News & Blogs
Knicks’ Josh Hart not considering surgery at this time, focusing on new role coming off bench – SNY
Game Preview: Knicks vs Bulls, Nov. 2, 2025 – Posting & Toasting
It’s time to have a Hart to Hart conversation – Posting & Toasting
BULLS at KNICKS | FULL GAME HIGHLIGHTS | November 2, 2025 – NBA
Knicks at Wizards Preview | PREGAME POD – Knicks Film School
Knicks vs Bulls Post Game Show | Ep 645 PART 2 – Knicks Fan TV
The Run.down Knicks vs Bulls Postgame Show – The Strickland
Knicks Nightcap episode 3 – Knick of Time
YT News
111 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. Most mock drafts had 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.
“Boston and Indiana have alot to do next offseason to return to their previous highs, just Tyrese and Tatum returning wont be enough.”
Selfishly, I don’t care as much about them “returning to their previous highs” as I do about them returning to “being good enough to knock the Knicks out of the playoffs.”
Boston last year weren’t good enough to knock off the Knicks in the playoffs.
Just don’t trade Grimes for a 1/1000 chance that a Burkowitch and Brodgon Resurrection carries them for a title, and forget about cap issues, and all would be much better now. But to be fair, Grimes looked horrible in his last half season with the Knicks.
To be fair, E, I think it takes more than ordinary drafting to identify Jalen Williams and Ajay Mitchell, neither of whom were a clear choice. Sam Presti is a high bar.
The standard I have always held Leon to (which I think is fair) is “would this team be in much better shape if he called in sick on draft day and an automated bot selected the highest ranked player on ESPN’s draft board at every selection.”
In 2024 that process would have yielded George, Filipowski, and Bona. Flip’s not exactly lighting it up this year but George is looking mighty blunderful. He was a classic “if he ever learns to shoot” case whose floor seemed like Kelly Oubre if he didn’t. Who knows if his early season shooting is for real but his defense and athleticism is exactly what this team desperately needed.
Pacome Dadiet was a punt, plain and simple. He is the French Incineration.
They were pretty banged up even before the Tatum injury and we were completely healthy. I also think that Mazz had a very bad series. But I agree that they have a steeper path than Indy, who should be even better next year than they were last year just on internal development alone. They also have some cap maneuverability and trade assets. Boston, not as much.
Im actually surprised how bad Indiana has been this season so far, Siakam has played great but the rest of that roster is pretty banged up and just not that good.
Indiana lost Nembhard, Mathurin, McConnell and Obi. Without those four, they are running a lottery-bound rotation out there. Only Obi is projected to be out long-term, but who knows, maybe they’re thinking about stealth-tanking?
Yeah, hindsight this was a VERY short-sighted move, especially since it was not known if Randle was even going to be able to come back and, it turned out, he was not able to come back.
ESPN would have us draft Furphy & George
Wasserman would have drafted Collier & Dunn
Hollinger would have been Filipowski & Furphy
Vecenie would have been Filipowski & Collier
Where are we getting George & Filipowski? Why are we taking that board as some sort of gospel?
hmmmmm, wondering if you all hang on to you “ex’s” as tightly as knick players once on the roster…
The past and future are one and the same,
they flow in a passage of time.
And the now holds onto all the blame,
for the present invented crimes.
The Ringer had Dadiet at 26
Hollinger had Dadiet at 24
No Ceilings had Dadiet at 25
SB Nation 26
ESPN at 30
Again, it depends where you look. These rankings make Dadiet at 25 completely reasonable. The others usually have him around 33. Mock Drafts do not agree, there’s a lot of variance.
Endlessly harping in hindsight on cherry-picked draft picks is a big part of what we do here.
All indications are that there was a big preference for Dadiet because he’d be willing to give back some cash that would help the team sneak under aprons.
If “drafting in the ordinary course” means anything, it means completely eschewing that kind of nonsense.
Right, because being under the aprons is really not a big deal.
That drafting will always be far from an exact science is why I’m varying degrees of forgiving of every Leon draft except 2021, when he traded the opportunity to draft a number of guys who have gone on to have a lot of NBA success for jackshit. We don’t have to re-litigate it, but it was awful.
