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White House removes altered Knicks logo mocking Mamdani after team reached out: report – New York Daily News
White House removes post with Knicks logo mocking Zohran Mamdani – The New York Times
Game Thread: Knicks vs. Timberwolves, Nov. 5, 2025 – Posting & Toasting
Knicks 137, Timberwolves 114: Scenes from NY taking pelts at the Garden – Posting & Toasting
Knicks bench gaining confidence as Miles McBride helps New York take out T-Wolves – SNY
Mitchell Robinson shows importance to Knicks with game-wrecking performance against Timberwolves – SNY
TEAM BASKETBALL is BACK in New York! Knicks Dismantle the Wolves! – Knick of Time
“He’s IRREPLACEABLE”: Why the Knicks Can’t Win Without Their Star 🔥 | CP The Fanchise – Knicks Fan TV
How are the Vibes?! w/ Steve Popper of Newsday | KFS BEAT REPORT | Knicks Film School – Knicks Film School
The Putback with Ian Begley: Knicks-Timberwolves reaction with Jon Macri – Begley Putback
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41 replies on “Knicks Morning News (2025.11.07)”
I haven’t listened to Macri’s podcast with Steve Popper yet, but apparently he said the vibes are not immaculate, the players have reservations about Brown, etc.
Alan, I listened to it. He did say that, but more in the context that the players had the same initial worries about Brown that the fans and players had. I didn’t get the sense that any of the players were unhappy, just typical adjustment stuff.
I am glad that we have three full days off before playing the Nets on Sunday. Seems like a good time to absorb all that has transpired and build on it, especially now that the team is as close to 100% healthy as it is likely to be all season.
All the players?
I would imagine Deuce, OG, and Mikal are thrilled. I can see KAT, Brunson, Hart having reservations.
The way this team was constructed with such an obvious line of demarcation has alway concerned me. But I see an abundance of wins when I look at this upcoming schedule (16-2 looks reasonable to me), and I expect that to resolve all reservations by Christmas:
Brooklyn
Memphis
Orlando
Miami
@ Miami
@ Dallas
@ Orlando
@ Brooklyn
@ Charlotte
Milwaukee
Toronto
@ Boston
Charlotte
Utah
Orlando
@ Indiana
Philadelphia
Miami
“All the players?
I would imagine Deuce, OG, and Mikal are thrilled. I can see KAT, Brunson, Hart having reservations.”
Again, he’s just echoing what was common knowledge in the press. The only point he made was that the vibes were not “immaculate.” It was pretty obvious that KAT was having an adjustment, and Hart looked downright unhappy although it’s hard to dissect the cause, given the injuries he’s been dealing with. But he also made clear that he thinks of himself as a starter, and so far he’s playing 13 less mpg than he did last year, so while he’s far from being marginalized (and I personally think that 24-28mpg off the bench is ideal for him) I could see him feeling a bit of loss from last year. But his injury status might have actually helped make the adjustment more palatable for him.
I think we’ll lose some variance games, plus teams will look at film and force adjustments, plus a key player could get banged up (for example, we looked like a different team without Deuce.) 13.5 seems like a good O/U number for those 18 games.
(PS I’m binging now because I’ll be in Saratoga and then Canton up in the North Country all weekend. Brrrrr…)
A couple of interesting quirks in the stats:
-We are 24th in pace. Last season we were 26th. So while we’re getting into offensive sets faster, it’s not really being reflected in this stat, which is a noisy one to begin with but still….
-We are allowing the 3rd lowest FT attempts…so we’re defending without fouling, albeit our defense is pretty average.
-We are making our FTs…3rd in the NBA, but not getting to the line all that much (26th) so there’s room for improvement there. Probably caused by our proportion of 3’s to 2’s (5th in 3PAr) although it might be actually worse because it seems like we have gotten lots of FT attempts on 3’s, but that’s just by my eye test.
-We are 1st in the NBA in 2PA allowed.
