Knicks Morning News (2026.10.06)

Cyber, my take: first half was fine. Brunson, OG and Mikal looked tip-top, Hart and KAT a bit less so but fine.

Of the bench players, Drummond, Shamet, and to a lesser degree, Mo and Kolek, stood out on the positive side on isolated plays but were sort of spotty.

Dadiet has moments, but his brainfarts are just so egregious.

All of Wiseman, Eubanks, and Bradley looked terrible, just in different ways. I suppose that’s good for Wiseman.

My issue with Wiseman is that he loads up more slowly than a Civil War era musket. You could see it in isolated plays where he was in position to get a rebound but just couldn’t get his mind/legs to fire.

On the positive side, he looks fast in a straight line and pretty healthy and spry overall. Definitely can catch some lobs.

You would have to really believe in Brown and his staff to coach him up anoint him the guy.

“In which case, the blame would unambiguously fall 100% on the shoulders of the grown ass man who broke up a championship NBA team because his feelings got hurt by wholly innocuous, common sense comments.”

Dolan is a given. You can rail against him all you want, just know that you are not adding anything to the conversation by doing so, You yourself suggested that you were sounding like a broken record. How many times does Dolan being a small-minded petty asshole have to be stipulated before we can move on to matters of actual substance? (note: I agree that the pro’s and con’s of going over the second apron are controversial enough to merit further discussion, so long as it is stipulated that for whatever reason, the matter of whether the Knicks will do it or not this year is settled, and that no amount of broken-record-ness is going to change that.)

What is actually useful to discuss is how to successfully negotiate with the given of Dolan on the other end.

We know with 100% certainty that Dolan will deliberately sabotage the team if he feels like a player is crossing him in any way. So if KAT starts escalating, he runs the risk of Dolan telling Leon to either trade him or let him go. Don’t we have enough experience with Dolan to know that?

And when you are dealing with an imperious asshole that has the power that Dolan has over decision-making and you negotiate in a way that has been shown time and time again to lead to a result that you ultimately don’t want, you bear some responsibility for the outcome.

I would think that Leon & Co. will negotiate shrewdly and unemotionally with KAT and his team, unless Dolan meddles in one direction or another. And we have experience with Dolan meddling in both directions. As such, beyond the second apron mandate which seems “final” by all available evidence, Leon and KAT should both be acting in a way that keeps Dolan out of it as much as possible until they come to an agreement that Dolan will approve without getting otherwise involved.

I think that Brown would learn more about Wiseman if he played him with the regular rotation guys. Maybe he’s doing that in practice, e.g. running him out there with the other 4 starters and playing KAT, Deuce, Alvarado, Shamet, and Mo against them. All Wiseman has to learn to be is a gap-filler. He needs to concentrate on controlling the ground with footwork, rather than reaching and flailing.

Of course, I felt the same way about Kevin Knox and it never happened.

There was one sequence last night where Drummond blocked a shot, then ran the floor and received a pass, then tried to go left to the basket and got blocked pretty easily by a smaller player on a slowish, weakish move.

There was also a defensive sequence where he had to rotate several times and moved his feet reasonably well and covered a decent amount of ground. It wasn’t peak Mitch, but it was something!

He made one nice drive on the left side and shrugged off a smaller defender for an easy layup.

If you squint, you can discern the outlines of a reasonably good 2-way second-stringer if he can use the regular season to lose a few pounds and get into better shape. But he should be “backed up” by a quick-twitch pogo stick type. That does not seem to be James Wiseman.

I’ll frame it differently, Timo.
Right now, the Knicks are spending more than 86% of its second apron space on its starting 5. Of that, 62% is spent on the top 3 (KAT 26%, OG 19%, Brunson 17%) and 24% on Mikal+Josh. That leaves less than 14% left for the rest of the roster. If you filled the rest of the spots with vet’s minimum deals, that would cost $22M, or 10% of the remaining amount.

That leaves 4% of the available second apron space to spend on non-starters, or around $8.84M.

For this year, The following non-starters are splitting most of that 4% as follows:
Shamet (1.4%)
Alvarado (0.9%)
Deuce (0.68%)
Dadiet + Diawara (<0.5%)

None of those guys make even the TPMLE this year.

