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Knicks 132-125 Heat (Dec 21, 2025) Game Recap – ESPN
Game Thread: Knicks vs. Heat, December 21, 2025 – Posting & Toasting
Jalen Brunson does ‘what MVPs are supposed to do’ in Knicks’ win over Heat – SNY
Jalen Brunson scores 47 points to power Knicks past Heat 132-125 – SNY
Knicks 132, Heat 125: Brunson burner scorches the Heat – Posting & Toasting
Will the New York Knicks’ make any moves before the NBA trade deadline? – The New York Times
Knicks at Timberwolves Preview w/ Chris Hine of The Minnesota Star Tribune | PREGAME POD – Knicks Film School
Pod Strickland Episode 553 feat Brian Geisinger: Brunson Buzzsaw – The Strickland
Knicks Weekly: Brunson Reigns Supreme | Will Yabusele Be Traded? | Fanchise Forecast – Knicks Fan TV
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56 replies on “Knicks Morning News (2025.12.23)”
I’ve never liked the NBA scheduling 2 games in a row with the same teams playing each other , and it’s particularly dumb IMO to have the Spurs and the Thunder play tonight and then again on Christmas.
Yeah, they did that to us a couple years ago with the Bucks. Weird.
I like the approach tonight with Brunson and OG resting. Beneath the obvious strategic rest decision, there are a couple of interesting tactical wrinkles:
– KAT gets a big offensive load in his return to Minnesota, where motivation and comfort should be high.
– Kolek draws a matchup against a team without a true primary point guard, which lets him focus more on offense than survival.
ESPN Analytics has this around a coin flip. My guess is that playing tired versions of Brunson and OG wouldn’t meaningfully swing those odds, while having them fresh for Cleveland on Christmas probably matters more.
Taken together, it feels like a more deliberate, long-view approach than we’ve often seen.
https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/47398198/sources-nba-looking-new-ways-prevent-teams-tanking
League is gathering to brainstorm new anti-tanking measures.
Shams:
Every time they get together to do this it’s like watching a Monty Python skit. They dance around all the obvious answers and create new problems you can see coming a mile away.
Expected Lineup
PG Tyler Kolek
SG Josh Hart
SF Mikal Bridges
PF M. Diawara
C K. Towns
MAY NOT PLAY
F OG Anunoby Out
G J. Brunson Out
G M. McBride Out
G L. Shamet Out
F G. Yabusele Out
diawara starting again (he started against the pacers too)!!! i would have liked to have seen more yabu with real minutes but diawara is interesting too
I doubt Diawara starts. Without OG, they should probably play a double big lineup, otherwise Randle will destroy Diawara (or Hart).
Double big makes the most sense to me, unless Diawara can hit enough 3s to pull Gobert out of the paint. I do not particularly trust Diawara to hit his 3s, but might still be worth it if there’s a chance to pull Gobert out.
our mvp this season might just be peter patton who is working with mitch on free throws and with josh on 3s
Diawara hasn’t taken enough threes in games for us to be able to tell if he is good at it, but he has shown that he doesn’t hesitate and his form isn’t awful.
I liked Diawara from the get-go and continue to like him. Clearly he’s a rookie and prone to rookie dumb shit and inconsistency, but he does a couple of things that make me want to see him more and more:
-point of attack defense: when he gets down in a crouch, spreads his arms, and moves his feet, his defensive “radius” is as good as there is in the league. He glides over screens and even when he gets caught up, he can have impact with his length as a trail defender. He’s jumpy and off-balance at times, and still has kid muscles that need to mature, but with his length and motor, there are the raw materials of a massively impactful defender there.
-extension in transition with both hands: when he gets an angle to the basket and rises, his length allows him to finish above defenders even when they have position on him. He has soft touch on banked finishes.
-Face-up shooting: The form is not broken. He doesn’t have great touch right now, but there’s cause for optimism because of the form. If Patton, our shooting guru, can work on making him more consistent, you can squint and dream on something like a Pascal Siakam type of two-way impact player.
I don’t want Brown to use him in a way that puts wins at risk, but there’s enough there on the defensive end for him to be impactful even without scoring if he’s on the court with the right players around him, similar to Kolek in that regard. It will be interesting to see if he and Kolek can develop some chemistry out there, you would think that Mo can be a strong slashing lob target with his length and hands. I hope we continue to see him in short stints, primarily to reduce OG’s and Mikal’s minutes…or even out there with them in an elite length defensive package. Throw Mitch and Brunson out there and that’s a lot of defensive length to have behind Brunson.
This reminds me of a thing I haven’t paid much attention to: how has Kolek been at throwing lobs? One of the few weaknesses in Brunson’s offensive game is that he doesn’t throw them. (Presumably, it’s one of the areas where his shortness gets in the way.) Between that and Mitch’s various injuries, it’s mostly taken the lob threat out of our arsenal. Has Kolek been throwing more when he’s on the court?