-Building on that, we have an enormous spread in FGA (93 per game, 3rd) and FGA allowed (84 per game, 2nd). This is likely due to leading the league in offensive rebounding…and also in opponent’s offensive rebounding. While we are just average in defensive rebounding volume, this is due to opponents taking so few shots…so we are actually first in DReb%!
Z-Man, not sure if you’re pulling any of your thoughts from Macri, but his newsletter today is filled with fun stats of all types, so many I can’t really copy and paste any particular one. So I’ll just leave this nice descriptor:
“Josh Hart: a riddle wrapped in an enigma covered in melted jarlsberg.”
Raven, I read the newsletter and specifically tried to highlight things that he did not directly mention, although they might be implied in some of his points. He’s also looking at more granular Cleaning the Glass-level stuff, while I’m just perusing our B-R page.
The one point he makes that raises an eyebrow:
If I may make excuses, I think some of this is due to games missed by three of our best defensive players (Mitch, Deuce, Hart.) But it’s definitely something to revisit after another 8 games. Or maybe more, since the schedule that hubert posted above seems pretty soft for a while.
The X’s and O’s guys from Knicks Film School have pointed out that the advantage of getting into sets faster isn’t about increasing our pace so much as it is allowing us to run many more actions. In the Thibs system, it took so long to get the ball up the floor, and then for Jalen or our other guards to survey the defense, that by the time the ball started moving again, we were usually pot committed to one action, and if that failed, it had to be quick iso-ball from whoever had the ball in his hands as the shot clock wound down. Now, we can try multiple things before Jalen or OG or whomever has no choice but to try to play hero.
I read a stat going into last game that Knicks were 5th in passes per game and were making 39 more passes per game which was the largest increase in the NBA.
Alan, I agree, and from the eye-test it also looks like the nature of the actions is more varied…e.g. more cutting, more PnR with Brunson and KAT…
But that said, Brown and many others specifically referred to increased pace, and that isn’t happening. And you know what? I’m kinda glad, because it falls into my philosophy that Thibs put a pretty nice tree in place but it could have used a lot more ornaments, and Brown is doing a nice job of tinkering with things in ways that fit a team that is not really built for speed.
im not sure that hart is one of our best defensive players i think that most would agree that our top 3 are og deuce mitch and then if youre going to add someone else right now it would probably be mikal and im writing this as someone who really loves hart but yes if youre talking about eye test defense that doesnt really show up in stats then yes josh definitely contributes there
Hart looked good whenever matched up against Ant in the last game. That said, Ant was not fully himself in that game. I’d probably put Hart fifth on the team in defensive ability, after OG/Mitch, Mikal, and Deuce. But he’s a good defender. He can be cooked, and it’s bad if he has to defend big guys, but I don’t worry about him on that end the way I do KAT or Jalen.
There’s ‘pace’ as a stat and there’s ‘pace’ as the coaches use it. We are playing with more actual pace; we’re not playing shorter possessions, which is what the stat measures.
Some other stats from KFS Xs & Os, which is worth a listen… we’re averaging 10 more catch & shoot attempts a game compared to last year and we’re averaging 10 more drives per game than last year.
The Westchester Knicks play their first game tomorrow for anyone jonesing for Knicks basketball during the 3-day layoff.
Could be a fun watch. Given the break, maybe they’ll fly Kolek, Dadiet, and Diawara down for the game on top of Evbuomwan, McCullar, Jemison, and Dink Pate.
EB, the more catch and shooting is very evident, and the best news is that it doesn’t seem to be coming at the expense of turning the ball over.
