(Tuesday, July 23, 2019 2:55:11 AM)
Marcus Morris’ move built up some hard feelings around the NBA. Players have verbally agreed to contracts with one team only to change their mind before, but in this case the Spurs had made roster moves — including trading Davis Bertans go to the Wizards — to clear out space for Morris, leaving San Antonio in a tough spot when Morris changed his mind and signed with the Knicks. The Spurs were pissed at the Knicks about this.
(Tuesday, July 23, 2019 2:55:11 AM)
Marcus Morris’ move built up some hard feelings around the NBA. Players have verbally agreed to contracts with one team only to change their mind before, but in this case the Spurs had made roster moves — including trading Davis Bertans go to the Wizards — to clear out space for Morris, leaving San Antonio in a tough spot when Morris changed his mind and signed with the Knicks. The Spurs were pissed at the Knicks about this.
(Monday, July 22, 2019 10:46:01 PM)
Sixers power forward Al Horford shot down an ESPN report that his new team was guilty of tampering prior to free agency. He addressed the issue on the Dan Patrick Show (hat tip to NBC Sports Boston’s Chris Forsberg). Horford declined his team option with the Celtics and signed a four-year, $109MM contract with Philadelphia. […]
(Monday, July 22, 2019 9:22:17 PM)
After being drafted third overall in the NBA Draft, RJ Barrett will also have the third-best odds to win Rookie of the Year.
(Monday, July 22, 2019 9:22:17 PM)
Despite the Knicks’ losing ways, they still rank high among the most valuable franchises in the world.
(Monday, July 22, 2019 4:49:16 PM)
Although the New York Knicks struck out on this free agent class’s top talent, they will have more opportunities to scoop up a star going forward. Could D’Angelo Russel be that player?
(Monday, July 22, 2019 1:15:17 PM)
In the summer of 2017, Kyrie Irving got his wish as the Cavaliers sent him in a blockbuster trade to the Celtics. And former Knicks PG Nate Robinson was there to witness it all.
(Monday, July 22, 2019 11:43:07 AM)
For the Lakers, Anthony Davis’ most recent comments are a nightmare. For every other team who wanted the versatile center on their roster this season, they kept that dream alive.
117 replies on “Knicks Morning News (2019.07.23)”
It seems like we got a player that both the Clippers and the Spurs wanted, and aren’t paying him much more year than the Clippers offered. That’s a kind of unexpected coup for the Knicks.
According to the player projection advanced stats from 538, the Knicks young core (all players under 25) are ranked 20th leaguewide in projected wins above replacement over the next 5 years despite the absolute beastiness of Mitch. I’m hoping it’s underselling RJ a bit but God I feel like Knox cannot possibly go anywhere but up moving forward. Coulda had SGA. So bad. Article here:
https://www.theringer.com/nba/2019/7/23/20703286/nba-young-core-rankings
@2 the Knicks’ magnificent fuck up wasn’t the 2018 draft. The draft itself where NY was picking is a gamble. The fuck up was playing to win with lots of veteran players who had no future on the team in 2017-18. Why were players like enes kanter, Courtney Lee, Michael Beasley, Jared Jack, Kyle O’Quinn all playing big roles on a team that had virtually no chance of making the playoffs even before porzingis got hurt?
It’s these players who pushed the Knicks out of the top of the lottery, and its history of arrogance and complete negligence that can completely swing a franchise in the wrong direction. Any of the top five picks from this past draft could become game changers. Based on pure young talent, that Knicks team had no business winning as many games it did. However, our brilliant front office really felt that getting to 30 something wins was important I guess.
@3
Trust the process….. That’s what Phil/Mills/et al should have been thinking rather than tilting at windmills and devising strategies to win 33 games.
#2, thanks for the article. I think.
“…Kevin Knox, who has the second-worst career shooting percentage among active players. Knox in particular stands out in a negative way: He projects as the worst NBA player over the next five seasons, with a befuddling -11.6 WAR. That assessment might seem harsh, but among 120 qualifying players last season, Knox had the worst true-shooting percentage. He also ranked as the league’s third-worst defender, per RPM; tallied 39 percent more turnovers than assists; and rated near the bottom of basically every advanced statistical leaderboard on Basketball-Reference.”
