Knicks Morning News (2026.01.13)

May I suggest you include more input on body language, facial expressions, a player’s response to what his direct competitor did, mano y mano play and how teammates react, ball domination and bad shot decisions etc… in your repertoire.

And when I say a problem, I don’t mean a negative. I mean he’s doing things that are NOT maximizing the team. He doing things that maximizing his stats. There’s potential for more that will accrue to others if HE makes changes.

as my 9-year old would say, boy went to the zoo and thinks he’s jane goodall. these things you’re pointing to aren’t unstated because math or because they take so much observational talent to unearth, but because they’re obvious. or, in your case, overwrought versions of the obvious.

i get the sense that you think these highly conspicuous dynamics — jalen sometimes overdoing the hero-ball, getting caught up in duels, OG or KAT looking sad because they haven’t shot the ball in four minutes — are all that’s needed for people to sign up for your Matt Foley act and start screaming that JALEN is THE problem and he NEEDS to make changes. but almost everyone sees this stuff.

the point of departure isn’t what you see (at least based on what you write about it), but your tendency to provincially focus on a narrow slice of the massive human tapestry as if it is a singular and simplest lever to pull if only more people would yell about it. jalen finding the optimal balance between hero-balling too much and deferring too little is a balance that 95% of the best scorers in the league struggle with. optimizing this balance is much harder than it looks and all but a few historic high usage scorers players struggle with it their entire careers. many, many great scorers have dimly vacillated between overuse tendencies and excessively deferring without ever making major net strides. you can’t just tony robbins it into optimality, any more than you can do so for the zillion other extremely important HUMAN things that could be levers for basketball improvement.

i suspect your laser-focus on heliocentric departures from a panglossian version of the ideal offense has led you to be so cocksure you see what other don’t, that you don’t really interrogate both the difficulty of making the changes you’d prefer and the many other human foibles that you are less practiced at observing. and that is the point of sometimes talking in the big picture (yes, using numbers), because the schoolmarmish desire to simply demand change to one particular degree of freedom is parochial and uninteresting.

you need to challenge the accessibility of the counterfactuals you’re wishcasting instead of accusing other people of being boxscore sluts. telling homeric stories is more fun and sounds more “real” to a lot of ears but is so often just the result of someone swimming in lazy overconfidence, saying the obvious while screaming eureka.