Knicks Morning News (2018.04.18)

Since we’ve known that Hornacek was a dead man walking, I have pretty much been all over the place with who I would like to see replace him. Now I am firmly settled in on Stack or Fiz. Nick Nurse would be my 3rd choice since Jay Wright likely isn’t interested. If the FO is as serious about those two candidates as they say they are, then I think they will need to make a quick hire after interviewing them- as I believe there’s gonna be solid competition for their services.

Tomorrow, Frank reads a new article on Mark Jackson, takes another 180 on Mark Jackson. 🙂

Actually I think I am leaning towards Stackhouse over Fizdale. The Fizdale-Gasol thing feels a bit ominous to me — I am not sure what happened there but it is worrisome that the head coach cannot get along with his star player. JVG and many others have always said that that relationship is the most important — Belichick/Brady, Pop/Duncan, PJ/MJ — you cannot succeed unless the head coach and the star are fully on the same page. How Fizdale let it get so bad with Gasol makes me nervous. I know Lebron/Wade/Ray Allen etc all love Fizdale, but it’s much easier to be the assistant coach and letting the GM/HC be bad cop — not sure if Fizdale as HC knows how to do that effectively.

What I am loving about Stackhouse is how self-aware he seems to be — basically self-scouting all the time. It takes a certain level of being comfortable with yourself to be able to criticize yourself — to say that as a coach he wouldn’t have liked himself as a player — that says something to me about how secure he is in himself. There’s an article from the NYT about him from last year (h/t to @knicksfilmroom for tweeting an excerpt from it) where Stack reveals that he records himself during practice, motivational speeches to the team, etc etc with the idea that he always wants to get better at everything. I love that.

It seems to be the opposite of Mark Jackson, who it seems bristled at anyone who he thought might be trying to tread on his turf or give advice on how he could get better at his job.

As to the coaching choice Mark Jackson never impressed me as being very smart and being smart is an essential characteristic of any type of leader on any level. The Neanderthal stuff bothers me too. The guy was a savant with the ball in his hands as far as running an offense but was one of the worst defenders ever and I don’t quite get how he is some sort of defensive guru?

Blatt has a flawless W/L record but somehow alienated his meal ticket one of the most talented yet self absorbed babies of this or any era.

Blatt is a very bright guy and outstanding coach everywhere he has tried (including the NBA) and there is a pretty fair football coach 4 hours north of here who was an abject failure in his first go- round as a HC 🙂

If the Blazers get swept I worry the Knicks will abandon ship on the rebuild and offer Frank Ntilikina, our 2018 1st round pick, and Enes Kanter’s expiring contract for Dame Lillard. Of course that would be right after we give Mark Jackson a 5 year contract to be head coach. Then we’ll be stuck at 45 wins a season between KP, Lillard, and TH2. Am I the only person who feels this way?

On a more serious note, Jerry Stackhouse, Dave Fizdale, and Mark Jackson are probably the front runners for the Knicks’ position. I’d prefer David Blatt because I think he’s the coach most likely to be patient with Frank Ntilikina and build a dominating defense between France and Latvia. People forget that Cleveland has basically been the same team since 2015 in terms of minutes allocation and were a top 10 defense with Blatt at the helm (well they were 18th in 2015 but in 2016 they were 5th at the time Blatt got fired). Lue took over and the defense has basically been AI hitting the jumper and walking over him ever since. I like the idea of giving Blatt a group of Burke, Ntilikina, KP, and our 2018 and 2019 picks to build around. I think we’d be a respectable two way team that overachieves, and the Princeton connection between Robinson, Mills, and Blatt should give him the pull necessary to keep him around through turmoil. The Princeton connection plus the European background with Frank/KP make him an ideal fit with our current long term infrastructure.

Man I really fucking hate the Celtics

I think they’re going to do annoyingly well in these playoffs.

Stackhouse is appealing but I think I’m a little burned by Derek Fisher to hire another first time coach.