But I will keep reminding folks that we had the #1-#2 offense for a huge chunk of last year before other teams adjusted their defensive tactics and strategies against us, and then we dropped off considerably. So while these things look great right now, and definitely headed in the right direction, I’m anticipating that film of what we are doing will trigger adjustments, and then it will all be about counter-adjustments by Brown. Thibs kind of hit a wall (build out of his own stubbornness) and while Brown might be less prone to that, you never know what he might do if stuff stops working….he has a history of running out of answers, and of his players souring on him, so while I’m liking what I’m seeing, there’s a long way to go before I feel confident that it is sustainable, especially in the playoffs, and especially especially beyond the second round.
re: our best defensive players alan wrote it pretty perfectly
Jordan Clarkson’s shooting is around where it was during his better recent seasons. His rebounding, and passing are all down, and are probably causing his low BPM numbers, but I don’ think it’s because of him slowing down athletically, more about being tentative. I personally love what I’m seeing from him so far. Sure he takes some bad shots (so does Brunson, OG, KAT, etc.) but he has largely seemed like he’s letting the game come to him. I’m hoping that once he fully settles in he will pick up in the non-scoring aspects of the game and that will show up in the stats.
Alan, I think Hart is better defensively than you are giving him credit for being. For example, I think he’s far more switchable than Deuce, and in some ways, even more than Bridges. He has the quickness to stay in front of most guards, and the toughness to switch on to bigger players. He’s not OG but probably the player on the roster that is the second most switchable.
He’s not a 37mpg player on either end, but in his current role he can be a very, very effective 2-way player, especially if he can keep hitting 3’s.
Z-Man, it may be early season rose-colored glasses, but it strikes me that Brown’s system may be harder to counter-attack than Thibs’ somewhat more simplistic, or at least predictable one. I’m no offensive or defensive savant, but that’s my early take. There will, of course, be attempts to adjust by other teams. We’ll see if any of it takes.
And with you on Clarkson. I continue to watch him like a hawk in terms of checking for stupid, but he’s been more or less a pleasure, and with some decent defensive efforts now and again.
By the way, that over-the-shoulder pass by KAT to Clarkson for the dunk was my favorite play from the last game.
Listened to the podcast. He’s not reporting anything, he’s just expressing his personal doubts. Basically Popper thinks Thibs was great and is wondering why anyone would change anything that was (in his opinion) working so well.
A couple of noteworthy sections:
– Brown wants KAT to run to the corner when he’s a PF, and Popper thinks KAT isn’t that kinda guy. He thinks last year was the best year of KAT’s whole career (lol) and expresses his belief that a coach’s job is to maximize his two best players, not the team.
– he makes a decent point about Mitch: if he’s going to be in and out of the lineup then you’re changing the starting lineup every night. That’s not good. But he doesn’t bring up the flip side: that it’s actually important to get Mitch run with the best players on the team so if you go to it in the playoffs it’s not the first time they’ve played together all season.
– he talks about Brown’s substitution patterns, which I think will be a fair criticism if they persist. But for the first ten games of the season I think it’s kinda ridiculous to kill a guy for experimenting.
IMO he comes off as a Thibs stan who doesn’t think we made the right move and thinks that a new coach should have just come in and run the same system because it was so good for so long (🙄). There’s nothing at all about any players giving off bad vibes except the stuff we all know about KAT and his role.
Z-man,
While I think teams will adjust to our new style once there’s enough tape out there on us, my hope is that it will be harder to adjust to us because there will be more to adjust to. Last season once teams figured out how to defend us, there wasn’t much else Thibs knew how to do (or was willing to do).
Also, teams last year adjusted to us WITHOUT Mitch Robinson.
mitch is such a game changer for us that I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that his health and play is the X factor on whether we can win a title or not.
Imagine defending Brunson, KAT, OG, and Mikal very well for an entire possession with all of the action Brown has put into place and forcing them into a bad shot only to have Mitch Rob grab another offensive board and give those dudes another shot at scoring.
It’s not just he’s so good at defense and rebounding. Those offensive rebounds are such morale breakers for the other team. You defend your ass off and we still score because Mitch is that good at getting the offensive rebound. If that happens 8 or 9 times in a row, I imagine it becomes really hard from a morale stand point to keep defending at a high level.
Outside of using Yabujelly (I see you, Z-Man!) at all, I’ve been really happy with this substitution patterns. A few of them didn’t work, but it’s super early and he has to find who works well with each other — it’s not like tape from last year would tell you anything give Thibs’ rigid rotations.
