown kick that to the curb immediately. When we can use McBride in that role I think we’ll look great but that’s probably very situational. The Cavs are a perfect team to do it against. The Thunder not so much. But the fact that we’re even considering situational possibilities is incredibly refreshing. Ultimately Bridges has to at least occasionally be a secondary ballhandler like Randle was, and if he can those picks won’t hurt as much.
No magic to his game, he’s the most bureaucratic, punch the clock superstar ever. Maybe if they win more rings and he’s still amazing when he gets older, the effort will be more clear, and it will create some mystic.
This is another significant counterpoint to the lazy “Thibs maximized regular season wins” argument, btw. I’d bet good money playing Deuce with the starters more often would have produced more wins than running the starters into the ground.
A big plus of Brown using 11 players in various combinations is that we’re gonna be very difficult to game-plan. Lots of different looks, lots of different strengths. Lots of ins and outs, what-have-yous. It’s exactly why Thibs had to go – obviously there are going to be ways of playing that are better, groups of players with better numbers, but if we have a variety of options, we are so much less predictable. Or as Hubert would say, we aren’t just throwing “rock” every time. Encouraging.
One other random thing before my caffeine high wears off: I like that we might have actual future coaching candidates on the staff. Chris Jent, Brendan O’Connor, even TJ Saint are all guys you might consider for a HC job in two years. Mike Brown’s best quality right now is not being Thibs. We might grow very tired of him when the honeymoon wears off and his foibles become apparent. We had zero coaches in our internal pipeline to interview this summer. Now we do.
Some fun narratives I’ll be tracking tonight and going forward:
Is Yabu a bum (and if so, how much of one)?
Is Clarkson an annoying irritant or a decent cog (or both)?
Will Brunson find his footing in the new system?
Is Mikal finally happy and freewheeling?
How good is Huk (as first resident of Huk Island, it’s no longer is Huk any good)?
Will Kolek continue to get burn? (Ditto Jemison)
please allow me to fourth the boredom with shai hes great but is for sure a horrible watch youd have to be an okc fan to love it
jalens poor shooting nite was offsent by 12 of 13 from the free throw line
If Hart plays tonight, does that knock Kolek out of the rotation? Jemison? Both?
If Hart plays tonight, does that knock Kolek out of the rotation? Jemison? Both?
Probably means we are playing 12 men…
SGA is the quintessential modern superstar, doing most of his best work by taking maximum advantage of an artificially-open floor, and the barely-even-basketball ability to induce foul calls.
“Bureaucratic” is a great word for it. (*) Kudos.
(*) It’s one thing to draw fouls in the ordinary course of basketball. That’s a skill, and generally speaking an underlying proxy for underlying talent. It’s quite another to build your game around consciously endeavoring to do so. I’d say pretty much the exact same thing about walking in baseball.
but when does dia get on the floor?
I’m good with SGA’s game. Very old-school. Kinda like Jordan in his last couple of Bulls runs. I don’t think he flails and rip-through’s his way to the line. His assortment of moves is beguiling…even mesmerizing.
Honestly, what is wrong with you guys? He is close to a perfect basketball player. Plays good defense for a great offensive player. Shares the ball, but has the seeds to dominate at crunch time when needed. High volume with top efficiency scorer.
What’s not to like? Not enough stupid “primal screams?” Doesn’t taunt his opponents enough? Plays for a small market team in a red state? Doesn’t have enough “Look at Me!, Me!, Me!” bullshit mentality?
WTF, the guy is great and plays 70’s Knicks team basketball. I’m guessing all you folks would think him spectacularly enjoyable if he played for the Knicks.
This will likely be shot down as cloud yelling — I of course don’t care — but I preferred the association play style where you had to actually earn your open spaces on the floor, rather than them being bestowed upon you by virtue of your teammates all standing 24 feet from the basket because of the artificial 3-point line.
The same 12 or do we see Dadiet/Diawara/McCullar/Tosan?
SGA also gets a way with a lot of pushing defenders, while getting a good whistle. I kind of agree.
Yeah, this. Brunson had so few catch and shoot 3s last year because Randle’s gravity was no longer there. I think his off ball role will generate good looks and he’ll shoot above 40% from deep like in his first two seasons here.
“What’s not to like? Not enough stupid “primal screams?” Doesn’t taunt his opponents enough?”
I do like the general cut of SGA’s jib, nothing to complain about there in the least.
Jokic is the perfect basketball player. Giannis is too almost.
I agree about SGA. Too much foul baiting. He is great though. Undisputably.
Donte DiVincenzo, starting Point Guard, is an interesting development.
That’s fine to have a preferred style of play, but virtually every team in the league plays with that offensive philosophy, he’s the best at it and he earned the MVP partly because he excelled at the style that everyone plays.
