News & Blogs
Jalen Brunson has exceeded expectations at every level. Five words explain why – The New York Times
Recently waived Jonas Valanciunas among centers on Knicks’ radar – SNY
Knicks Domino Effects: What if De’Aaron Fox didn’t foul Jaden Ivey? – Posting & Toasting
NBA Power Rankings: LeBron James vaults 76ers into top five; Spurs have early edge over Knicks – CBS Sports
Karl-Anthony Towns and the burden of being picked first – Posting & Toasting
Jordan Clarkson re-signing with Knicks on one-year deal – SNY
Top 5 Trades In Knicks History – Do KAT, Anunoby, Bridges, Hart make the list?! | KFS OFFSEASON – Knicks Film School
YT News
64 replies on “Knicks Morning News (2026.07.30)”
“are there examples of second-generation sports superstars whose dad were at least stars, even if the sons surpassed them?”
If we replace “sons” with “children” it could be argued that Laila Ali had a better career than her father. And if we don’t confine it to the same sport, tennis Grand Slam winner Petr Korda and golfing daughter Nelly.
Yeah, Trinity Rodman in that camp too
Ron Harper was a very good player for many years, I’m surprised he didn’t get on even one all star game. Dylan looks like he will.
Did Pablo Torres just release new comments on Kawhi? There were some comments at the end of yesterday’s thread
Yannick (French Open, HOF) and Joakim Noah deserve and honorable mention… I don’t see Domantis Sabonis getting to the Hall, but Pops is there… Archie Manning was a star.
Grant and Calvin Hill
I took a look at Hunter Dickinson’s draft profile. He’s sort of an old school behemoth type C who has some skills and a highish B-ball IQ, but has very limited athleticism. He’s currently on a 2-way with the Pels. 7’1″, 255lbs.
In his G-league stint last year, his per 36 numbers were 20.7 pts, 12.5 rebs (3.6 offensive), 3.8 assists, 2.8 tovs, 1.0 blocks, 1.2 steals, .656 TS% on a 22.8% usage, and an impressive 39% on 3’s (50-128).
He is not very mobile and would have trouble guarding in space, but there does seem to be something there if he can pick it up a bit on D.
Okay, so let’s keep a running list of guys who were stars (if not necessarily the best in their sport) whose sons were also stars (if not better than the old man):
Bobby and Barry Bonds
the Kens Griffey
Archie, Peyton, and Eli Manning
Cecil and Prince Fielder
Do any of the other dads mentioned yesterday or today qualify? I don’t know enough about Jellybean Bryant (and forgot he even existed when I did the first post on this) to be able to say about him, or Calvin Hill, or some of the others.
The Guerrero’s
The Bichettes’s
The Alomar’s
The Alou’s
Ronald Acuña Sr. and Jr., along with Luisangel Acuña. Sr. never made the majors, but his two sons did.
Geez, Z-Man. I blanked on all of those.
Sabonis
Arvydas was clearly better than his son.
Remember, the original discussion was about Rick and Jalen, and how it seems like when second-generation athletes turn out to be superstars, their dads were usually journeymen.
If baseball’s standards for the HOF were as low as basketball’s it seems Sandy Alomar would be in… I was surprised to see that Cecil Fielder only made 3 ASG’s
I’m in the middle of watching one of the best analytical compilations from the finals I’ve seen yet, not sure if it’s been posted before. Enjoy!
PS when I click the link it weirdly starts in the middle of the video, you need to scroll it back to the beginning. Really, really good!!
OAKOAK Ernie and Kiki Vandeweghe ( IIRC Z-Man posted this already) Kikis cousin is Coco former tennis pro.
Save the date- Marcus King plays Summer stage in Central Park on Sept 2nd.
Patrick’s son had a cup of coffee…
Ewing Jr.: 19 total regular season NBA minutes
Cody Bellinger better than his father Clay. Boone family is three generations: Ray, Bob, Brett and Aaron
That’s the list we’re making? Oh, there’s tons of them. Curry, Klay, Kobe, Booker, Love, Jackson jr, Horford, Grant, Dunleavy jr, Danny Manning, Danny Ferry…
I thought the question became which good players had good kids.
I don’t remember the stat but a pretty high number of players have at least one parent who was a high level athlete, usually in college.
Giannis, who grew up living hand to mouth in Greece, had a father who played professional soccer and a mother who was a high jumper.
Luka’s dad was a player and a coach.
Similar story for many people
Szczerbiak too
“I thought the question became which good players had good kids.“
I thought the question was which good players had better kids …Good defined as all star/ pro bowl/top 10 (aka a star). Calvin Hill was a multiple pro bowler but Grant was relatively much better at basketball. Petr Korda briefly peaked at number 2 in tennis but Nelly has been number 1 at golf for at least a year.
Kobe spending a few years of his childhood in Italy is a clue to how good Jellybean was.
Here’s a pretty exhaustive list of father-son combos. Definitely some surprises there.
