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Knicks’ Josh Hart not considering surgery at this time, focusing on new role coming off bench – SNY
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It’s time to have a Hart to Hart conversation – Posting & Toasting
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54 replies on “Knicks Morning News (2025.11.03)”
The offense looked good, the defense not so much.
The defensive rating with OG on is 112.4, with OG off it’s 130.5.
We need a clone machine, 3 OGs, 1 Mikal and 1 Deuce and the defense will be great. 😉
On the plus side, even with their 3-3 record, the Knicks are #6 in SRS, less than a point behind OKC. It’s early, so these things will change quickly, but it helps give some perspective.
SRS is probably unreliable this early in the season. The larger point is that if we are a serious contender, we shouldn’t be going 0-3 on the road to Miami, Milwaukee, and Chicago.
The good news is that there are plausible excuses for those losses…learning a new systems, injuries, variance, etc.
The additional good news is that last night’s game gave us a first glimpse of how this team will look when everyone is reasonably healthy and the offense gets rolling in line with Mike Brown’s principles. They looked a lot like last year’s team with some tweaks. So that’s promising!
The bad news is that if Yabusele turns out to be a total dud we are screwed because he has a player option for next year. So it won’t
be easy to get what we need. IMO, we need a player around Yabu’s size that’s a plus defender that can shoot a bit. They say he’s struggling with the system because he has to learn both PF and C, but he has looked terrible on both sides so far.
I wouldn’t pay much attention to SRS until around 20 games. Maybe even 20 is not enough these days because of the dramatic increase in 3s.
If you shoot a lot of 3s you’ll get more volatile results.
All else being equal, over a longer period of time a successful 3 point team will produce a better offense and net rating (and SRS), but it will remain more volatile game to game and even over a short series.
small sample size caveats but i’m very interested in Mikal’s non-scoring stats.
Assist rate is currently 23.6 -> that’s ~50% higher than his previous career high (16.3). We all wanted a return to PHX Mikal, but he was always a play finisher there, not a play creator — his assist rate there was always <9%.
Rebound rate – also significantly higher than his previous career high. averaging 8 rebounds per 100 poss vs a career rate of 5.8 rebounds per 100.
I sort of think of these rates more as level of involvement – Josh Hart rebounds everything because he is literally everywhere at once and is never sitting back and watching – he is IN THE MIX. Mikal literally doubling his rebound rate from last year seems very interesting– small sample size disclaimer of course.
I think we are probably on schedule even though a 3-3 record isn't great. KAT clearly doesn't feel comfortable in the offense yet, and losing to MIA/CHI/MIL on the road isn't exactly losing to the Jazz or the Pelicans.
Meanwhile when did Josh Giddey become Luka Doncic.
Give Yabu time. He will come around.
“we need a player around Yabu’s size”
No, we need a player of his HEIGHT. And preferably half his weight.
I am willing to give Yabu a lot of grace because he is potentially a valuable bench piece and it’s a new team, a new role, and a new system. My guess is that his game comes around in a few weeks to the point where he is playable for 10-15 mpg. But it’s good to see that Brown has him on a short leash.
If it turns out that he is completely unplayable, then the FO has some work to do. They can either trust some of the bigger kids on the roster, or find a promising two-way guy in the G-League, or make a small deal and pick up someone like Ben Simmons, or attach a couple of seconds to dump Yabu. At the end of the day, I’m not all that worried about it.
I really can’t believe my eyes when I see how good the rank-and-file NBA player has become at shooting 3’s, let alone the great shooters. The shooting skill level in today’s game is just off the charts.
One thing that is dragging the Knicks shooting efficiency is their finishing at the rim. They are dead last in FG% from the restricted zone (60%, when league average is 70%), and 25th in FG% from 3-10 feet. I can’t imagine this is a skill issue, they were basically league average from the restricted zone last year. Anecdotally, just yesterday we saw KAT miss a few easy layups, Mitch missed a putback dunk, and OG missed a few bunnies (though that happens often).
I love OG like my first-born, but OMG is he bad at finishing at the rim. You watch someone like Bridges contort himself for beautiful reverse layups, and then watch OG throw up a ball at the rim like he’s five years old.
Maybe he IS my first born…
Actually very excited to see Huk and hopefully Jemison play tonight with a back-to-back and Mitch likely out. Not a bad team to do that with as an opponent. I’m still harboring high hopes for both these guys (as cromulent backups), although haven’t seen much so far this year. So that will be a big part of my eyeballing tonight.
