Knicks Morning News (2026.01.27)

I don’t subscribe, but the beginning of Macri’s newsletter had this:

I went to Cleaning the Glass and filtered for lineups with Jalen Brunson and without any of New York’s poor defenders and/or young players (who are generally inconsistent defensively). That ruled out KAT, Clarkson, Yabu, and all of the first or second year players and two-way guys with the exception of Tyler Kolek, who I deemed a plus defender this season for this exercise.

That left us with 352 possessions – not a huge sample size but not statistically irrelevant either – and the results were as follows:

+23.8 net rating (100th percentile league-wide)

132.7 offensive rating (100th percentile)

108.8 defensive rating (91st percentile)

Getting into the details, these lineups are making shots at a prolific rate (59.7 eFG%), grabbing their own misses like crazy (39.5 OREB rate), forcing a ton of turnovers (17.4 TOV rate) and are causing a lot of misses (49.7 opp eFG%).

It feels like a good argument that almost any trade of KAT is addition by subtraction…

But it also feels like we can’t afford to ditch other core players to get rid of him. Though I don’t know what else Macri might have said about other lineups.