Alan, he’s had a few but I don’t think he’s been standing out in that regard yet. However, the ability is there, and he’s still in the process of establishing the kind chemistry with the bigs that lobs take. He looks more comfortable lately, but I think he is still in “don’t fuck up too much” mode and doesn’t want to make “loud” mistakes that sometimes happen on mistimed lobs.
It feels like I have seen a few more lobs from Brunson lately, but that might just be wishful thinking.
One more thing, it is pretty telling that Diawara has blown by Dadiet in the pecking order. Pacome seems to be regressing, he looked awful in yesterday’s G-League showcase game. I don’t see anything close to an NBA-ready player. The stroke looks pretty good but the ball doesn’t go in nearly enough. He doesn’t seem as floppy as Kevin Knox, but isn’t really separating himself from that level of draft bust as of yet. Specifically, he’s got that same deer in the headlights look.
Most nominal anti-tanking measures adopted thus far have more so changed which teams are most incentivized to tank, rather than chipped away at the incentive to tank. Everything from the original implementation of the lottery to the flattened odds has made tanking more enticing to teams that aren’t true bottom feeders.
We’ll see what they come up with, but these proposals seem similar. Limiting pick protection may stop some teams from trying to keep, say, a top-10 protected pick…but could also incentivize teams to tank extra hard to try to keep a top-4 protected pick. Locking in the standings before March may just start tanking season earlier. I’m not sure how much tanking banking back-to-back top-4 picks would prevent since teams could just get back at it in the third year, but in any event it would also create an enticing tanking opportunity for different teams (assuming it would just boost the lottery odds of the teams not excluded).
Ultimately, I don’t think we’ll see anything more than marginal changes until the league does something it’s never been able to do at scale: incentivize teams with no chance at a championship to win.
To be sure, there are teams that for a variety of reasons, some more rational than others, place some value on winning even if they’re not contending. But there will always be a critical mass that recognizes it’s usually better to win 25 games than 35, and the problem flows from there.
I like Frank’s (knickerblogger poster, not 8th man for Olympiacos) proposal of having a mystery point in the season at which point wins, not losses, are what accrue better lottery odds. Every system will have some unfairness built in somewhere, but that one seems to accomplish the “reward bad teams who are earnestly trying to get better” goal better than most I’ve seen.
I also like Frank’s idea.
The clear and obvious thing Silver can do to address the problem is punish teams that tank.
Dallas got fined $750k for the shenanigans they pulled to keep their protected pick a couple years back. If there was enough evidence to issue a punishment, it should have been a real one, like forfeiture.
“It feels like I have seen a few more lobs from Brunson lately”
Eye test, but the last few games, definitely (maybe). I’ve been mostly internally decrying the lack of lobs all season, and I’ve been pleasantly surprised to see a bunch of them of late.
I would go for the draft wheel and stop rewarding bad teams. The cap rules now are stringent enough to make the league leveled, so teams go through win-now and rebuild phases anyway. And it sucks to cry for that random win in December because some scrub was trying hard and the reward was a worse draft pick in the end.
Athletic story on what’s gone wrong with the Cavs: https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6912871/2025/12/23/cavaliers-atkinson-roster-trade-deadline-news/?source=athletic_thebounce_newsletter&campaign=16168257&userId=137051
Includes this note:
I get the logic behind this, and I agree with the goal. I’m just not sure the incentives line up the way we’d want them to.
A system like this would seem to benefit a mediocre team like the Bulls more than a truly bad team that’s trying to build something from the ground up. A team that’s hovering around .500 all year is better positioned to rack up wins regardless of when the mystery date falls.
On the flip side, if I’m a team like Milwaukee this season, I can already see how to game this. Even without knowing the mystery date, there’s an incentive to slow-play Giannis, stay out of the playoff race, then bring him back late in the season and pile up wins once the odds have flipped.
I’m not sure this is entirely true (at the end of the day a lot would depend on when the cutoff was), but here’s a provocative idea: shouldn’t we want to reward teams like the Bulls?
The reason everyone correctly clowns on the Bulls is precisely because they scratch and claw for marginal wins instead of tanking. I think there would be much more watchable basketball if every bad team was similarly stupid, but alas, there’s an obvious collective action problem wherein bad teams ain’t gonna sacrifice their own long-term positioning for that purpose.
The Bulls are a bad team that tries to get better. The problem is under the current incentive structure, that’s usually stupid. IMO, that’s the incentive structure we want to change.
I think those are great points, and I used to make them myself when we were a 35 win team scratching and clawing for every marginal win. But I was (and you are) arguing against the foundational idea of the draft: that it’s there to help the teams at the bottom. Now we’re not just fixing tanking, this is a sea change. I’m here for it, but the league definitely isn’t.
