As an interesting side bar, I listened to a long form interview with Pat Riley

This is very intriguing…can you please share link?

https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6930954/2026/01/01/nba-season-2025-2026-disappointments/

Guerschon Yabusele

Remember when the New York Knicks got a deal because Yabusele took a slight haircut on his taxpayer midlevel exception contract to keep New York below the second apron? Welp.

He was one of the best stories of 2024-25, parlaying his stellar play for the French national team into a key role on the Sixers, but his New York experience has been less magnifique. Yabusele has been exiled to the basketball Elba that is the end of Mike Brown’s bench after 27 ineffective games with the Knickerbockers, even as deep-bench guys like Kevin McCullar and Mohamed Diawara get chances to shine during Josh Hart’s injury absence.

Yabusele has struggled to make an impact at either end, sporting an 8.7 PER and shooting a modest 34 percent from 3 — where most of his attempts come from. In fact, the biggest difference between this season and his last one in Philly is that he’s made almost no impact whatsoever inside the arc; on a per-possession basis, he has half as many 2-point baskets and free throws as he did a season ago.

He stepped on the scale his first day of practice at 383 pounds. He said he was down to 320 by the end of his first season.

He also mentioned the best brawl he witnessed was between Xavier Mc Daniel and Anthony Mason the first day of practice after X arrived. He said it happened during the first possession of practice and it was a real heavyweight battle that lasted a few minutes til they could break them up. He said both guys had zero issues after their throw down.

Also that 91-92 team had 7 guys play all 82 games and that slackard Mark Jackson played only 81 for the 8th man.

im a little surprised that no is posting here about how ferocious the spurs defense was against us we were rarely open and they made passing very difficult

I agree the spurs defense was good. I couldn’t watch all the game, but in the part I saw, the Spurs players were always in position and making our offense difficult. Even so, we still scored well and I thought that was a tribute to our offense and to our persistence and aggression.

yeah i dissent. i don’t think he has ever been near 90th percentile in a measure that reasonably attempts tell the full story of rim protection and its counterfactuals. most (eg dfga %) are really poor proxies by themselves. i think kat is a well below average rim protector partly mitigated by being an above average switch defender (for a 5) and an above average defensive rebounder. this makes him looks somewhat worse on defense than he is because shitty rim protection from a 5 jumps off the page. but i think that’s the best thing you can say about kat: he’s not as harmful a defensive 5 as his subpar rim protection would suggest.

This is why Deuce is so important to this team as our best point of attack defender (and really, the only excellent one in our lineup.)

Kolek is also very good at the point of attack.

per Hot Hand Theory.

They had a great line the other day (I’m paraphrasing): “it feels like this team under Brown is working on finding all the answers, whereas in past years under Thibs they weren’t even interested in asking the questions.”

They also cited the following stat: OG, Hart, and Bridges have played 40 mins or more 7 times this year combined. Last year they did it 94 times!