Giannis is super great but far from a perfect player. He can’t shoot outside of 8 feet and shooting is an essential skill. His dominance in other areas more than makes up for it but close to perfect, he aint.
This type of baseball player literally does not exist.
The type of baseball player who consciously “works the count,” “makes the pitcher throw a lot of pitches,” and has an OBA of .370 with a BA of .250 absolutely, positively exists.
The Little League fields of the mid-80s United States were filled with 10-year-olds screaming “walk’s as good as a hit.” Pace FJM axiom, the value of a walk has never been a mystery. But even those 10 year olds understood the athletic and aesthetic difference between (a) getting a hit; and (b) walking.
Walks and drawing fouls are the “eat your vegetables and take your cod liver oil” of sports.
Brown did say postgame that his normal rotation will eventually consist of just 9 players.
I suppose there’s also a chance Hart plays but KAT doesn’t, in which case Jemison is definitely staying in the rotation for another night.
Love how the curators of the sport — TV networks, ESPN.com, The Athletic — act as if the primal scream is the very essence of basketball. It’s completely inorganic and rote at this point, yet somehow they think it’s “showing the players’ passion” or some other idiocy.
“Not until basketball players began to primally scream did they actually care.” LOL.
Also interesting is how the WNBA players and curators have all adopted it as same, particularly given its obvious deep roots in The Patriarchy.
FWIW I enjoy the Knicks slightly less when Brunson is foul baiting, too. At the same time I want him to get the same whistle SGA gets, and Butler still gets (dude shot 16 FTs in the season opener), and Embiid used to get but doesn’t anymore bc he’s a washed up bum ever since he pulled Mitch down to the floor.
(Funny thing about Embiid… I feel like we collectively saw the sudden demise of his athleticism in game 1 of the playoffs. When he threw that ball off the backboard to himself for the dunk it was a jaw dropping moment. But he landed awkwardly, left the game, and that was probably the last time in his life he had elite NBA athleticism.)
In the long run, this makes sense. When Mitch and Hart are available, you’ve got seven guys who should be playing at least 20 minutes a night, several of them over 30. And then you’ve got Clarkson and Yabu who, if they’re playing well, should be at least close to 20. The math becomes hard to make room for more than 9.
But Brown is also smart to not be locking himself into 9 this early. He’s figuring out what he has, playing with matchups to a degree, etc. Especially since guys are going to be load managed (or, in Mitch’s case, “injury managed.”
Some of you guys have the shittiest and most ridiculous baseball takes I have ever seen. Walk rates have been remarkably constant for like 100 years. They reached a peak in the 1940’s and dipped shortly thereafter and have remained constant ever since. There was a little peak again in the steroid era, probably because pitchers figured it was smarter to walk guys than to let the opponent’s roided up second baseman jack a steroid-aided flyball into the stands. But they went down as the steroid era ended. If you plot the walk rate in baseball over time since the 1920’s it’s a straight line with those two bumps in it.
You get .250 hitters with high OBP today because the fucking league batting average is .250. In fact it was .245 this year. This has always been the case in baseball. League average hitters in terms of BA with high OBP have always existed.
Just an incredibly shit take. You know who walks the most? The best hitters in baseball. You know why they walk a lot? Because pitchers don’t throw them a lot of strikes. You know why they don’t swing at those non-strikes, and walk a lot? Because they’re good hitters.
You know who doesn’t walk a lot? Shitty hitters. There is no such thing as a player who “bases his game around walks.” If all you can do is walk, nobody will walk you!
Ted Williams and Mickey Mantle drew a ton of walks!
The scare quotes around “working the count” as if that’s some kind of dumb idea are just… chef’s kiss. Amazing.
The most athletic and aesthetically pleasing thing to do, of course, is to just go up there hacking at everything like Jeff Francouer of Javy Baez. This whole “working the count” thing is for scrubs like Aaron Judge, Shohei Ohtani, Ted Williams, and Babe Ruth.
Wemby may not be the perfect basketball player yet, but he’s on his way.
I think you inadvertently supported his take while calling it shitty and ridiculous.
Knowing and conscious effort versus byproduct.
Know the difference.
Three pointers in basketball, walks in baseball.
Two sides, same “efficiency” coin.
It’s odd to word associate Aaron Judge or Ted Williams and arrive at “works the count.” I frankly doubt that actually is the association being made.
You’re not reading it correctly.
.245 is the league batting average. He’s saying there’s a plague of low batting average hitters because too many guys “work the count” today. But the walk rate in MLB is the same it has always been. Hitters don’t walk at any higher rate today than they ever did.