If you increase the share of second apron space taken up by the big 3 even slightly, say upping Brunson to 22%, which would be $48.6M this year, you now have to deal with having zero money beyond vet's minimums to fill out 9 spots. (Let's ignore rookie minimums for now.)

Options to fill out the bench:
-Josh takes a significant pay cut
OR
-one of Josh or Mikal is traded taking less salary back
OR
-Josh's player option is declined and he is let go
OR
-Deuce is replaced with a minimum deal
-One of Alvarado or Shamet is let go

If there is another path to paying KAT what he wants, paying Brunson close to what he deserves, retaining OG, keeping both Mikal and Josh beyond next year, while staying under the second apron, I don't see it.

“1) No TPMLE–we didn’t use it”

We didn’t need to use it this year because we were able to retain both Shamet and Alvarado using their Bird rights. It kind of came in handy last year, and it might come in handy next year as well. But the only way to get it back is to get back under the second apron.

“2) No salary aggregation–which salaries were we going to aggregate in a trade that, mind you, would’ve been required to lower our overall payroll, due to a first apron restriction?”

It is pretty obvious that you can aggregate some salaries now if you have to priior to the trade deadline, either to pick up a player earning somewhere in the $5-7M range without giving up two rotation players, e.g. Deuce+Dadiet+a minimum. And you can also do something next year should an opportunity come up without having to get under the second apron first.

“3) Frozen 2034 pick–if we trade this for a player that improves our championship odds more than Mitchell Robinson, you’ll know where to find me!”

The crux of your current argument is that retaining Mitch with the potentially devastating consequences if he gets injured are worth it because he maximizes the odds of repeating this year. In other words, the gap between him and whoever is brought in to replace him is virtually impossible to close to the degree that it makes all the apron stuff a risk worth taking. It’s fine that you feel that way, but you should be at least a bit concerned that the risk of it backfiring is significant enough to not just handwave away. Heck, we were lucky that he wasn’t lost for the finals for an injury he caused to himself!

And obviously, if the Knicks went into the second apron to retain the likes of Mitch, it would be kind of hard to convince KAT or Brunson or OG or Bridges or Hart to take a discount, and personally, having all of those guys on the team for the next 3 seasons was and is higher on the pecking order for me. You seem to be pretty flippant about “hey, just don’t stay in for more than 2 of the next 5 years, yet it seems almost impossible for that to have occured while still having a contender. Not everyone feels that way, and that’s not to defend Dolan’s edict. There are some who feel that he should allow the team to go over, just not now and not for Mitch.

I should clarify that I was unhappy that Dolan made keeping Mitch impossible but I was able to move on quickly because I could see potential upside in staying under the apron this year, and am not ruling out that by the playoffs we will be at least as good as we were last year, maybe even better if Leon pulls off a fortuitous move at some point, like he did last year in swapping out Yabu for GTA.

Didn’t a certain poster just have a full-on middle school meltdown about certain kinds of provocative posts?

Anyone care to weigh in? Alan?

I love Deuce, but think that Mikal is a much more valuable player even beyond being near or at the top of the NBA in games played and minutes played every year while Deuce has missed a significant number of games.

Deuce has consistently been pretty terrible in the playoffs. In the last 3 years, he played in 50 games and for over 1,000 minutes. His BPMs were -1.6, -1.8, and -2.7. His playoff TS% is .526 and has never been above .553. And it’s not like he makes up for it by passing, he has a 9.0 AST% while Mikal os at 12.0.

Mikal played in 37 games for over 1300 minutes in his 2 years with the Knicks. His BPMs were 0.3 and 2.8. His TS over those 2 years is .571. He also played well in the playoffs for PHX during their two long runs. While he only had a .518 TS% in the playoffs last year, a career worst number, he was probably the MVP of the Celtics series, which was the Knicks’ best series win since the 1990’s.

Mikal if frustrating because he doesn’t play to his ceiling as much as we want him to. But his ceiling is really freaking high, and he reaches it often enough, that you can roll with the down times.

Deuce’s ceiling seems to be very good bench player, or worst starter on a really good team.

It’s a fair question when framed that way. I say no because Mikal has proven himself to be a solid starter who can dominate a playoff game in multiple ways, including blowing up high-leverage possessions with huge plays (similar to Mitch in that regard.)