Even the best GMs will miss the BPA all the time and you should evaluate the process behind the pick. I don’t think the draft is a total crapshoot and the many, many hours I’ve put in to producing 60 player big boards proves as much, but I think Obi is the only disastrous actual pick Leon has made from a process perspective despite the countless ways my board has differed from his.
But 2021 still hurts.
(1) We don’t actually know if that was the reason Dadiet was drafted there. He was frequently mocked in that range.
(2) Acquiring 3x All-NBA players is generally considered part of the ordinary business of GMing a basketball team.
(3) The next pick, presumably drafted in the ordinary course of business, was by Sam Presti. That player flunked out of the league after 1yr. A large part of Presti’s success is sheer volume of picks, many of which do not work out.
Also, Dadiet just turned 20. Kyshawn George was still in high school at his age.
If Leon had just drafted two very good picks in Miles McBride and Quentin Grimes at #19 and #21 rather than making some trades to get those same guys at a lower draft position plus some extra stuff (not enough, to be fair), no one would be saying shit about it right now. We don’t have to re-litigate it, but that folks are still squealing about it is sort of comical, if eternally annoying.
Precisely. During the course of his tenure, Leon’s had the second highest volume of draft picks after Presti. We should be loaded with hits and misses.
And in that vein, I think the process Leon followed in the 2022 draft was way more subject to fair criticism than that in 2021. The 2021 criticism is still as woefully overwrought as it was on draft night, and caused more stupid hand-wringing than any other single event in KB history, despite it having almost no bearing on this team’s outlook apart from obvious cherry-picking. Trading completely out of the #11 pick in the 2022 draft for cap maneuverability and future picks was far more impactful and worth bitching and moaning endlessly about.
The biggest part of Presti’s success was trading for Shai when he was considered a good player with upside and then watching him turn into the MVP of the league.
I maintain that trading the #19 pick in a draft that was unusually strong in that range for a fake first that predictably conveyed as two seconds, five and six seasons later, was not good process.
What can I say, the hot takes never end.
“Just don’t trade Grimes for a 1/1000 chance that a Burkowitch and Brodgon Resurrection”
i hope someone can remind me when we traded for brogdon
The Grimes trade was terrible because Grimes had shown he could defend well, hit open 3s and was still young enough to improve.
He had a down period, got hurt and then went down further, but it wasn’t the kind of injury that was going to potentially kill his career. You just had to wait until he was healthy.
How much of that trade was him wanting out after losing the starting spot, how much was his salary demands and how much was the Knicks losing faith in him as a rotation player I do not know. But trading him at the bottom for a couple of washed players that were not going to put us over the top was flat out terrible in terms of value and I repeatedly said as much at the time.
Ummmm… no, they aren’t. There wouldn’t be much purpose for living if this were true.
“I maintain that trading the #19 pick in a draft that was unusually strong in that range for a fake first that predictably conveyed as two seconds, five and six seasons later, was not good process.
What can I say, the hot takes never end.”
To my knowledge, only one person argued that it actually was a good process. That person was not me.
Had the criticism been voiced as you just did above, we wouldn’t still be talking about it, would we? But that’s not what happened, was it? That of all the things to remember and say “it still hurts” about, you picked the least bad of all the bad process moves to hurt over. It literally meant almost nothing in the long run. That’s the actual hot take, not the “I didn’t like it but it’s really no big deal” take.
Here are some obvious “way worse process” moves since Leon took over:
-picking Obi over Hali (even you seem to agree on that one)
-trading the protected Charlotte pick for Cam Reddish
-trading out of the #11 and then the #13 pick in 2022
-trading Grimes for two bargain basement rentals
-trading Obi for two terrible 2nds
-trading 5 virtually unprotected firsts for Mikal
-signing iHart to only a 2-year deal
-signing Kemba, then using picks to salary dump him
-signing Evan Fournier
-running back the 2020-21 team
As Caitlin Cooper, the Pacers blogger regularly says, Grimes has been one of the better defenders of Haliburton in the whole league – which makes that trade particularly painful.