You’ll get hitters with high OBP and a league batting average, just the same as in any season in MLB history. It just LOOKS different to people who don’t know what they’re talking about— to these people a .250 batting average is shitty even though it is ABOVE LEAGUE AVERAGE.
Point taken Alan.
Let me just say that when I have time to read through an entire thread, I often see the same kind of comments/concerns about our players repeated that I think miss the mark badly. So I’ll repeat myself and suggest why I think their concerns are misplaced and why they should really be worried about XYZ. I assume some people may not have seen what I think under the worse assumption that they care what I think. 😉
Whether or not it looks different, it *sounds* different because no one in his time made googly eyes at Ted Williams’s ability to walk.
Because that was a secondary, residual skill to the things that actually made him “Ted Williams.”
This was a great post, but this part in particular was very triggering to me because I used to regularly get into mindnumbing arguments with other Yankee fans about this as it related to Brett Gardner.
These guys were convinced that Gardner was an awful hitter despite his high OBP and solidly above average wRC+. I desperately tried to explain that with extraordinarily rare exceptions, every MLB pitcher can throw strikes to any given batter if that is their sole goal, such that if a hitter truly cannot hit, say, a 90 MPH fastball down the middle, they will never get on base.
I wasn’t able to breakthrough to them, and it bothers me to this day that some idiots didn’t appreciate Brett Gardner.
I can’t cut and paste now, but the second sentence of the second paragraph of JK’s last post isn’t at all what I’m saying.
For someone that doesn’t follow baseball closely, is that because the pitching is better, the bullpen is used more often and effectively and there is an effort to hit more homeruns or is there even more to it.
I was a big baseball fan as a kid, but didn’t pay any attention for literally decades. When I look at the players now, the change is so obvious I can see it. They look physically superior to decades ago. They look bigger, stronger and in much better shape.
Yet the walk rate remains constant despite the “googly eyes.”
Hitters aren’t walking any more than they used to. Good hitters tend to walk a lot and shitty hitters don’t. This is really not complicated.
Maybe this is missing the mark, but I have to think all else being equal some players have superior perception and/or patience and can use those skills to generate more walks than someone with less skill in those areas. I remember the days of little league when if you took a marginal pitch and it was called a ball, the other players would yell “good eye”. Maybe it was a misplaced compliment, but there probably is such a thing as a “good eye”.
The “conscious effort to walk among players and front offices” hasn’t remained remotely the same — the entire point — and so pitching has also adapted to that conscious knowingness to keep walk rates roughly constant.
Doesn’t change anything I said.
In terms of this new consciousness crowding out actual hitting, it pretty clearly has unless 1980 is some kind of outlier.
Hits per plate appearance (*):
1980: .240
2025: .218.
A nine percent drop.
So, yeah, walk consciousness has pretty clearly crowded out actual hits. Or just as noted.
(*) American League, to keep the DH constant.
I won’t speak to the tendency, but a lot of really good hitters didn’t walk very much, all the way through Ichiro, one of the best pure hitters of all-time, who walked 40 times per 162 games. His close predecessor, Rod Carew, (*) walked 67 times per 162 games.
*Could* Rod Carew have walked more if he had today’s sabermetric “wisdom”? Clearly, lest the obvious connection between being able to ID pitch location and batting average be denied.
and just like that baseballblogger is back!
To think that at the height of the FJM/walks craze, there were actually people who vociferously argued against the notion of Ichiro Suzuki as a Hall of Famer ….
The main thing that has driven batting averages down is pitcher velocity, and the increased use of bullpens. In just 15 years, the average fastball velo has gone from 92 to 94 MPH. That’s significant. There are simply more guys that can throw hard now. Most teams, even crummy ones, can bring in multiple relief pitchers who can strike out over a batter per inning.
The impact of launch angle-related hitting strategies and the prioritization of high-EV hitters is less clear, but is certainly also a factor. Teams are willing to live with hitters striking out as long as they can mitigate that with extra base hits and walks.
Walk rates have remained constant, although it is a common misconception that the modern game stresses walks more, because Billy Beane liked Scott Hatteberg or something.
I’ll take “Things That Never Happened” for $800, Alex
?????????????????
Bizarre take.
Yes, exactly — that’s a “conscious effort by teams to draw walks.” You just admitted my entire point.
But in any event, walks in baseball have trod virtually the same path from “by-product of other things involved in playing the sport” to “conscious effort to obtain” that three pointers have in the NBA. It’s undeniable. That change from by-product to conscious effort is the whole story. Everything downstream, from player sorting to player usage to player scouting and evaluation, flowed from that.
Once three-pointers become something teams affirmatively try to obtain, defenses adapted to that change. Same thing with walks.