The Guerrero’s
The Bichettes’s
The Alomar’s
The Alou’s
Yes, this is it. I’m trying to figure out how rare it is where you have a Bobby/Barry Bonds situation, since anecdotally, it seems like the great majority of second-gen superstars had dads who were topped out at pretty good.
ETA: I feel like the Vlad/Vlad or Alomar or Fielder situations should count, though. The sons have to be at least All-Star level, even if it’s questionable which generation was better.
This whole conversation is really just a version of the old nature vs. nurture and regression to the mean arguments, confounded by the fact that the number of superstars is low, so your N is small, so you need a ton of time to get a big data set, but conditions change over time
I’m about to watch this, but I’m already put off by the title:
“How did the Knicks Win when the Spurs Controlled 72% of the Finals?”
Leading is not controlling.
The Spurs led for 99% of game 4, for example. But it would be silly to suggest they controlled the 2nd half when they were completely shellshocked and desperately hanging on for dear life.
The Spurs were just a dominant first quarter team. The Knicks won something like 12 of the other 15 quarters. We were the team in control most of the series. We may even have been in control during those first quarters when Wemby was consistently tiring himself out.
It actually goes on to mock that POV, and makes Wemby look really bad and KAT look really great.
(“Mock” is too strong of a word, I would say “discredit” is better.)
I love any stat that makes Manu look good
https://x.com/funakistats/status/2082861018997494074?s=46&t=0wqff4cNt-sCGcDs-uMExw
Manu’s father was probably an all-pro bullfighter
Yeah, the list is definitely tiny-to-nonexistent, given the precise criteria. For example, D Sabonis would have to become the best player of his generation to be considered better than his father, but he is still an excellent player, a 3 time all star, probably deserving of more, but gets less exposure in the NBA than if he’d played in Lithuania like pop. (It’s a lot harder for Sabonis to make an all star team than it is for the Guerreros and Bichettes).
Given that many bullfighter careers didn’t end in retirement or many had injuries not conducive to having sons, he makes my list!
Like, if Pippin’s kid made 3 all star teams, or Hardaway jr, or Payton II, or Little Big Dog, they’d all make the list, so Sabonis shouldn’t be precluded just by virtue if his dad being too good.
It’s a fun video.
I forgot that we were really kicking their ass in game 2. We had a 14 point lead in the 4Q before we randomly missed every single shot we took for 5 minutes and Tony Brothers started hitting Knicks in the back of the head with a steel chair.
One of the video’s themes is that a great deal of Wemby’s effectiveness came from avoidance. We heard so much about that Wemby U-Turn heading into the series, and OKC in particular vacated the paint throughout their series. We were the only team to go right at him. I’ll be curious to see if other teams follow suit or if we’re just the only team who can do it effectively.
So which is more stupid – Kenny Atkinson saying the Cavs beat the Knicks analytically, or former Spurs assistant coach Sean Sweeney saying if the games were 46 minutes long, the Spurs would have beaten the Knicks in 5 games?
Pretty close IMO…
I think Sweeney
Definitely Sweeney.
The Atkinson quote has valid context. He was asked what he could tell his team to make them believe they could come back from down 3-0.
Sweeney straight up refused to admit the Knicks were better. He also blamed attrition from the OKC series.
Sweeney and entire SAS organization is clearly in concert with Wemby that the Knicks were not the better team.
Similar to election deniers, we nwo have Championship deniers.
The norms have changed so much in the last 25 years…sometimes feels like I’m 150 yrs old.
That’s fine with me. If you choose to ignore how your team repeatedly fell apart during the game’s most important minutes, you’re doomed to do it again.
I know you guys are fans and not coaches so it’s not the same, but I had to endure a lot of “we’re better than the Pacers” here while i was watching them play the Thunder last year. It’s only natural for competitive people to feel that way, and winning shouldn’t need to be validated by a formal concession. Sore losers aren’t the most charming, but neither are sore winners. The knicks had the fortune of getting hot in a down year and not having to face the defending champs, but it’s not like they beat the Warriors cause Durant and Klay blew out their knees, or won in a covid-bubble. There no * next to the knicks’ title. Who cares what Wemby thinks.
Sweeney and Atkinson have a job to keep so it’s logical to try to prove that they did their best but lost due to…bad luck? … Divine intervention?… something strange not yet known to mankind?
If the games were 46 minutes long, the Spurs would have beaten the Knicks in 5 but if the rim was 2 metres higher they would have lost 4-0!
😂
Missed this yesterday: Knicks and Yankees are scrapping their association with the terrible Gotham Sports app and will be moving their streaming packages to DAZN sometime in the next year:
https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/7477587/2026/07/29/yankees-knicks-tv-streaming-dazn/
Gotham Sports was so bad last season that I didn’t even bother with it for this most recent one, so I could only watch nationally televised games. May give DAZN a shot whenever it comes into the picture. Anyone have any experience with it?
1) you may not recall that many felt Thibs coached poorly and failed to make adjustments that would have improved the outcome. The onus was on the coach. Which seems to be a reasonable theory, given this year’s results. Similarly, I expect many of us would not argue that coaching played a large part in the Spurs’ failure this year. An argument that they had a better team is reasonable – but not without accountability, which everyone in the organization seems to lack.
