News & Blogs
Jose Alvarado immediately impacts Knicks in debut win over Celtics – SNY
Brunson, Towns, and Houston to appear in Kia Shooting Stars competition – Posting & Toasting
NBA All-Star Weekend: Top 10 Knicks moments of all-time – Newsday
Guerschon Yabusele on amending Knicks contract to facilitate Bulls trade: ‘The passion is more than just the money’ – SNY
The Knicks are deeper than they were last year, but it’s deceiving – Posting & Toasting
The Knicks Win Another Championship! – Knicks Fan TV
Jose Alvarado Makes NBA History In 3rd Knicks Game! – Knick of Time
YT News
39 replies on “Knicks Morning News (2026.02.15)”
He has my respect for prioritizing playing time and being happy than just the money. And i wish him well. OAKAAK!
I’m with you, Cyber. One of my favorite NBA quotes was by Tony Kukoc during contract negotiations with the Bulls: “I’m already rich”. I wonder though if Yabu isn’t betting on getting another contract if he plays well the rest of the way this season. Respect either way.
He could have played here more if he was better but it wasn’t a fit for either party.
The value of incremental dollars shrinks for most people once they get past a certain point. I don’t know Yabu’s net worth or long term goals, but I don’t think I would have made the same decision as him yet. I think one more year of that salary might come in handy someday if this basketball things doesn’t work out even if he has some deals available overseas.
He’s earned $16.15M in his career. After taxes it’s not enough to be considered rich in our times, but he’s probably doing OK.
The craziest thing about Silver’s statement is he seemed to be acting as if people should be impressed by his action against the Jazz and Pacers:
Oh, they noticed, Adam. Everyone saw your ineffectual slap on the wrist.
At the same time, everyone also how effective you can be when you think something actually is a problem:
Two teams (including Utah, a repeat offender) who make $800 million were fined $600,000.
One single player (Isaiah Stewart) who makes $15 million was fined more than that for leaving the bench.
We noticed, Adam. You think players leaving the bench is unacceptable and you have an effective zero-tolerance policy to make sure it doesn’t happen. You also think tanking is perfectly acceptable and for a decade have refused to use the options you have at your disposal to create a similar policy that would eradicate it.
All of which would be fine if you owned it, but for the love of god don’t piss on our back and tell us it’s raining.
Respect? Respect is only valid when earned.
A professional athlete has virtually only two responsibilities to arrive to his team in reasonable physical condition and to compete professionally.
This guy did neither and despite numerous attempts to gift him unearned playing time he failed miserably. Failing is common, not competing is inexcusable.
I think I’m gonna like Sochan, he has a goofy earnestness about him that is very endearing.
I am bringing this post from a couple of days ago just to comment that the proposed wheels usually are more or less fair every 5 or 6 years. That is to say, in 6 years you have picked once between 1-5, once between 6-10, once between 11-15, once between 16-20, once between 21-25 and once between 26-30. So the experiment does not have to be that long.
Even it could be possible to do a wheel of six years, and that you have a lottery for deciding which position in the bracket the teams pick every year.
There’s some unintended consequences there, iserp. Like no one’s going to want to trade for future picks if the wheel says it’s 4th but if you scrap the wheel it could be 30th. And how are you going to have a fair process to determine if the experiment continues? Everyone picking in the top 5 the next couple of years will vote based on their own self interest.
You might not have to commit 30 years but the wheel seems like something you have to marry, not date.
Happily aligned with Hubie on his tanking takes, past and future (assuming Lent doesn’t sacrifice his acumen afterwards). Sortta feel the betting companies are driving this, given the complete absence of Rozier/ Billups convo.
lol my acumen was noticeably sharper last year when I gave up basketball (not just kb, I gave up the podcasts, the articles, everything), to the point I’m surprised I came back. I was like Costanza when he gave up sex. So if you don’t hear from me again and you read about a random 48 year old on the Yankees spring training roster who came out of nowhere, do the math! (It’s just velocity in relation to trajectory with gravity as constant.)
It’s a stimulating challenge to devise ways to eliminate tanking…I am in favor of abolishing the draft altogether, but that isn’t going to happen any time soon, so whatever.
But the more relevant question is: What will Adam Silver do, or more precisely, be allowed to do?
The question is especially interesting right now because, as was pointed out by DJ Zullo on KFS, literally a third of the league is tanking in one form or another right now. That’s obviously intolerable, yet there is little Silver can do about it with the system currently in place. It’s also fascinating how the combination of aprons, odds-flattening, and pick protections after trades has really put gasoline on the fire.