Would love to see a bit more of Huk in Yabu’s minutes (although Yabu has often come in as a 4, and Huk’s a 5 hard stop, so you’d need to have someone else be the 4 when Huk plays, but that’s not that tricky — KAT or OG or Hart, depending…).
“IMO he comes off as a Thibs stan who doesn’t think we made the right move and thinks that a new coach should have just come in and run the same system because it was so good for so long (🙄).”
Considering that this take is coming from the same guy who believes that there is a “cult of Thibs” around these parts, take it for what it’s worth.
And that’s not to say that there aren’t some folks out there who think that it was wrong to fire him. There are also folks who are lukewarm at best on Brown being much of an upgrade, if one at all.
But calling Popper some sort of Thibs stan is just silly.
Remarkably the only thing I heard Popper give Mike Brown any credit for was emptying the bench in blowouts.
He even discredited one of the things we were discussing here:
“We can count dribbles per possession and all these other crazy analytical stats but I think in the end you put the ball in the hands of your best player and that’s what Tom Thibodeau did.”
Not a terrible idea, but it’s not the end. It’s the beginning. And constantly treating everything like it was the end is exactly why we needed to move on.
Raven and swifty, I hear you and hope that you are right. And I’m not suggesting that other teams will be able to stop us. I am only saying that I need more evidence and won’t have enough until after a whole bunch of games to draw any firm conclusions.
Swifty, while a healthy Mitch is indeed a game-changer, I think that he’s one of those guys that teams can adjust to by paying more attention to boxing him out. Easier said than done, but if Mitch is NOT killing it on the offensive boards, then a huge part of that game-changing ability is neutralized.
On the other hand, I do like that Brown is sending more guys at the offensive glass.
On the other hand, that leaves us more vulnerable in transition.
We’ll see!
I’m sure we could find 10-game stretches last year with lots of passing. Maybe when Brunson was out, maybe at the beginning of the season before teams adjusted to us. The question is whether the unpredictability of the offense is sustainable. Given how Brown is teaching concepts and then encouraging improvisation off of those concepts, I am optimistic.
As for KAT running to a corner, I don’t think Brown realizes it will play into their hands by letting a small cover him. If he’s quick, he won’t there with the center on him, but a quicker player. So that idea isn’t so convincing…
Given he’s led the league in offensive rebounding (or been second to Adams) almost every year, and given that he’s a huge (literally) deterrent in the paint on D and also has lots of stocks… That’s quite a statement.
The “pace” stat is pretty bad, at least in terms of measuring “pace” as viewers commonly understand the term.
Opponent possessions factor heavily into the formula, so a team can get dragged down (or up) heavily by their opponents’ style of play regardless of what they do.
Things like average time on the shot clock at the time of an FGA, average half-court crossing time, passes, etc. are a much better measure of what most people mean by “pace.”
The money quote from Popper:
The obvious reason is you want a system that works well for all your players, not just two.
But more importantly what is the actual basis for suggesting it worked so well for both of them? The simp argument is going to be “they made the conference finals”. But look at “those crazy analytical stats”, as Mr Popper calls them.
The Knicks starting 5 was outscored by their opponents from January through the end of the season. That’s a huge sample. And then they were outscored by their opponents in all three rounds of the playoffs. That’s not a system that is working so well.
We all saw this offense get bogged down. We saw KAT play better against Indiana with Deuce & Wright & Landry instead of Brunson & Bridges & OG. The great system from November to January vanished, and everything fell on Brunson’s shoulders.
Why would anyone want Brown to go back to that?
Threes are up.
Drives are up.
The number of actions we run in a possession are up bc we’re not starting all of them with 14 seconds on the shot clock.
Brunson isn’t getting pounded bringing the ball up every time.
Mikal Bridges looks like a guy worth giving up 5 picks for.
OG is making me think his contract is good value.
And the argument is we should stop all this madness and go back to the system where our best players were consistently outscored for the last 4 months of the regular season and all three rounds of the playoffs.