There are a couple of modern analogs to the Rod Carew/Ichiro type players of the past, who were outliers in and of themselves. Jose Altuve was a low walk rate guy who could put up high batting averages. Luis Arraez was kind of doing it there for a minute.
Those players still exist, they’re just rare. Rod Carew, incidentally, took a pretty decent amount of walks in his career, had an above average walk rate of 9.6% in his career. Ichiro was a little lower, 8.1%, which is historically the league average.
I’d rather talk about Kolek but I think the point I would put forth is a broad statistical one: single-year league average doesn’t mean good if the single-year league average is bad. There’s a 120+ year data set that helps us determine how good a year is, and .245 is a bad year.
What the fuck kind of Byzantine argument is this? The walk rate in baseball has remained constant for like 100 years, how in the everloving name of all things holy does that show that “teams prioritize walks” more? Shouldn’t walks go up like even a little bit if this was the case?
What exactly are we lamenting here? Too many teams try to get walks now, even though walks haven’t gone up at all? This is all very dumb.
id rather you post about kolek as well
In 1887, they counted walks as hits. I suspect this debate would look a lot different if they kept doing so.
Yes, exactly. A bunch of the BITD good hitters ex-walks below the Carew/Ichiro level have been sorted out in favor of the walkers and the launch anglers.
And thus we see hits, and especially the “lowly’ single, crowded out of the game, in favor of other, less aesthetically pleasing alternatives.
This is just fundamentally wrong. League batting averages are not magic, they simply reflect the state of the game at a given time. “.245 is a bad batting average” in an absolute sense is just a bad take, full stop.
The National League batting average in 1930 was .303. Is that because all the hitters in the league were just that good? The average hitter in 1930 was just a .300 hitter by dint of sheer quality? Or was it the conditions of the game that led to high batting averages? Of course it’s the latter. The conditions of the game change. In 1968 the league batting average was .237. Was the whole league populated by shitty hitters?
If you’re not comparing hitters and pitchers in a given year to the baseline of the whole league, you’re just doing it wrong. A .245 batting average in 2025 can’t really be compared to a .245 batting average in 2001, and WHY ARE WE EVEN TALKING ABOUT BATTING AVERAGE
Singles per plate appearance, American League:
1980: .173
2025: .141
18.5 percent drop.
“Or was it the conditions of the game that led to high batting averages? ”
I thought the “conditions of the game” were pretty much the topic of discussion.
On the other question, I mean … .245 kind of is a bit of a shitty batting average. You can make up for it in other ways, to be sure, and still have some “value,” but just on the sole question alone, yeah.
“WHY ARE WE EVEN TALKING ABOUT BATTING AVERAGE”
Because the ability to generate a high batting average in Major League Baseball is something people have admired as cool for over a century, and is a very aesthetically pleasing athletic ability?
So, let me just get this straight. You would rather see teams trot out empirically worse players, because they can hit singles like Rod Carew and Ichiro, because that is aesthetically pleasing, and furthermore, these Carew-esque players exist but just aren’t given a fair chance by their respective teams?
I’m just trying to parse out how bad the argument you are making is, exactly. Tell me some of these excellent Rod Carew-type players who are languishing in the minor leagues being passed over for the launch angle stars of today. I’ll go ahead and wait, since these very real players that exist should be easy to find.
It’s not. In 2008 the market was down 38%. If you were down 35% would you call it a bad take, full stop, if I said 2008 was a bad year for you?
Friday Night Knicks is right around the corner…
making my way now thru the Craig bond movies…Spectre turned me off a bunch to the series…
still haven’t watched No Time to Die, which received okay reviews…
watching Skyfall now, and I’m thinking I don’t remember this at all…guess that’s a good thing…
not gonna lie, I’m a bit concerned about the mitch situation, was wishing for a consistent healthy impactful season…
good to see though that huk appears ready…grateful jemison the 3rd is on the roster…
kind of excited to see if tyler can repeat his performance from last game, he really looked comfortable out there…a cool, confident and capable kolek could help the cause a whole lot…
it’s good to balance some disappointments (mitch and yabu) with some pleasant surprises – tyler kolek, jemsion the 3rd…
look forward to seeing diawara out on the court at some point when KAT sits out to rest/heal…or, when yabu gets shifted down on the depth chart (still believe he’ll adjust and show out, at some point)…
Hitting a single is a more admirable athletic event that drawing a walk. By an extremely wide margin.
Hitting .300 in the major leagues is cool and admirable and aesthetically pleasing, irrespective of “value.”
I can’t fathom this instance on treasuring the “efficient.” I mean, no, I don’t want to go to a Yankee game next year and watch the players hit .153, or watch the 2026 baseball season and watch the league put up a .220 batting average.
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