Knicks Morning News (2018.03.09)

The problem is these “welfare” recepients are all billionaires who have the capacity to make their teams better but are incentivized to not do that.

Again, I don’t blame teams at all for tanking under the current system. It’s just hard to imagine it’s not damaging to the sport when taken to its logical extreme (all teams diving head first into the cellar when it becomes clear they can’t get a playoff seed, and maybe a decent one at that). I know I’ve certainly tuned out the NBA other than the Knicks and marquee games at this point.

I don’t have the solution. I like the lottery wheel idea but also see the issues that arise when draft position is completely untethered from team record. I feel pretty confident in saying the more flattened lottery odds will do little to nothing and could increase tanking in some cases though.

. I listed 15 centers who are demonstrably better, thusly he can’t possible be a better than average starter.

Bob, you just listed a bunch of guys you claim are better than Kyle. As far as I can tell you use some combination of salary and playing time to determine player production. I think that’s a shitty way to do it.

Speaking of stratomatic 180s, the man hated the melo trade when it happened. Just kept blasting it.
It’s ok though:)

That is not entirely accurate.

My initial reaction was to hate it because I already knew that Kanter was a huge liability on defense and because we didn’t need a C. I was hoping for a deal that would have brought us a defensive minded SF like Harkless without taking on a really bad contract.

But after I thought about it for a couple of days, I softened to say we won the deal because even though I didn’t like Kanter, his deal was the same length as Melo’s (and cheaper) , and we got the Chicago pick. It was a good deal, just not the one I wanted.

Harkless hasn’t had a very good year, but I still think we would have been better off with him as long as we didn’t have to take on a real dog of a contract as part if it. Without Kanter, we’d still have Willy. Harkless is also still young, a pretty good defender, and a huge upgrade over someone like Lance Thomas.

Maybe taking on a bad Portland contract was unavoidable so it had to end this way. I’ve since read that Melo told management they if they couldn’t get the deal with OKC done he was OK with Portland. Lucky Portland. 🙂

Why do people have such trouble they made a mistake here?

Mudiay sucks.

Mudiay sucks.

He’s an elite tank commander…. although it clearly wasn’t by design 🙂 I am looking forward to the losses piling up for the next 14 months!

All Whiteside can do is dunk the ball.

@13
At the end of the day, this is just entertainment. The Knicks stinking does not depress me at all. The real world does…the daily headlines from around the world. As a former teacher, these continued school shootings and the gov’t lack of response to it, year after year, makes me far sadder than the Knicks.

However, it sure would be nice if my favorite sports teams could ease that sadness, though. If the Knicks would just commit to an intelligent rebuild. Give us a young team that plays hard and cares. I can root for that all day long, even if they don’t make the playoffs. There’s at least hope in that. There’s no hope in the Michael Beasleys of the NBA.

For all his warts, Phil Jackson did leave the Knicks in better shape than when he came (though he certainly could’ve done much better, and he left the Knicks with the burden of Noah’s contract). But so far there’s no good sign that Mills will be any better (see contracts to THJ and Ron, Willy deal, giving 2nd for Mudiay).

I’m a Jets and Mets fan too, so, yeah…

@13

I think we all have different ways to be optimistic, if you lose that completely being a fan is just masochism. I for example generally overrate the draft massively, as I keep hoping that despite all the ineptitude this franchise has shown, we could Oklahoma City our way to a good position by striking gold in the draft.

It’s just that it gets progressively harder when you invest yourself into another season and it goes just as the other ones did. Everyone who has been “right” in their pessimism would surely love to be wrong, but oh well, I keep hoping that it will happen one day against good reason.

I was slightly more optimist at the end of last year than I am now, but I knew we were at least a couple of years away from being any good.

1. I thought we’d do better than putting Hardaway and Baker into the Rose cap space
2. KP broke down
3. I was hoping our draft pick would make more progress than Frank has.
4. I thought Willy was going to win the starting job and develop

All that said, we are going to get a better draft pick this year and next year than I thought because of those disappointments. We’ll get there, but KP being out is clearly going to delay the progress one year.

Bob, you don’t appear to base your player evaluation on anything other than appeals to authority. Hassan Whiteside is a bum-he was available to any team in the NBA for nothing and nobody took him. He only plays 25 minutes a night and you think he’s good? FOHHHH

You know the prime directive when one finds themselves deep in a hole to generally stop digging. You picked kind of a bad night to pick on Whiteside is he put up 26 on 12 shots with 8 boards and 2 blocks in 29 minutes and held Embiid to 5 for 18 shooting.