That said, they would probably have traded him anyway due to apron issues.
The 2023-24 would still have a fundamental flaw once I-Hart left, so I don’t see how this alternate history of making great draft picks would make that much sense.
The actual Incineration, while bad, is old news. The 2022 Lottery Disaster and then all the weird, non-ordinary course material since then is just as important, maybe more so.
I think this team would be a lot better if it had a 23 year-old wing averaging 21-9-5 with a .632 TS% who ranked in the 89th percentile in DEPM last season.
Just another one of my loony opinions.
Actually, looking at OKCs draft history since 2020, Presti kinda sucks at drafting outside the lottery.
He’s worse with picks than Rose. His draft picks he traded away included IQ, Deuce, and Sengun. He got Poku (out of league), Jeremiah Robinson-Earl (10-day deal b/c of Indy’s injuries), and this year’s 17th pick which became Joan Berringer (Sengun is a high bar).
By my count he hit on only 3 non-lottery picks since 2020. Presti’s draft success is just his team sucking for multiple years in a row.
So if you guys want to be better with draft picks, we can just dump everyone and tank for the next 5 years.
Have you seen what Cason Wallace is doing on that end? They probably don’t even need Caruso this year.
Turns out victory parades are kind of fun.
“…trading the #19 pick in a draft that was unusually strong in that range…”
#19 Kai Jones-bust
#20 Jalen Johnson-excellent pick
#21 Keon Johnson-bust
#22 Isaiah Stewart-meh
#23 Usman Garuba-bust
#24 Joah Christopher-bust
#25 Quentin Grimes-excellent pick
#26 Bones Hyland-scrub
#27 Cam Thomas-talented but (fill in the blank)
#28 Jaden Springer -scrub
That’s unusually strong? There were two players that turned out to be worth drafting in that range and we got one of them.
And as to hot takes, we all know there was a virtually zero chance that the Knicks had any interest in the other guy, since they purposely passed over him, almost certainly knowing that he wouldn’t be available at #25 (according to most boards, he should have been picked higher, it was concerns about his attitude/IQ that drove his stock down, and the Knicks were all about drafting high-character guys at that time. So if you want to argue that the real bad part to the process was blackballing picks on the basis of rushing to judgment about a guy’s character, then fine. But if the griping comes down to “just make the freaking pick” then maybe you can ease your pain by assuming that the picks would have been someone other than Jalen Johnson…say Kai Jones and Keon Johnson, or your beloved Bones Hyland.
The real shame about that draft’s outcome is that they used the pick they got for #19 on Cam Reddish. It actually had a reasonably outside chance to convey before Miles Bridges got suspended. And even those two pretty good seconds could have brought back a valuable player or been used to pick a good player or two.
That draft did virtually nothing to change this team’s fortunes. Let it go.
“I think this team would be a lot better if it had a 23 year-old wing averaging 21-9-5 with a .632 TS% who ranked in the 89th percentile in DEPM last season.”
Keep pickin’ those brightest, reddist cherries, dude. Because if you don’t, the statement “…when he traded the opportunity to draft a number of guys who have gone on to have a lot of NBA success for jackshit…” is itself, jackshit. Oh wait, you actually said it yourself: “Even the best GMs will miss the BPA all the time…”
Again (and again and again) if your gripe is that they were not going to draft Jalen Johnson no matter what, then just say that. Don’t couch it as “there were a lot of impact players there…” and then keep coming back to Jalen Johnson. Just say they whiffed on evaluating him.
If only we had Ousmane Dieng and Kai Jones…
He’s smart enough to make them, though. It’s a numbers game. You don’t have to hit them all.
His biggest mistake is probably when he pulled a Leon and decided to trade the Sengun pick for a bag of dicks instead of just drafting him.
Ironically, since jumping on Jalen Johnson after Leon passed over him, and then fleecing us out of the two seconds (that could have at least gotten us Bones Hyland, but I digress) for a half-season of watching the great Cam Reddish sit the bench on his way out of the league, the Hawks have not won a single playoff series while we’ve won 4 in the last 3 years.
Alas, if only…
I’m not calling it gospel. I’m calling it the one that’s on TV during the draft, making it a reasonable benchmark for what a simple auto draft program would select.