Culprits Within 3ft:
KAT is shooting .469
Shamet & Yabu are at .250
Mitch is at .333
Clarkson is at .500
3-10ft:
KAT .313 (career: .483)
Brunson .345 (career: .496)
“The Bulls fleeced the Thunder in the Giddey trade” was an interesting take last night.
Giddey was all potential on the Thunder. They’d have had to take the ball out of SGA’s hands to get him to post these kinds of numbers and that was never going to happen.
Alex Caruso was a 5.0 bpm player in the playoffs and absolutely dominated the postseason defensively. His game 7 performance against the Nuggets was legendary. Watching him fuck up Jamal Murray and Nikola Jokic in the same game was like watching Ohtani pitch and hit against the Brewers.
Was it an overpay? Maybe. But that’s the point in the win curve where you don’t care, like the Warriors trade for Iguadola or the Celtics trade for Jrue. Presti makes that trade again 1,000 times and throws in an extra pick to get it done if he has to. It’s probably one of the best trades of his career.
lots of extra disclaimers about small sample sizes i wouldnt want a player who is 6 foot 8 and 140 pounds hed weigh a little bit less than me and i dont weight that much
Raven, OG’s poor finishing has been a concern for me pretty much since we acquired him. I actually think that opposing coaches are onto this and are more than happy to goad him into ill-fated forays in the paint. It seems that OG is unaware of his own limitations and will just keep on flailing away in there, even though the result is even worse than the missed shot or live-ball turnover because he often winds up on the ground setting off a 4-on-5 break with our best defender trailing the play.
He’s clearly a high-IQ player in many regards, but this is a disturbing blind spot. To be fair, he does score in there, but almost always when he either has space and an angle, or has a single smaller defender on him. But he definitely has to become more self-aware.
I don’t think the Thunder particularly care given they won a championship and Caruso is a great player. They still may have left a lot on the table from a value in a vacuum perspective but Caruso was absolutely the right move. Still, Giddey turned 23 less than a month ago.
Of course there were also non-basketball factors at play, but from an on-court standpoint Giddey is looking like he’ll be an all-star for the next decade.
My comment was a little hyperbolic because he Giddey was killing us and looks fantastic this year.
re: the Knicks, while there is certainly cause for concern I think this start is being heavily over scrutinized. It won’t be long before Brunson starts cooking in all this space. I have a feeling when we get to the 20 game mark we’ll be talking about the best Knicks start since the Melo season.
E.B. I view it like IQ for OG. We didn’t want to pay IQ and they didn’t want to pay Giddey. He was an asset they had to trade.
And if OG dominates an entire postseason like Caruso did and wins us the title, will any of us care if Quickley turns into Josh Giddey?
OG is marginally (less than .004) better than Hart & Brunson and marginally worse than KAT (.002 difference) for his career.
Basically, OG dunks the ball so much that it negates his lack of touch. He’s taken 25 shots within 0-3ft and dunked 32% of them this season, or 47% of his made shots in that range are dunks. He leaves a lot on the table but it seems to cancel out.
Part of the reason Mikal is rebounding more is that Hart has been out or playing fewer minutes. So Mikal is getting a extra rebound here or there that Hart would have gotten. We know he has the ability to rebound more because he’s done it in the past and he said he would make a bigger effort to get rebounds this year.
His assists are up in part because the team is making an effort to play Brunson off the ball more often. If you bring the ball up or handle it more often you will get an assist here or there just by moving the ball, but you have to have it first. If one guy is dominating it, his assists will rise and others will fall.
OG has been a terrible finisher in non dunk situations from day one with the Knicks. His FG% at 0-3 remain high because he leaks out and cuts well into dunk situations. It’s non dunk situations with contact that has he trouble. At least he’s strong enough to finish and dunk through people once in awhile.
Edit: I see Early Bird Writes beat me to it
Mikal is grabbing 1.2 more rebounds per 36 than he ever has in his career despite not having Josh Hart on most of the teams.
Last year he grabbed 0.8 less than ever before, and 1.2 less than his lowest non-rookie season. And although we had Hart, this is mitigated to some extent by fielding OG at the 4.
“He leaves a lot on the table but it seems to cancel out.”