And yeah… Whiteside has been on a minutes restriction after missing 13 straight and 19 total games this year with left knee problems and he’s still averaging 50% more PT Than KOQ

You don’t seriously want to argue Whiteside’s body of work primarily vs starters and KOQ’s primarily vs bench players right?

Yeah, it is so much fun to watch good Knicks teams that I’m willing to put up with a few years of awful play to get back there again.

And when they stupidly fuck shit up so that those days never come? Well, again, it was so much fun watching good Knicks teams that I will carry on just by virtue of that nostalgia.

Also, as to…

I chose to be optimistic and hope for the best

That’s the problem right there. When we’re negative about the Knicks, it’s not because we’re choosing to be negative. The Knicks get negative reactions because they do dumb shit. When they don’t do dumb shit, we’ll give them positive reactions. It just never seems to come. If you go into anything with your view already predetermined, you’re going to be wrong a whole lot of the time.

You don’t seriously want to argue Whiteside’s body of work primarily vs starters and KOQ’s primarily vs bench players right?

I remember hearing that James Harden’s stats were inflated because he was a sixth man and then he went to the Rockets and has since become an MVP-caliber player

I remember hearing that Carmelo was going to have an efficiency resurgence by being the 3rd option on the Thunder but since he’s had to play the 3rd- or 4th-best defender every night, he’s shooting .508 TS% and has the 3rd-worst BPM of all ~150 players playing >1500 MP so far (just ahead of Josh Jackson and De’Aaron Fox, who are rookies and are also bad at basketball)

We could talk about Manu’s starter/reserve splits and how much better he’s been as a starter than as a reserve but there may be some age-related noise in there — still, no evidence that any player plays easy minutes against bench players (and let’s not forget that it is rare outside of extreme garbage time for all five starters to be off the floor)

-what 24 said.
Don’t shit on my face and tell me to be optimistic about it. The Noah and Timmy contracts = shitting on my face.

The Harden battles between jowles and ruru were epic.

But yeah, we probably still haven’t bottomed out. It’s going to get ugly.

Four + decades of rooting for the Nix has – if nothing else – left me better equipped than most non-Nix fans to cope with the daily realities of life under a President Trump.

While it’s hardly a comfort, this Nix fan’s hard-won understanding that there is no such thing as rock bottom does serve to steel me against the many horrors yet to come.

As one of the younger posters here, the whole “the Knicks being good is super fun” thing is more theoretical than anything else. The 2012-2013 team was the best one I can recall by far, and I enjoyed the hell out of that season but had no illusions about its sustainability. Long story short, it’s hard to keep doing this shit.

On another note, I’m starting to think Michael Porter Jr. might be available when we make our pick. The draft rarely perfectly mirrors the mock consensus. It’s just hard for me to imagine teams passing up the production of Bridges and Carter in favor of a high school kid, especially if he continues to not exactly light up the NCAA. I have no idea how to feel about him and kind of hope things just go as expected.

Do we really need deep statistical analysis to determine KOQ is, at best, a decent bench player? Isn’t today’s argument a regurgitation of the old Cole Aldrich debate where numbers were great but the guy was not perceived as a good player?

O’Quinn could start for the Warriors or Cavs and be just fine.

Not trying to be argumentative, but the issue is fascinating: why, then, is KOQ not fine starting for the lowly Knicks? Why couldn’t Popovich or anyone else see the game in Aldrich?

@38

The way i see it, in the case of O’Quinn, is simply bad luck for him. He was an unknown bench player in Orlando, a team nobody really watched or cared about, had decent numbers but not great and took the chance of longer term security with his current deal and got stuck with the Knicks.

Reputation and intangibles still matter for talent decisions around the league, even with the more extreme front offices like Toronto, Golden State or Houston, and it’s not like anyone is saying intangible stuff doesn’t matter, just that it matters less in most cases than talent and productivity.

For all we know you could easily replace David West for O’Quinn in GSW and it would be perfectly fine, but West probably has a good impact in the locker room and was cheaper and available. You would rather have West at the minimum than have to spend an asset to pay O’Quinn more. You could replace Nene with O’Quinn and they would maybe even be better.

Smarter front offices just don’t get blinded too much into overvaluing those intangibles and look for those things in role players or end of bench veterans without compromising the main production guys. Badly ran teams like the Knicks overvalue this sort of stuff, often over real productivity, so it becomes a shit show where they try to create a winning environment out of thin air without the required talent or structure to go with it.