I think the conversation has to shift back to the reason for the draft, and more specifically, for the lottery in the first place. And of course, that reason is foster competitive balance by giving small market teams a chance to land generational stars, given the structural disadvantages of being a small-market team. It’s the same reason for the existence of a salary cap structure.
What Silver (meaning the governors, and I guess the NBPA) have to realize is that you don’t really need a draft to accomplish this. You can do it 100% through salary cap manipulation, and give bad teams advantages in roster-building in terms of cap space, including in trades and in free agency. The amnesty provision has been tested, and maybe making more targeted use of it could help teams turn over more quickly without having to hope to get lucky after tanking.
Eliminating the draft would also prevent teams from selling their souls in win-now situations. Having draft picks count as trade currency only exacerbates the tanking problem.
The acquisition of both Alvarado and Sochan should make a very significant difference in our prospects. Both are dynamic, edgy, energy players.
I’m wondering if Brown will start giving Sochan some of Diawara’s minutes. I love me some Mo, but he’s probably not ready for prime time and the playoffs are creeping up on us. Seems like he needs to find out what he has in Sochan while there’s still time. I mean, why sign him just to bench him?
“Seems like he needs to find out what he has…”
Ok taking oppositely out of context (never happened before) but posit Mo as the subject…Let Mo develop until he hits a clear wall, which he will. Take it from there into the playoffs
BE, sure, so long as you work Sochan in with different lineups to see what he can do to help come playoff time.
Jordan Clarkson is currently averaging almost 19 minutes per game. Just sayin’.
I didn’t bother to learn anything about the format and didn’t even go out of my way to watch, but so far so better-than-I-thought a far as the all-star game goes. Low bar, but the first game had some nominal defense and the second one is off to a similarly cromulent start.
I think Sochan’s minutes will mostly come at the expense of Hukporti in lineups with KAT at center. Diawara having to be guarded from the corners makes him hard to replace in a one-to-one sense with Sochan, though if Sochan looks good enough at other things anything is possible.
The defensive possibilities of lineups with Diawara and Sochan are intriguing if we can figure out how to put points on the board.
I agree that Diawara shooting over 90% from the corner is tantalizing, but assuming that comes back down to earth, the reality is that he’s making a million little rookie mistakes out there, especially on defense.
I see Sochan and Diawara as very interchangeable. Sochan is more polished in an all-around glue guy sense, while Diawara is longer and shoots straighter but is still very raw and we’re only 63 attempts into his 3pt career, which is a long way from concluding that the shot is for real (see: Landry Fields, who shot lights our his rookie year only to be unplayable in the playoffs.) This is not the year where you want to rely on a rookie maintaining his regular season play in the playoff cauldron. If nothing else, let’s see how he responds to the pressure of Sochan being a threat to his minutes.
The interns in KB headquarters don’t seem too interested but I enjoyed that last game quite a bit
This round robin bullshit? I’m not Catholic, but I might take up lent just to stay away from these pointless all-star products.
KAT has hit more 3s in these games than he has all season. Not checking the numbers on that, feels true.
All Star KAT second best player in league
Idk I’m kind of enjoying this version of the all star game. They’re playing a modicum of defense and seem to be really into the competition.
Kawhi is taking it seriously
Looks unreal
What a performance from Kawhi.
I like the format
Kawhi is use to these rims that’s for sure
I wonder if the Knicks would go after Kawhi in the offseason
I’m fairly sure everyone knows precisely what Sochan is about from his 5300+ minutes most of it coached by the best coach in the business.
He is a wing who can handle the ball, stay in front of big guards and cannot shoot a bloody ounce outside of 3 feet.
Putting him on the floor will collapse the defense because there is no need to cover him. We saw what happened to Brunson’s ability to sniff the lane vs Detroit when KAT wasn’t spreading the floor, now imagine Mitch and Sochan on the floor at the same time.
He might have some utility guarding Cunningham heads up for a few moments or key possessions, but I don’t see how the Knick’s offense can function with him on the floor.
“I’m fairly sure everyone knows precisely what Sochan is about from his 5300+ minutes most of it coached by the best coach in the business.”
Jeremy Sochan is 22 years old. No one knows when a player will stop developing, but saying that everyone knows precisely what he is strikes me as silly. He is more than two years younger than either Kolek or McCullar, and a year younger than Hukporti.