I don’t see this as a positive. It is dumb for him to continue to try things that clearly don’t work, i.e. have such a low success rate that they should simply not be attempted. It’s the mindset that worries me….again, anything predictable is going to be exploited by opposing coaches. “When OG goes into a dribble drive, the primary defender should stay in front of him and the closest defender should hard double, while everyone else should look for either the emergency pass, the fling at the rim, the block, or the live-ball turnover, and then run out before OG gets back into the play.” Pretty simple stuff, and if I were an opposing coach, I’d be looking at film carefuly for sets that trigger ill-fated OG drives.
This is less true for KAT, but not untrue.
If I had to list the #1 positive and the #1 negative from this season so far it would be:
Positive: Bridges by far. He’s essentially been the idealized version of Mikal Bridges
Negative: Yabu, although KAT is a close second due to his horrendous defense (even by his standards) and that debacle in Milwaukee
mikal was largely invisible last night but had a great stat line too many turnovers though
Quickley is no kid anymore, he’s been hurt a lot and he’s certainly not lighting it up this year.
RJ has been more efficient, but his defense is still bad.
The one people haven’t fully noticed yet is KP. I think all the injuries, sicknesses etc.. fnally caught up with him. He can still score, but he looks terrible on defense at times so far. There were signs last year, but he may actually be done. It will just take some time to be sure and for the team to bench him if he doesn’t play better.
Beyond the rebounding and playmaking, the biggest difference I see in Mikal is his confidence in shooting above-the-break 3’s. Obviously the shooting is gonna calm down a bit, but that’s the Mikal I was hoping for, and the one we only saw in short stretches last year.
He also said he was going to make a bigger effort, but we’ll see where he ends up, especially if he starts playing more minutes with Hart.
There are multiple things involved.
1. Role/effort
2. Playing next to Hart
3. Randomess over a short period
Caruso for Giddey was pretty clearly a trade that helped both teams. The Bulls needed a guy who could make things happen with the rock in his hands and the Thunder really didn’t. Giddey was redundant there.
I’ve always believed in Giddey as a player, so I’m not surprised to see him thriving.
Giddey’s situation with OKC gives the lie to the idea that you should just trade draft picks for mediocre value if you don’t have a clear role for your BPA. Shockingly, drafting a good, young player tends to produce benefits regardless. In this case, it allowed OKC to get a hand-in-glove fit in Caruso, and while I’ve always liked Giddey and think Chicago “won” the trade from a value perspective, OKC would obviously do it again.
Mikal’s stocks have fallen back to within normal ranges for him after a great first 2 games, which is unfortunate
I wouldn’t be surprised to see his rebounds do the same. The biggest difference is actually his offensive rebounding, which is a little surprising.
I do think the assists are sustainable. The offense is conducive to producing assists and he’s getting a lot of opportunities to run the offense.
Giddey became basically unplayable vs Dallas in the playoffs which lead to OKC trading him.
One of the reasons I’m not sweating our 500 start is some of the various progressing-to-the-mean aspects such as the in-close shooting stats that EB wrote about above. I suspect much of that is random and as Hubert intimates, once things normalize we’ll see a pretty good team out there.
One bit of progress I wasn’t expecting was Hart returning to form — I really thought it was going to be a while if at all this year. That’s one gutsy mo-fo.
The takes were hot following the 2-3 start but my only genuine new concern was Hart. Just about everything else came down to good shots not going in and Mitch being absent, which isn’t to say the latter isn’t an ongoing concern, just not one we learned about in those first 5 games.
Hart has looked much better of late, but for the record I still want him to get the surgery. We need all the upside we can get in the playoffs, and that means not willingly entering them compromised. Unlike some other, I view Hart as an immensely crucial player to the current roster’s success and don’t take an extended absence lightly–I think it would materially impact our record. But I’d rather enter the playoffs with a lower seed and a healthy Hart.
The good news is nothing Mikal is doing looks that unsustainable (the 3PT% will come down he’s taking excellent shots so 40% isn’t out of the question), and the ~5 BPM version would be a game-changer for our medium term trajectory.
Honestly, reflecting on it more, OKC may have still gotten more value because Caruso is just that good on defense. We’ll see how Giddey progresses from her on out.
Hart said surgery would mean missing at least 3 months, I could see why he would be hesitant to get surgery if not totally necessary. Its one thing to miss a few weeks but once you start entering a few months that’s tough.