Then you also need to be okay with having Ousmane Dieng, Tre Mann, or Nikola Topic instead of Mikal Bridges and Karl-Anthony Towns.
https://x.com/7PMinBrooklyn/status/1985407652575203429?s=19
Melo’s comments about Phil are pretty fair especially the part he says at the end about Phil should’ve coached the team if he was so obsessed with implementing the triangle but Phil doesn’t want to coach bullshit teams.
if you have a team with a bunch of young draft players, you can wish cast some future where we win a title like OKC. I guess for some that’s better than thinking we only have a team that can win 50 plus games for multiple years and maybe sniff the finals.
I get it. the theoretical ceiling of a championship, however slim those chances, is better for many than the real ceiling of being good but not quite good enough.
For me, personally, though, after watching season after season of us just sucking with no apparent game plan or long term strategy, will takes these seasons and enjoy them for all they’re worth. Life is short. End of the day I want to turn on a knicks game and most nights watch them win.
The automatic bot picks were Halliburton, Bane, Tillman, Jalen Johnson, Keon Johnson, Deuce McBride, Jalen Duren, Johnny Furphy (good call, I missed him), Kyshawn George, and Adem Bona. Hits and misses. I would definitely be ok with that instead of Mikal Bridges and Karl Anthony Towns.
About 5 years into his tenure, Presti blew up a potential dynasty by jettisoning future MVP and HOFer James Harden. Then he watched as a top-15 of all time player walked for nothing. Finally, after 18 years as the team’s lead decision-maker, he built a championship team.
I think it’s fair to say that he is better than Leon at virtually every aspect of GMing, other than maybe the nepotism part. But he had growing pains as well, and he wasn’t going to last 18 years under Dolan and with the NYC media on his back.
Thankfully for OKC fans, the team’s ownership gave him a lot of grace after those blunders, and stayed out of the way while he methodically rebuilt the team into a generational powerhouse.
In that sense, I think that unless they win a championship this year, Leon’s next “big” move will be the one that defines his tenure with the Knicks. He’s not gonna last anything close to 18 years if this either stalls or goes south. And that next big move will determine whether that happens.
What can I tell ya, I’m allowed when I pre-picked the cherry 😉
We can all split hairs and do the “I was right” shtick about each individual draft that has happened under Leon’s watch, but the end result isn’t really debatable: our “young talent” consists of Ariel Hukporti and Tyler Kolek. This is the endgame of being allergic to the draft year after year. Most of those draft picks were burning a hole in Leon’s pocket. He couldn’t wait to get rid of those shits.
We got some stuff in return for it, but we’d be in a better position if we had at least a couple of young players with upside. Right now we have to hope all of our guys stave off their decline phases for as long as possible, because there are no young players coming up in the ranks.
Sure seems like you have a gospel and that gospel just coincidentally is exactly the same as your 20/20
“What can I tell ya, I’m allowed when I pre-picked the cherry 😉”
Dude, no one is saying (or ever said) that you only liked Jalen Johnson in hindsight.
What is being said is that you can’t out of one side of your mouth say “just make the pick, there were lots of good players available at that spot, even if your board was different than mine!” then out of the other side of your mouth say “you should have just picked AND ONLY PICKED the highest guy on MY BOARD that was still available.”
This is especially true when you yourself just posted: Even the best GMs will miss the BPA all the time right after posting he traded the opportunity to draft a number of guys who have gone on to have a lot of NBA success…
So try talking out of just one side of your mouth. Is it that Leon had Quentin Grimes ranked higher on his board than Jalen Johnson (which is absolutely fair and something to be personally pissed off about, just like picking Obi over Hali, and is not cherry-picking, but something that you claim is “forgivable” because even the best GMs miss on such judgments) or is it that he didn’t pick Quentin Grimes at #19 and (whoever else you want to pick from the list since Johnson went at #20) at #21? Because if it’s the latter, your entire argument seems kinda silly in retrospect, being that no one other than Johnson is worth spending one second pining over.
Yeah, Melo handled that well.