This whole movement to hire former players before they’ve cut their teeth as an assistant reminds me of when the league was obsessed with drafting high school kids instead of productive basketball players from college. Projecting Stackhouse as a coach based on sound bites and quotes is as difficult as projecting a 16 year old’s likelihood to succeed in the NBA by his vertical leap. There’s too much unknown, and we pick apart the guys with experience too much.

Maybe I underestimate G-League coaching experience.

If the Blazers get swept I worry the Knicks will abandon ship on the rebuild and offer Frank Ntilikina, our 2018 1st round pick, and Enes Kanter’s expiring contract for Dame Lillard

You are incredibly underestimating Damian Lillard. That trade would be the best thing that’s happened to us since we drafted Patrick Ewing.

Thanks, Frank… didn’t realize he worked under Casey.

i think the fizdale/gasol thing is overblown… a declining star player is a tough thing to manage for any coach especially once the wheels completely fell off and the goal of the season became different… hell even spoelstra is having that difficulty now with not even playing whiteside major minutes…

fizdale does have a strong personality…. but that’s not necessarily a bad thing for our situation… i do think he’s looking for a more veteran team.. namely the cavs or bucks… and i think he’s a better fit there…

i like what i’ve read about stack… hated him as a player… but he’s grown to be my #1 choice given his work in development and from everything perry and mills have said i think that he might be theirs also…

Whoever plays the young guys the most should get the job. Sounds like Stackhouse is the guy.

Yeah more and more I like Stackhouse. He’s done a good job in the D-League and seems like the right kind of guy to work with young players. And I like that line about not liking himself as a player if he was the coach.

As much as I would love JVG, I kinda get why its a non starter. The past history, while maybe water under the bridge at this point, would come up and the second there was a difference of opinion or the team wasn’t doing well, it would be another media drama fest. Mark Jackson would be worse because of the personal stuff but both are “homecoming” picks and we see how this stuff works out when we do these homecoming moves (Phil, Melo, or whenever they bring in a hometown player that’s a star like Marbury, etc). The fact that he’s a young ex player but is not directly connected to the Knicks past…I like that from a drama free standpoint.

Gasol is famously prickly and I think Fizdale was in a tough situation in Memphis because expectations were so out of whack. A lot of people in the organization (Gasol included) still seem to have perceived themselves as the fringe contender they were a few years ago. But their roster was weak even before Conley’s injury issues, and when he went down, forget about it. I think it resulted in him taking a lot of heat that didn’t really belong on him. That said, it seems he didn’t seem to handle it that well and the issues between him and Gasol spiraled. I think he has a good chance to become a really good head coach, but we have a potentially prickly star and perennially misaligned expectations are a big part of what we do around here, so you’d have to be a little worried about him facing the same issues that undid him in Memphis.

It is fucking delusional to think the Blazers are going to give up their biggest star, who plays the most important position in the NBA, on a #3 seed in a competitive conference for the #8 pick and a rookie who had a historically-bad offensive season to go with his “upside.” Add Kanter’s perception as unplayable in the playoffs — why the fuck are we even discussing this?

There is not a single person I’ve met in Portland who thinks that Lillard is anything less than a mega-max superstar. Trading him for a guy who shoots .420 TS% and the anemic pick the Knicks fucked themselves into? Give me a mother fucking break.

And this is from a guy who thinks that Lillard is perpetually overrated.

It is fucking delusional to think the Blazers are going to give up their biggest star, who plays the most important position in the NBA, on a #3 seed in a competitive conference for the #8 pick and a rookie who had a historically-bad offensive season to go with his “upside.” Add Kanter’s perception as unplayable in the playoffs — why the fuck are we even discussing this?

There is not a single person I’ve met in Portland who thinks that Lillard is anything less than a mega-max superstar. Trading him for a guy who shoots .420 TS% and the anemic pick the Knicks fucked themselves into? Give me a mother fucking break.