The best coach in the business had the wonderful idea of playing him at PG, which for some reason didn’t work out…go figure! He’s actually been jerked around quite a bit, as Mitch Johnson wasn’t able to find a role for him and played him at C quite a bit, which is not as bad of an idea as playing him at PG but far from ideal.
“He is a wing who can handle the ball, stay in front of big guards and cannot shoot a bloody ounce outside of 3 feet.”
He can also rebound (8 rebounds per 36 for his career) and is pretty switchable. He is quite comparable to Ryan Dunn, who is playing 20mpg for a pretty good PHX team. And around the rim he’s actually a pretty good finisher…he shot almost 60% from 2 the last 2 years at pretty decent volume. There are others who can’t shoot a lick that are pretty good rotation players…Ausar Thompson seems pretty good. So does Dyson Daniels. (all three of these guys are slightly older than Sochan)
Obviously Sochan is not as good as Ausar or Dyson, but thankfully we aren’t depending on him to fill a void in the rotation, at least for now, but I like the move a lot, and think it’s worth messing around with him in different lineups to see what he can bring in short bursts. Especially when the main alternative in his role is a 20yo rookie with 318 minutes under his belt.
Mitch Johnson coudn’t figure out how to use him because he clogs the floor for Fox same as he will for Brunson.
Watched a few videos on him today and he’s an OG, Thompson, Reid, Jones, Johnson and Dort level wing defender who makes one less three every two games than OG does.
Kid is 22yrs old. Pop loved him. Picked him in the lottery and let him learn. His shot is not broken. I have to believe that he can get up to 35% with peoper coaching and flirt with league average.
My insticts say that OG will likely be out another 2-3 weeks and Sochan will play alot until he comes back, catch DNPs after but will be used sporadically to guard Cade or Tatum in the playoffs. Love Hart and Shamet but they can’t guard neither. Even Jaylen Brown lights them up 1v1.
I think that’s overstating the role KAT played in that specific outcome. The Knicks scored 88 in the Detroit game without him, but they also scored only 90 against the same team a few weeks earlier when he did play. That suggests the issue wasn’t simply his floor spacing. Detroit was able to bog down the offense regardless, which points more to overall execution, matchup dynamics, and motivation than the presence or absence of one spacer.
He can guard wings but he’s a big, not a wing. He’ll play the 4 and 5 here, not the 2 or 3.
My sense is that he just had better players to use. They just took Carter Bryant with the 14th pick and he has tantalizing potential.
Releasing him seemed like one of those moves where an organization decided to do right by a player.
Hart has shot 32% or worse several times in his career, including 30% last year. This year he is at over 40%. Silly to write off a young guy just because he played in San Antonio
No sense of arguing the semantics of whether Sochan is a wing or a big. He does a lot of “wingy” things regardless of whether he’s playing the 4 or 5. This is especially true on the defensive end, where he is essentially OG Anunoby, i.e. can guard 1 through 5. Here’s a video that focuses on his defensive ability. If one thinks he is a “big” after watching that, whatever. He is what he is.
Nice video, Z-Man. I’m already taking the L on Sochan (started by being dismissive). Anyone who can play elite defense can play on my team.
Thanks Raven, here’s a pre-deadline discussion between Sam Vecenie and Bryce Simon focusing on Sochan as a trade target. Vecenie said his vision for Sochan was this generation’s Aaron Gordon…of course, that ship has probably already sailed for Sochan but the point is that if he can just approach league average as a spot-up 3pt shooter, he becomes a much more valuable player. They point out that SAS has a bunch of non-shooters…they are 27th in the NBA in 3PT% (34.7%) none of Fox, Castle, or Harper shoot it particularly well…and they have a reasonable facsimile of Sochan in rookie Carter Bryant so why spend money extending Sochan when you have Bryant locked up on the cheap?
Here is their reaction after the move.
Point taken (OG was also out that game) but without serious spacing and a dual threat from KAT the lane was a complete “no go zone” for B runson that night. He didn’t play well (4 for 20) and Detroit shot it out of their asses, but the entire Knick’s offense is predicated on spacing and brunson driving those creases and dishing when he gets the defense moving.
Call him Rumplestilskin if you please, but as a 4 he’s a weak rebounder and as a 5 he’s a poor rim defender. He is a pretty good wing defender. But he is a zero on the offensive end, and hence he was cut.
I have no problem taking a flyer on the guy, but realize his shooting will have to make a quantum leap to be meaningfully playable. Let’s just say the career arc of his 3 point shooting is about as impressive as Mitch’s free throw shooting. Where there is life, there is hope.
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