On tanking, to paraphrase James Carville, “it’s the punishment, stupid.” The league has shown before that when it really wants a behavior to stop, it knows how to design enforcement that changes incentives quickly. The Joe Smith case basically ended cap circumvention, and suspending the ’97 Knicks ended the whole “leaving the bench” era overnight.
Cuban should have lost his pick and about 5 more when he sat a healthy Luka Doncic. No one would have ever done it again.
I like Frank’s (knickerblogger poster, not 8th man for Olympiacos) proposal of having a mystery point in the season at which point wins, not losses, are what accrue better lottery odds.
this general idea has been known in nba circles as the gold plan since a guy named adam gold presented a version of it at sloan 10 or 15 years ago. his original version didn’t use a mystery point, but rather allowed teams to accumulate draft odds by winning games only once they were mathematically eliminated from the playoffs. the pwhl actually instituted a version of his plan a year or two ago and i think he maybe have even consulted on it.
i don’t know what frank meant by “mystery point.” you could imagine a prospective randomization (computer picks a constrained future date at the all-star break and every team knows they will be eligible to accumulate draft wins after that date), one that is real-time (computer doesn’t reveal until the actual date hits) or a retrospective date (computer doesn’t reveal until AFTER the season). these all have different trade offs. my best guess is that the randomization itself probably costs more than it adds but maybe i haven’t thought it through.
Kolek hasn’t had too many alley oops, but I think does a very good job getting the ball inside with dump off passes, hitting cutters, and especially slipping pocket passes to rollers for a free lane to the rim.
More generally he makes great reads out of the PnR, seeing the whole floor and hitting shooters as soon as they’re open.
He has great chemistry with Mikal sending leading passes for Mikal to immediately flow into his jumper off of movement and finding him on cuts to the basket.
He’s maybe better than Brunson at running a fast break and manipulating a defense with an extra dribble or two on drives to get defenders another step away from a shooter.
Idk, maybe I’ve been watching too much score first Brunson PGing, but Kolek just seems really damn good at the PGing part of PGing.
I’m starting to lean more towards assigning all lotto picks randomly to the teams not in the playoffs.
If the bottom feeder wants to get better, they can go out and throw money at FAs even if they overspend for a mediocre team. I’d rather see a lot of games where a mediocre team can give some fight than have every other game be a joke.
It would also mean that fewer talented players would get squeezed on salary because Washington prefers to sign 15 young g-leaguers in the hopes one will break out and in fear that the vet adds marginal wins.
I would like to see a duel strategy that gives both preferred draft picks and cap relief to teams outside the playoffs.
-weigh the lottery a bit more towards teams that make the play-in, just enough to promote winning in the regular season but not enough to encourage teams to lose. Maybe give those 8 teams a 5% chance each of winning the lottery, for a total of 40%. This would leave the remaining 10 teams with a 60% chance of winning the lottery. Give the best 5 of those a 7% chance and the worst 5 of those a 5% chance. Seeding for all teams can be from 1-16.
-The teams who finish 11-16 in the lottery should get some sort of significant salary cap relief. Something like an amnesty, or exemption from luxury tax, or no trade restrictions at all up to the second apron. This will make these teams preferred trade and free agent destinations, meaning that they could turn things around without having to wait for a superstar in the draft.
I would also consider abolishing the trading of first round picks altogether, including swap rights. Make it so that no player can be traded until a year after they are drafted. This would remove much of the “gambling” that teams do, and would eliminate the prospect of teams going “all-in” at the possible expense of a decade with no way to rebuild.
These are all half-baked ideas, but the point is that it isn’t good for the NBA for any of its teams to be stuck with no draft picks and no cap maneuverability for a long period of time.
After the lottery is held, give the lowest seed
You could also give the teams in the play-in a guaranteed uptick in their final lottery position, say, they are guaranteed spots 7-14 no matter how the lottery goes, whereas tanking teams risk falling all the way to #18.
How about dividing the lottery teams to 2 groups, 1-7 (the worst teams) and 8-14 (the fighters). Pick 1 goes randomly to the a team from the worst group, and pick 2 randomly to a team from the fighters. Pick 3 to the worst and pick 4 to the fighters, and etc. for all the 14 lottery teams.
This way the worst teams still get the better picks, but the fighters aren’t being suckers.
He can correct me if I’m wrong, but I think he envisioned the league setting a basically random date (within certain bounds as to ensure the period isn’t too short) sometime in the second half at which point wins would be more beneficial, and not revealing it until after the season (you could combine the date reveal with the lottery itself for some additional pomp and circumstance).
Teams would still have some certainties–losing is still more beneficial at the beginning of the season before the switch is allowed to happen, and by the very end winning is definitely more beneficial.