2) you may not recall, but this is a Knicks fan site, so with all due respect, who the fuck cares what negativity about the Pacers you “had to endure”? Appreciate your wit and most of your posts, but there’s a limit, bruh.
Sweeney made those comments as the head coach of the Orlando Magic
Just maybe the Spurs staff should have prepared their team for 48 minute games so the wouldn’t have wilted in the last minutes of every game?
How’s that for a novel thought?
“Fatigue maks cowards of us all,” has been a mantra forever in sports.
Still protecting his reputation and keeping his job instead of working as a waiter in Santorini
I don’t recall anyone thinking we were better than the Pacers in last year’s ECF. We should have won game 1, but games 2, 4, and 6 were pretty decisive, and we got lucky in game 3.
There was a strong sentiment that we could have won the series with a better coach. That’s different. And it was probably true. But the better team won that series.
We had injuries too right?
I watched a lot of games on Gotham. It was total dogshit..
I would try anything else..
That was two years ago, when we played them without Randle, OG, and Mitch. Even the Pacers know they weren’t the better team that year.
It also made me log back in every single time I wanted to watch it, on any device — including my main smart TV, where typing passwords is a huge pain in the ass.
If you (think you) have the best player in the league and you just eliminated the reigning champs while winning the Toughest Conference then it’s probably quite easy to kick the ass of a team that 10 games ago was not exactly a juggernaut…
Losing by this team 1-4 while having also the home advantage should have been more than enough to shut the fuck up and try to understand what hit you.
Coming up with the “we were better but…” shit it’s fine as an excuse to your boss but also steals your credibility away…
FWIW I don’t think Wemby played the “we were the better team” card. He mostly just stood up there dazed and confused wondering what the hell just happened.
Does anyone think it’s sus that every team in the assoc has signed at least 16 players at this point, and we’ve only signed 13?
Wemby felt dominant as he said but his ass was still smoking after 5 games!
😂
“One of many things I learned is that the margin for error is very, very thin. Our domination stints were absolute. We absolutely dominated for most of the series, but our errors, our mistakes, were punished so hard that we can’t have ups and downs like this so much, you know. The ups are okay, the downs are the reason we lost.”
Gotham would log you out for no reason yes.
It was also impossible to use any basic streaming functionality, like pausing and replay, without total borking and needing a reboot. Drove me mad and I was happy (though sad about Clyde) when the games went to YouTubetv.
“He mostly just stood up there dazed and confused wondering what the hell just happened.”
When he wasn’t trying to choke out Brunson and throw him to the ground. Lowlife wormsicle.
“I had to endure a lot of “we’re better than the Pacers” here while i was watching them play the Thunder last year.”
Not from me. I was squarely in the “the Pacers were better than the Knicks” camp, just like I am now squarely in the “the Knicks were better than the Spurs” camp. Here’s the rationale:
In the 2025 EC finals, the Knicks lost all 3 “must win” games: games 2.4. and 6. All the games they won were games Indy could afford to lose.
In the 2026 NBA finals, the Spurs lost the first two “must win” games: Games 2 and 4. The Knicks could have afforded to lose game 5 and the Spurs still couldn’t pull it off…on their home court!
Honestly, I don’t think either series was particularly close.
“When he wasn’t trying to choke out Brunson and throw him to the ground. Lowlife wormsicle.”
If Wemby were a few years older, I’d agree. But he’s still a spoiled 22yo kid. I would say that he’s at strike two in my book.
I may have blocked out a Pacers series
I’m wondering who is the 4th player on Owen’s mancrush Mt. Rushmore: David Lee, Manu, Mitch, and _________.
Not really.
(1) We can’t sign an exhibit 9 deal until we have 14 players on the roster. We currently have 13 players on the roster.
Exhibit 9 deals protect us against injury. If we sign a player to a non-guaranteed deal without exhibit 9 and that player gets injured, we must keep the player on the roster until they’re healthy or the season ends.
Basically, unless you want some random schmuck taking up money and a roster spot to do nothing, you don’t want to sign anyone right now.
(2) We can S&T players who we haven’t re-signed. This includes several 2-way candidates, like Dillon Jones, McCullar, and Jemison.
Remember how we used DaQuan Jeffries, Charles Brown Jr., and Duane Washington Jr. to aggregate salary in our trade for Karl-Anthony Towns? We can still do that with our 2-way guys, so it’d be a loss of a resource to sign them unless another team is threatening to do so.
While we can’t take back a player with a S&T, we can take back an exception or draft rights. This allows us to aggregate salary without giving up an actual player.
For instance:
(1) NYK receive Goga Bitadze from ORL
(2) ORL receives Deuce McBride & Danny Wolf (from Nets)
(3) BK receives Sochan in S&T, plus picks
There are some draft rights also moving around. But this only works with a S&T as Bitadze makes more than Deuce.
So did Thibs… while he was coaching one.
This site uses User Verification plugin to reduce spam. See how your comment data is processed.