I guess we theoretically should wait a bit and see if Hart’s 3pt shooting can stabilize near his career average. It’s only been 5 games plus he’s had the back issue, but some of the shots are way off even for him.
Looking more and more like RJ was the best player going out in the OG trade. Which is less about RJ being good and more about IQ being either underwhelming or injured. At $32M AAV, he’s a borderline albatross.
“Looking more and more like RJ was the best player going out in the OG trade.”
oh lordy what have you done
Looking at RJ’s numbers he wasn’t as good last season as I thought. Off to a very efficient start this season but apparently still can’t play defense.
Doogie, relitigating RJ’s value is a big part of what we do around here.
Looks like IQ isn’t hitting his 3s this year, but the rest of his numbers look pretty solid. He had a 3.2 OBPM in the 900 min he managed last season.
I think offensively things are pointing in the right direction, and the promise is there. I’m just not convinced that this team will ever hold up enough defensively to make real noise (and I don’t mean this as a Brown/Thibs thing, it’s a KAT thing mostly).
In terms of value, RJ seems closer to being a $27M AAV player than IQ is to being a $32.5M AAV player. Neither guy is particularly valuable on their current deal, but IQ is locked in for 4 years at that price.
And for the record, I have always been in the middle with regard to RJ’s value and impact on winning. He’s a solid rotation player at the right price and with the right guys around him. Thibs utilized him excessively and probably incorrectly, and his last 3000 minutes with Toronto are probably much more indicative of who he really is than his first 9000 with the Knicks. He’s a medium efficiency/medium-high usage wing with decent ball handling, passing and rebounding chops and a decent and somewhat switchable situational defender. And I still think there’s some TS% to mine in his FT shooting.
He’s probably still more of a $20M-ish player, but in the spectrum of opinions he’s pretty clearly in the middle of the extremes but closer to E’s endpoint than the other end.
Parlor game at this point, but I’d still prefer the 2023 playoff Knicks, especially now that Grimes has taken a significant leap. Himself has proven he can be efficient down at the 23-ish USG level.
*Much* deeper bench, five 1’s still in hand, normal age range distribution rather than the Children of Men we have now. Presumes ordinary course drafting (i.e., Kyshawn George, Ajay Mitchell, etc.) That team would be wrecking it with their depth. This team … not so much.
Sounds very much like we’ll be seeing Huk, Jemison, and maybe Diawara tonight. Fun!
Oh, and/or maybe that Dadiet creature…
I think it’s more than fair to feel strongly that this team would have been in a much better place had it been run by Sam Presti. And yeah, maybe by assorted KBers. But the Brunson Maneuver makes up for lots of ills, and at the end of the day we’ve passed by lots of teams who were well ahead of us on the developmental chart when Leon took over…including Toronto, who shitcanned the great Masai Ujiri after he totally fucked up their post-Kawhi rebuild. So the question for me is less about how we are doing and more about how we are doing compared to where we would be with anyone other than Leon (not including Presti) at the helm. We’ve seen lots of teams flounder around…Cleveland since they went all in for Spida, Atlanta since they made the conference finals and then traded for “the missing piece” in DeJounte Murray, Minny since they went all-in for Gobert. The Clips, Suns, Nets, Sixers, Heat, Grizzlies, Mavs, Jazz, and Blazers were all teams on the rise at some point in the last few years and all fizzled out.
Is that what will happen to the Knicks? Very possibly, but there are some causes for optimism.
-their core is all mid-prime with a 2-3 year window beyond this year
-they can trade their 2026 pick and 2033 pick on draft night
-They have a top-10 player on a ridiculous contract
-There is value stored in KAT’s current contract
-Seems like NY is a preferred destination again
Sadly, the Thunder look more loaded and sustainable than ever, and the EC will be back next year. So it looks like a repeat of the 1990’s, where we have to get lucky to find a window to the finals. This is as good a year for that as any, but I’m feeling pretty good about it not being the last, best opportunity in this run.
Not sure what ordinary course entails. There are plenty of mocks that put the Knicks guys ahead of those 2. Sam Vecenie ranked Kolek 21 & Dadiet 34. He ranked Kyshawn 30 & Ajay 35. There are mock drafts with McCullar ranked ahead of Ajay.
Boston and Indiana have alot to do next offseason to return to their previous highs, just Tyrese and Tatum returning wont be enough.
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