I was harping on this through the first twenty games. I barely believe in a link between usage and efficiency and even I am shocked by how incredibly bad Melo has been.

There are so many moving parts, it’s very difficult to isolate or predict the relationship between usage & efficiency. IMO, that’s why all the models are broken when it comes to measuring the value of scoring. The math is programmed for fixed relationships that don’t exist.

Melo was already on a downturn related to injury and age. He can’t get to the FT line anymore either (which is critical for efficiency). What’s happening with him in OKC is hard to use as evidence of anything other than I’m glad we don’t have him. 🙂

At some point you have to use some common sense.

If one guy takes mostly 5 foot shots and a handful of tough ones per month and the other is REQUIRED to take a couple of tough ones per game, there’s going to be a difference in their efficiencies that does not reflect on their value to the offense.

If shot selection was truly always a choice, everyone would shoot nothing but spot of 3s from the corner, lobs, and free throws. But despite trying harder than any team in history, even Houston can’t accomplish that. The defense wins the possession a lot of the time no matter how good your offense is designed, how talented your players are, and how hard you try to avoid long 2s and other tough shots.

A better way of thinking about the value goes something like this.

Assume the defense won the possession & forced a tough shot.

When peak Dirk took a long off balance 2, he made it WAY more often than most other players. The efficiency on those shots was not good, but relative to almost everyone else on those, he was God-like. That was adding value while lowering his TS% relative to Tyson Chandler. If he was doing that by choice, then he’d be destroying value.

KOQ has been behind guys getting paid 10+ million his entire tenure here. They were obviously trying to get the most out of their investment.

Kind of interested to see who picks him up after this year.

Watching the end of Melo’s career is very satisfying for me.It’s one of my favorite things about following the NBA right now. I know that makes me a bitter, sad and somewhat contemptible person but I don’t care.

I think I have come around to the fact that some players simply can’t handle the minutes physically. I think Cole or Boban fit that bill. Pop throttled Manu’s minutes his entire career without much argument from him. I am willing to defer to Pop I suppose though I never really understood why he wasn’t out there 35 mpg. Some guys may just not have the physical makeup to handle the minutes load their numbers suggest they deserve.

But KOQ is not in that boat. He should be playing more.

The Cole argument is particularly weird since a good team did sign him after he was on the Knicks and he was great for them. He was so good that a bad team threw a lot of money at him, money that neither the Spurs nor the Rockets nor the Warriors could afford. So…huh?

Same basic idea goes for O’Quinn. He was a free agent when those other teams didn’t have to room to sign him to the contract that he got from the Knicks. The Spurs were clearing out space for Aldridge and the Rockets and Warriors were capped out.

So, are KOQ and Aldrich part of the problem or part of the solution? Do they make teams better, make them worse or just provide filler bench material of little consequence?

Or looking at it differently, how much should the Knicks re-sign KOQ for, in order for it to be a great move by the front office?

@51
Same here. I’ve already said that I hope the Knicks do not give OQ something like 4/$40m. He’s worth that to a playoff caliber team, though. But for a rebuilding team that will not be good for at least 2-3 more years (and maybe more…)? There’s also the ever present chance that, once paid, he may not be so motivated to get in great shape like he did this year.

I’d think that he’ll get a full MLE offer from someone, and if so, the Knicks should just let him go. I’d rather they kept Willy as the backup big for the next couple of years and traded OQ instead, but that ship sailed. When KP comes back, he needs to play mostly at the 5, and the Knicks will need to find a backup 5 who is alot cheaper than OQ.

If anyone is interested the Dunc’d On Podcast did a Center rankings podcast recently that discussed the C position extensively. Their conclusion was that outside of a relatively small number of elite guys there are a lot who are quite tightly grouped and where system/team needs etc. may matter more than overall talent. In other words the talent curve is flatter than at other positions. I see O’Quinn as falling into that flat portion of the talent curve and think that it makes this discussion a little academic. On the one hand I agree with the idea that O’Quinn is “just a guy”, he’s not particularly elite in any area, he has never had a major role on any team, and all the available evidence suggests there isn’t much of a market for him in the league. On the other hand he probably is good enough to start on some of the best teams in the league and I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that about half the teams in the league would be at least indifferent between him and their starter. I don’t think he’d actually start for all those teams but he’d continue to get his 20 minutes a game either way.

My feeling is that the C talent curve is so flat at the point that O’Quinn is on that locking him at market rates for the back end of his prime is kind of a waste, particularly for a bad team. He may be the 15th or 20th best C in the league but I don’t think he’s all that much better than the 40th or 45th best C. Unless he wants to take a hometown discount the Knicks would be better off trying to scoop up that 45 best guy for cheap and develop him a bit.