But you can only game that so much, definitely less than you can game the current system. It also seems much harder to coordinate a Rube Goldberg machine tanking strategy wherein you try to lose games to start the season, but then try to get much better later on.
Ultimately like you said all systems have their tradeoffs, and this one seems a little rough on teams that are just genuinely terrible without trying to tank. But those teams would still rack up a lot of lottery equity early, and given the randomness of the lottery itself the disadvantage would often be marginal. They also would be much less deterred by what we can call The Courtney Lee Dilemma, wherein under the current system it makes literally no sense at all for a non-contender to try to improve their team by signing a middling veteran to an FMV deal.
watching nba today, they’re going over the green/kerr thing (they got in an argument during a time-out, turnovers maybe?)…
they showed this graphic hat says Drayton has had both more personal fouls and turnovers than he has made baskets…
– 72 fg
– 75 to
– 80 pf
just taking a moment to enjoy that fact…
most important thing there though, the dubs hanging an L on the magic…
drayton sounds like draymond green and deandre ayton had a baby
No other league with a draft has to do all this.
Say what you want about the Giants and Raiders but they’re both trying to win this weekend.
This happens in the NBA because it’s accepted in the NBA. Fix the front office culture. Everything else is window dressing.
The problem with the NBA is there is no replacing a star player in the aggregate. You either have the stars or you don’t. The best (and for some teams only) way to get a star is through a high draft pick.
In the NFL, if you miss drafting a star QB, you can assemble a strong offensive line and/or defense.
You can’t compare football and basketball season and it’s rather silly to. You also have 53 players on a football team. It’s completely different.
If teams were only tanking for Wemby, EB, I’d agree. But Mark Cuban tanked shamelessly for Derrick Lively. A QB has a lot more impact on an NFL team than a part-time rim-running C.
too funny doogie 😊
posted and got immediately distracted by, I don’t remember…
squirrel…
yeah okay, the tanking talk is kind of depressing…been happening, will continue to happen…
and yes, seems like there are waaay too many teams that don’t seem to care about putting a solid product together for their fanbase…and the other fanbases who watch also…
they showed this graphic hat says Drayton has had both more personal fouls and turnovers than he has made baskets…
– 72 fg
– 75 to
– 80 pf
just taking a moment to enjoy that fact…
michael ruffin, the author of the greatest turnover in nba history, actually pulled this off for his entire career.
https://www.reddit.com/r/nba/comments/wbbd41/highlight_michael_ruffin_tossed_the_ball_to_run/
Very little of this tanking stuff bothers me. Most bad teams are bad because the management sucks. They wind up drafting poorly anyway and staying bad for extended periods until they get lucky or get better management.
The exception is when a good team has injuries, is having a bad year because of them and then tanks late in the season. That results in a good team getting a good draft pick which defeats the idea of trying to create balance. I’m not sure how that can be addressed, but it’s a clear issue.
The other problem is dumb teams trading away too much draft value to smart teams. Then you can wind up with very good teams also being overloaded with draft assets and bad teams that are empty.
Maybe something has to be done about picks that are traded where a traded pick doesn’t retain full value if a bad team traded it to a good team.
They should get rid of all pick protections, it never should have been a thing in the first place.
Like the Pacers. Hell they didn’t even wait for late in the year.
Use multi-year standings to determine lottery order.
Westchester is so bad I’m not sure we can clean any meaningful information from our prospects down there.
Westchester is collectively shooting 27.4% from 3 and averages 2 more TOs than assists per game. I don’t know how anyone can show their strengths in that environment.
To be fair to my beloved Pacers, Mathurin has been their only top 10 pick since the 1980s.
but they acquired other players like obi who were and drafted other players like hali who should have been
That has nothing to do with tanking, that’s the entire point
This from a guy whose handle is Xavierjdesigns:
Thibs’ ideas were not always borne out by reality …
They drafted Jarace Walker 2 years ago… more recently than Mathurin, which I’m sure you as a diehard fan know
oh yeah walker is eminently forgettable but he was indeed 8 overall just like toppin and is still playing (mostly badly) for the team
going double big as suggested by many:
Confirmed Lineup
PG Tyler Kolek
SG Josh Hart
SF Mikal Bridges
PF K. Towns
C M. Robinson
MAY NOT PLAY
F OG Anunoby Out
G J. Brunson Out
G M. McBride Out
G L. Shamet Out
F G. Yabusele Out
watching some of the Nets-Sixers game and Maxey has 1 point 5 minutes from halftime. I can’t tell if the Nets are starting to play a bit better or if the Sixers are just in a terrible funk tonight
no game thread yet thats ok
Kolek Kolek!!!
Re: Is Kolek Good at Lobs?
No.
The Wolves should be ashamed of themselves if they lose this game tonight.
Conley probably views Kolek as a great opportunity to prove he isn’t washed
They can’t guard Ant.
Thread is up