So, we don’t have two mega-stars in Porzingis and Ntilikina? You don’t think they only need more time because obscure stat X has them ahead of Jordan and Pippen at the same age?

There is not a single person I’ve met in Portland who thinks that Lillard is anything less than a mega-max superstar. Trading him for a guy who shoots .420 TS% and the anemic pick the Knicks fucked themselves into? Give me a mother fucking break.

Of course… this is meaningless. What is the definition of a mega max value player? Good value compared to Evan Turner’s 17 million…. sure!

I’m not so sure I want to be paying a guy 29 million a year for his next 4 years that perennially sucks come playoff time. 33 games >1300 minutes playing to a .092 ws/48. He isn’t a great passer (making his mates appreciably better) nor a great 3 ball shooter…. but he can score on high volume with good efficiency til playoff time comes and defenses get to concentrate and scheme against one way volume players.

Also calling Frank a 42% ts player is a little disingenuous while factually correct. I’m guessing Lillard wouldn’t have fared particularly well in the NBA during his freshman season at Weber fucking State….

That isn’t to say the proposed package has great merit, but the notion that Lillard is some sort of demi god because the latte drinking fanbois think so is a pretty funny appeal to “authority” from you 🙂 And he is overpaid if you are thinking he is a star lead dog # 1 player on a championship caliber team, which he certainly isn’t And that should be the standard for a true mega max player.

So, my Fizz conclusion is, some risk; maybe went thru some learning pains in a toxic environment. Not sure he showed much in terms of developing youth. I’d put him after Blatt on my list.

On the other hand, Frank projects more as a Shumpert than a Lillard, wishful thinking not withstanding. Both stats and eye-test results look dire.

Frank not only projects as a far better defender than Shumpert, he is today a far better all around defender at 19 than Shumpert with his gambooling assed ways ever was. Offensively they may be a fair comparison.

And championships are won basically with defense… ask the Celts dynasty, Knicks two championship teams, the Bulls 6, the Spurs 4 and even the recent Warriors…. not by volume shooters who suck eggs at playoff time. It is really hard to win a champoinship grossly out scoring them without the capability to get stops and extra possessions.

I mean both championship Knicks team had excellent offenses (they were ranked higher in ORtg than DRtg during the second), the dynasty Bulls had better offense than defense (being 1st in ORtg by a significant margin multiple times). These are just the examples I’m willing to look up on my phone, so I can only imagine how the rest fare.

Of course you don’t have time to look up any more because they don’t agree with your position…. you prefer cherry picking data:

SA was 7, 5, 8 and 7 in OR for their 4 ringzz and were 3,2,1 and 3 in DR

GS was 2,1 in OR for their 2 rings and 1,2 in DR

Teams like the Paper Clips led the league in OR in 15 and 14 and never got close and the 2011 Nuggets led the league in OR and went nowhere.

Of course great teams need a balance to win but it is very hard to win in any sport without a very good defense.

The Lillards of the world look great on the score sheets during the regular season but not so hot in the playoffs…. I wouldn’t be thrilled to have him on the books for 29 M per year moving forward.

Houston is the #1 offense this year, and the #6 defense.
Golden State is the #3 offense this year, and the #11 defense.

Those are your two title contenders right there.

Toronto is the #2 offense, #5 defense but they did it in the weaker conference.

I was thinking about the inherent racism that is built into the types of coaches that we like. The “process” guys tend to be white dudes, because black guys don’t get the process jobs. That doesn’t mean that black guys can’t be process guys, it’s just that they don’t get those jobs so we never get to know. When black guys get hired, they are almost always hired due to their ability to relate to the players. Then some white guy that you’ve never heard of gets to be the process guy (like a Nick Nurse, a Quinn Snyder, a Budz, a Kenny Atkinson, a Carlisle, a JVG, a SVG, a Thibs) and then becomes a hot coaching prospect because everyone wants a process guy.

So I totally respect Mills and Perry for wanting to hire a black guy as their head coach, but it pisses me off that the way that the system is set up, the most interesting process guys (like Nick Nurse) are going to be white dudes.