Honestly I would just let KOQ go, specially since it may come to a point where Wendell Carter is the best available prospect to draft. Let him get his money somewhere else and move on with cheaper, more efficient contracts and it’s fine.

If only we had a 23 year old Center on a cheap contract that has shown some good stuff already on the roster, you know…

I’d sign KOQ at a discount even with how much we have invested in the C position. Big men and players in general seem to be playing at high levels well into their 30’s these days.

If not then just let him go and get the top pick in the draft next year.

Everyone besides

Troy Williams
Trey Burke
Kristaps Porzingis
Damyean Dotson
Frank Ntilikina
Ron Baker
Luke Kornet
and I suppose Emanuel Mudiay

…they should be actively trying to move for anything they can get. I would’ve put Willy in there too but whoops!

I’m guessing we’re stuck with Lee, TH2, Kanter, Lance, and Noah for the foreseeable future, so that makes 13 players, 15 with our 2 new draft picks. Troy and Luke could be 2-way contracts, and they could sign a few young fringe players.

We are terrible. If we end up at 9, we might want to trade down for multiple picks just to try and get more talent.

I’d hire Blatt and start: Burke/Ntilikina/Miles Bridges/Robert Williams/Kanter or something like that and just keep looking for deals and cheap talent.

Cole Aldrich is not a very good basketball player. He can give you a few minutes of productive backup ball, but that’s about it.

This reminds me of a debate I once had with a friend that had a theory about horses that suggested that jockeys should always rate their horses to perfectly even fractions to maximize their final time and optimize their chances of winning.

My response was, if that was true, why do most trainers train their dirt horses to run faster than that early and turf horses to run slower than that early and why do jockeys change their level of aggressiveness to match that?

His answer was, “Because they are all stupid”.

To which I said, “Dozens of brilliant hall of fame trainers have been training horses for decades trying every imaginable technique possible to maximize thoroughbred performance. Jockeys do the same thing. They all came to similar conclusions. The results of races verify that speed is more important on dirt than turf. Yet somehow they are all idiots because you have a theory and some math that says they are wrong”.

I had to shake my head.

If your favorite model is saying Cole Aldrich is a very good basketball player, it’s not that every coach, GM, and other player is wrong for barely using him. The problem is with the model.

I would never argue that coaches, GMs, and players are perfect at evaluating talent. Some are better than others and some are not very good. But Aldrich has been on 6 teams and had many chances to demonstrate his ability. Everyone concluded he’s a liability on offense, slow on defense, his rebounding does not make up for it, and he’s only acceptably productive in limited minutes against mostly backups. Experienced people are often wrong, but when many people are actually testing and seeing the results in action, they are not THAT wrong. The problem is the model.

KOQ on the other hand is a pretty good basketball player. The question is whether he could be as productive PER MINUTE starting and playing 35 minutes as he is playing with high energy is short bursts.

Cole would be a good player if the game were only 36 minutes long.

But despite trying harder than any team in history, even Houston can’t accomplish that.

I mean Houston actually has done that in multiple games, but whatever suits your narrative, I guess.

Houston has never had a game where they shot nothing but corner 3s, lobs, and FTs.

They do an absolutely amazing job of avoiding tough shots (especially long 2s) because they have a genius offensive coach, a GM that understands the game and supports him, and they bring in talent that excels at the things that make sense mathematically. But the defense still wins possessions against them. So sometimes Paul is forced to fake a 3 and shoot a long 2, Harden throws up some trash, etc.. But they are smart enough on those possessions to know they are way better off with one of those guys doing it than allowing Capela to shoot an off the dribble shot from 20 feet. Having Harden do it when they are forced is a value choice even if he’s only 40%-45% to make it because Capela may be 30%. Again, that is not to say that Capela is not adding a ton of value with dunks and lobs. He is. Paul and Harden can’t do that. But Capela is not Shaq. He can’t do it at that super high level of usage (at least yet). If he was forced to up his usage to that higher level by taking some of the broken possession shots, his efficiency would decline.

I haven’t seen him as atrocious putting the ball on the floor or hitting from outside. What I like is defense and dominance inside. His passing is non existent, maybe he is one dimensional but he could be lethal next to KP

A big game tomorrow at 1pm between Alabama and Kentucky…two possible future Knicks in Sexton and Knox. Sexton looked really good today, Ntilikina and Sexton backcourt would interesting