Nah, I’m good.
You can already see how each play Brown runs has multiple options and counters to react to how the defense plays it.
If the Knicks can’t make this offense work, then the team needs to be blown up.
I disagree with Popper 100%. That was the biggest problem.
There is an enormous amount of offensive talent on this team. The problem with the offense in the second half of the season last year was that there was very little strategic player and ball movement. There were too many possessions where everyone was standing around watching Brunson dribble away the whole possession looking to create a shot for himself. Admittedly, he’s very good at that and we need that late in the clock. But there’s no way in hell that’s optimal for Brunson, let alone the team. The offense actually looked better at times when Brunson was out injured and a couple of other players (like OG) went on a tear because we were forced to move to ball to get shots. There’s no way it should even be possible that when our best player is out, other players are playing better (not just scoring more points but playing better).
I’m not saying we have it all mastered at this point, but there’s obviously been more of an effort to keep players and the ball moving and it has translated into much better results for OG and Mikal. Brown is also not afraid to go small and play 5 out with Shamet or Deuce when the matchups are right.
I’m not worried about Brunson.
Towns has been less than 100%.
I’m not worried about the offense at all.
It’s the defense that could be an issue.
Beat reporters are generally not very good analysists. It’s a different skillset. Fred Katz was the exception (as his replacement demonstrates). I put the Popper interview in that category.
Not sure this will be at all clear, but I’ll try to describe one set I really loved. There was a play with around 7:30 left in the 1Q where the Knicks in semi-transition:
Shot Clock 23: Mikal cuts from the left elbow to the right corner.
Shot Clock 20: Brunson brings ball up to slightly right of top of the arc.
Shot Clock 19: OG who started in the right corner, takes a step forward to screen Mikal’s defender as Mikal passes him on the baseline side.
Shot Clock 18: Mikal receives pass in right corner from Brunson. Mikal & OG’s defenders both lunge at Mikal. OG slips as Mikal lobs him a pass over their heads.
Shot Clock 16: OG catches the lob under hoop. Gobert meets OG there after leaving Hart. Hart begins cutting to basket.
Shot Clock 15: OG passes to cutting Hart. McDaniels leaves Brunson to meet Hart a step in from FT line.
Shot Clock 14: Hart stops, pivots, and throws pass to Brunson beyond the arc. Donte leaves Mikal to run at Brunson.
Shot Clock 13: Mikal receives pass in right corner and drains the 3.
That’s 5 passes in the time it would have taken us to get into a set under Thibs.
I don’t recall Thibs ever running that play in the corner with a Mikal-OG tandem who sometimes ran something similar with a wing-big combo, usually only when we played 2 non-shooting bigs.
“That’s 5 passes in the time it would have taken us to get into a set under Thibs.’
This.
I think I found it?
@tnfh,
Yeah, that’s it but unfortunately misses the nice Mikal-OG action at the start. Feels like we don’t see much run with those 2 together
The extent to which we’re involving these guys in off-ball actions feels like one of the standout differences between this season and last.
I felt like I was going a bit crazy last season watching a team of good shooters just not shoot very much, and I started to wonder if Thomas knew something I didn’t (which, to be clear, is true across a wide variety of basketball domains).
Maybe our guys were just not capable of creating the kind of looks we needed to generate to be a high-volume 3PA team. It seemed like a dubious proposition based on my isolated observations of everyone’s ball skills and mobility, but it was hard to believe we truly were just leaving points on the table.
Lotta season left to play, but turns out…yeah, good chance we were doing that.
oh man, no friday night knicks…shoot…watching spurs/rockets…
surprised to see sochan still in the rotation for the spurs, thought he was just a mascot now, incredible athleticism but crazy raw talent…pop and the spurs rode him to a bunch of top draft picks though…
interesting to see houston using thompson at the point, that sheppard pick might have been a miss for them…
Houston doesn’t really have a point guard on its roster with FVV injured. It’s an adventure.