Now, coaches whose greatest skill is relating to the players do work out a lot when they’re willing to hire great process assistants (Doc Rivers and Phil Jackson are two guys who come to mind), but then you get guys like Derek Fisher who, well, don’t.

Long story short, I’d like for NBA teams to start giving process gigs to black guys because I want a process guy to coach the Knicks but I also support Mills and Perry wanting to hire a black coach.

I never thought the 2013 team was good enough to compete for a championship team even with how good on offense they were. Felton/Kidd/JR/Melo and Tyson even at full power were just too small to deal with the other contenders.

If I recall correctly, they matched up oddly well against the Heat that season, as the Heat really struggled with Chandler and Melo as the two bigs on the court (since the Heat couldn’t go to Bosh at the center with Chandler out there).

Looking into it, they beat the Heat three out of four games that season. One win was without Melo and one win was without Lebron. The wins, though, were big ones while the one loss was a six-point loss.

That’s always what drives me insane about 1996-97, the fact that they specifically seemed to match up well against the Bulls that year. They probably would have still lost, but it would have been interesting (they split the regular season series, with the wins being 97-93 and 103-101 and the losses being 88-87 and 105-103. Talk about being evenly matched!).

APM data suggests that the best defenders might carry 5 points of impact per game and the best offensive players can top 6 points per game in a given season, so if that’s generalizable to team offense and defense statistics (which is an open question), offensive production is modestly more valuable than defense in aggregate, but both can be just as impactful as one another on any given team. Defense doesn’t necessarily win championships so much as being elite at one and being minimally top 10ish in the other is necessary to win chips.

Long story short, I’d like for NBA teams to start giving process gigs to black guys because I want a process guy to coach the Knicks but I also support Mills and Perry wanting to hire a black coach.

Interesting analysis, but it misses a structural component. It seems to me the real schism is not just the racially built in biases NBA executives use to evaluate potential coaching hires, but the way that racial differences are structurally built into the very nature of NBA coaching pipeline. Many black coaches are former NBA players and come up through a network system already within the organization with all of the personalized baggage that entails. Hence the reason they are hired to relate to players, since they were players and are part of a very insular and incestuous NBA player culture where jock groupthink, like Mark Jackson’s anti-analytics bias, prevails. More white coaches come up into the NBA from the bottom up like minor league ball players do–from High School to College to Euroleagues to G-League–and are socialized into professional basketball not as players, but as coaches. They acquire valuable experiences of trail and error as head coaches and graduate through the system based upon their performance in that field.

This is also a part of the reason why I believe so much of the Peter Principle applies to NBA coaching hires. Just because someone is a great basketball player, it does not mean that they will have the tools to succeed as a head coach. So what ends up happening is what happens in all corporate structures, employees who excel in one aspect of the job (playing) are promoted up the hierarchy until they reach the levels of their respective incompetence to do jobs requiring different sets of skills than the ones they excelled in.

In other words, we need a complete reformation in the international division of professional basketball labor in order to fundamentally address the racial disparities in NBA coaching hires. There has to be a better way of integrating black personnel into the coaching pipeline system outside of the traditional NBA buddy-buddy system where ex-players, with their own preconceived notions as basketball players, graduate into head coaching ranks. It means addressing the usual dichotomy we see where the professional level “brain” labor (executive work, coaching, etc.) are given to white personnel from High School up and the “physical” labor (playing basketball) is occupied by black personnel. Rarely do you find a black professional basketball coach who was a subpar basketball player like you do with white coaches like Jeff Van Gundy. We need a system where a black Jeff Van Gundy can exist because it means we are graduating coaching talent on similar criteria of success, hence a greater equalization of representation.