My gospel is thinking you need to be able to do better than an idiot sitting at home watching TV saying “pick the best player on the scrolly thingy.”
“We can all split hairs and do the “I was right” shtick about each individual draft that has happened under Leon’s watch, but the end result isn’t really debatable: our “young talent” consists of Ariel Hukporti and Tyler Kolek. This is the endgame of being allergic to the draft year after year. Most of those draft picks were burning a hole in Leon’s pocket. He couldn’t wait to get rid of those shits.”
We’d be in a better position if we had at least a couple of young players with upside but also not the stuff we got in return for not having them?
Seems like one would have to go all the way back to the Thibs hiring to evaluate that. Once you commit to winning now, as you do when you hire Thibs, you pretty much commit to drafting outside of the lottery. Once you have acquired a guy like Brunson, and then Kat (who didn’t really cost much draft capital) you are pretty much committed to drafting crap shoots. So you can keep rolling with the young guys with upside that you actually had (IQ, Grimes, Obi, even RJ) and hope you pick some winners, or deal picks in the hope of cashing in on Brunson’s and KAT’s primes.
Now maybe you strike gold in the late first or the second, but more than likely you are going to bank on having a top-7 with vet’s minimum guys and late draft flyers filling out the roster.
It sucks that none of Dadiet, Kolek, McCullar, Huk, or Diawara seem like hits yet, but that’s what you opt for when you go all in on guys like OG and Mikal. Would we have been better off without those two guys but with the “young guys with upside” that the assets we used to acquire them still in tow? Maybe, maybe not. You still have to hit on the picks outside the lottery.
There is no getting around the Thibs hire really being the thing that blew big holes in the build through the draft stragegy. But hey, here we are!
Since you seem to be using ESPN, I checked and here are the actual picks(*):
Kyshawn George
Furphy
Cam Christie
Ousmane Dieng was 8th ahead of Duren.
Keon Johnson is ahead of Jalen Johnson. If Kai doesn’t go at 19 because of Keon, we take Kai at 21. Jared Butler ahead of Deuce.
Obi at 5 is ahead of Hali at 7 from what I’m looking at.
Leandro Bolmaro, Malachi Flynn, and Payton Pritchard were ahead of Bane.
(*) I don’t pay for ESPN, so I’m using a 2nd hand source that purports to list their draft order.
I guess my gospel is also thinking you should draft players who you think might be good instead of trying to preserve 20% of a pick’s value for a future trade or focusing who is willing to play for 80% of the rookie scale.
thought it would bother me more, but settling in on the notion that OG and KAT are back to playing the 4 and 5 position…
yeah, yabu was a nice get, or so it seemed at the time – we really need though another functional defensive big…
time to go check to see if there was anything interesting said by the players post game yesterday…
okay, seems mike brown really likes using the word: sprays…
jalen got grilled pretty good, as always handled it well…KAT’s still smartly aloof, glad he’s a knick…
I think what well-meaning folks are trying to say is:
1) unless you are clearly making a “profit” on trading a particular pick, just pick the highest ranked player remaining on your board at that spot
2) do not consider cap implications at all when making a draft pick
I think we all agree on #1. As to #2, it gets more tricky since the margins between the aprons are so punitive that even a few dollars can make a huge difference.
What we can probably all agree on is that the main “general” issue with Leon’s drafting is his actual draft board. And in that regard, I would put the Obi blunder first and the 2022 draft second. All of the other picks are sort of quibbling, giving the imperfect science of creating draft boards in the first place. There wasn’t really any consensus on the 2021 draft, and since there were way more misses than hits from #19-28, we were lucky to not have drafted two misses (such as EB suggested in Kai and Keon.)
But it’s fair to say that Leon & Co. are not particularly good at it, probably middling is the best way to describe them. Nothing over time distinguishes them positively from the KB hive mind (whatever that is) in that regard.
It’s hard to read all these posts about making poor draft picks with all of this damn ticker-tape in my eyes.
It’s really hard not to look back on passing on Hali as just such an annoying self-own.
Game thread is ON 🙂
PS: But please don’t bring the “who should Leon have drafted that would put us right there with OKC” to the new thread.