The Rockets stand no chance against a healthy Warriors team in the playoffs because the Rockets have one way to beat you, and that’s all based around the pick and roll. D’Antoni is a one trick pony and he is going to get thoroughly outcoached by Steve Kerr. Once James Harden and Chris Paul have trouble, and they will have trouble, Clint Capella’s league leading efficiency will also dip. Trevor Ariza, PJ Tucker, and Eric Gordon will not be saving the day anytime soon. James Harden dances with the best of them, but he does not have more moves than Kyrie Irving and Klay Thompson was able to bother him down the stretch of every close game in the Finals. Once you clamp down on James Harden’s stepback he does not know what to do. Oh, and then they have to stop Kevin Durant. The same guy who calmly averaged 35 points a night in the NBA Finals against LeBron James. Don’t forget that the worst defender on the team is armed with the task of keeping Klay Thompson from catching fire and shouldering the load on offense.

Considering Houston has homecourt advantage in the series, I can see the series going to six games. It reminds me a lot of the Knicks-Pacers series in 2013 where a pick and roll first, iso-Melo second Knicks team lost in 6 to Indiana’s defense. Once the Warriors stop the Rockets’ pick and roll attack, the series is over. The only way Houston has a chance is if Golden State gets cocky, takes all those dumb ass shots early in the clock I hate, and makes those sloppy passes that lead to them losing the turnover and eFG% battles. But a focused Warriors team? Come on.

Lebron is the goat

Sure, nothing’s 100%. Just generally speaking.

When LeBron leaves the Cavs, what’s the over/under on games before Ty Lue gets fired? 20?

I think the worst thing an NBA team could do is what the Brooklyn Nets and Milwaukee Bucks did with Jason Kidd by graduating him to head coach straight out of retirement as an NBA basketball player. Is it any coincidence he crashed and burned in much the same way that Mark Jackson did this season? There seemed to be this faulty logic which assumes that all forms of basketball logic are interchangeable as if a great point guard will have the aptitude to approach the game the same as a coach would. In specialized work environments even the smallest differences in job tasks can make a huge difference. An ultracompetitve, headstrong, and combative asshole may have a performance advantage as a player in a star driven league, but those traits do not translate as well into head coaching where you have to earn your team’s trust, incorporate different ideas into a team strategy, and manage an assortment of personalities into a unified whole. Isaiah Thomas is a perfect example of this very dynamic.

Kudos to the Cavaliers for finally figuring out that Jeff Green, who has never been a good NBA player, is not a good NBA player.

@60 That’s got to be rough on Popovich.

On a lighter note, thought you guys might get a laugh out of this:
https://sports.theonion.com/carmelo-anthony-struggles-to-get-rhythm-back-after-maki-1825356181?utm_content=Main&utm_campaign=SF&utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=SocialMarketing

Kenny Smith interviewed for the Rockets and Darryl Morey, too. He actually won two championships and isn’t crazy, unlike the other point guard from Queens that the Knicks are interviewing.

Oh, I forgot, one more important qualification for Kenny Smith (and Mark Jackson) – he’s New York City born and raised.

Very important to have a coach who knows the area

What’s wrong with Love now?

Towns look an awful lot like “bad” Porzingis when he’s getting double teamed near the basket and isn’t getting wide open 3 pointers.

The rockets aren’t playing well and are 22 up. The Knicks would give more of a fight than the twolves

Derrick Rose and Jamal Crawford combined for 46 minutes. I don’t think it’s even possible to win when that happens regardless of anything else. They both shot the same amount of shots as Towns and 3 more than Butler.

Thibs should be fired midseries.

That would make sense if he was only coaching, but when you remember he actually built this roster and got those players, yeah, not so much.

So basically, KAT looked exhausted. Like everybody who starts on a Thibs team during the regular season.

I liked how Stackhouse talks about shit more than what he actually says. The ability to admit mistakes, to take on board other opinions.I don’t know that he’d be better than Fizz or Blatt, but he’d be better than Jackson just based on that.

I think Mills and Perry are very specifically talking about giving a black coach a ‘long leash,’ as that guy put it in that article about Jackson. That’s a small step forward, but it’s a step.