Yeesh.
” Knox is fine for the late first round, don’t waste a good pick on another guy who has to get better at everything if you can take some kid who is also still young but has demonstrated better production.”
-me, June 20, 2018
Both Bridges were good bets to be at least solid NBA players and SGA was obviously a better prospect than Knox. Those are the 3 players who went immediately after we drafted. Yes, we absolutely fucked up by winning pointless games that season, but we also made a really easily avoidable mistake in drafting Knox.
Knox sux.
I know his jump shot is super clean sometimes but he is a horrible basketball player. Does anyone see him dominating a G League game?
SGA would look great in blue and orange right now. How different would we feel about our future if we had a competent point guard who could throw Mitch four lobs per game? Not like SGA is out of the woods in terms of production but he at least has the profile of a guy who could really break out.
@3 that’s what anybody with any sense was screaming about on here last season, and the season before that, and so on.. But I guess you can’t underestimate veteran leadership and how it will lead to top tier free agents running to MSG to take Dolan’s $.
Rinse and repeat.
yes… had we drafted well and had SGA and Donovan Mitchell on the roster we would likely had some combo of Durant/Kawhi/Kyrie/AD to match…..opportunity costs abound from every dumb move made in the past 6 years from Phil to the present. Minimize unforced errors and maximize results.
As I said in an earlier post, if you replaced Knox and Ntilikina’s FGAs with the 29th-ranked team’s average from last season, the Knicks would have improved their pythag. win % from .190 to .300. This is especially crazy since they only played 15% of the Knicks’ available minutes.
We use the word “bad” to approximate their contribution, but man, they were about as bad as it gets, especially in a league trending toward a >.570 TS% league average.
Man, I wish someone could have guarded Knox a little better in that 3 on 3 game
Knox is unguardable in 3-on-3. You could throw Gobert, prime Rodman, and Dray out there and he would still dominate.
If the Knicks weren’t absolutely tanking, I suspect both of them would have had a lot fewer shot attempts.
Maybe. But if I hear some nonsense about how they would have been more efficient at, say, 10% usage, my head will explode.
They will be shitty shooters at any volume.
And remember we’re talking about the fucking lottery picks in consecutive drafts. “Hopefully they’ll stop shooting so much” is never something you want to say about your draftees.
On the one hand that ringer article employed a consistent methodology and did a good job compiling CARMELO ratings for players under 25. On the other hand they weirdly went into the endeavor with an axe to grind and didn’t provide a lot of context that would go against their point. Yes Knox was unprecedentedly bad last year. Perhaps instead of taking that to mean he will be allowed to have as negative of an impact going forward for five years, maybe don’t hold negative contributions projected based on tanking team performance against your ranking of a “young core”. Like why not even acknowledge that if you don’t think Knox will be allowed to be so negative in such an impactful way going forward, then the Knicks go up five spots in the ranking (with 2 WAR to spare)… Also any discussion of young core over the next 5 years seems arbitrary and incomplete if you are ignoring the ability to keep that core together given the contract commitments owed to those players. Treating Andrew Wiggins as a positive contributor to Minnesota’s “young core” given his contract just leaves me incredulous. Ditto KP and others though obviously not to the same ludicrous extent.
Nearly spit out my coffee.
That article didn’t give us much reason to think we didn’t screw up three consecutive lottery picks:
You’re basically saying “that was a good article but they used too many cold hard facts.”
It’s not a pretty picture. I think they painted it well.
Maybe. But if I hear some nonsense about how they would have been more efficient at, say, 10% usage, my head will explode.
They will be shitty shooters at any volume
I didn’t mean anything of the sort. Knox would look better statistically if he only took threes but he wasn’t drafted to do that and I’m not suggesting they should have done that. Instead, I’m suggesting they could have played him less if they weren’t tanking. But they didn’t have a lot of scorers to sub for them, so it wouldn’t have made them good, just less bad.
@18 Hubert
Even given Pelton’s own model, we still rated RJ as the 4th best prospect FWIW. I think that makes him different than Frank and Knox, though I admit not getting a complete player at number 3 is not ideal. I think RJ still being consensus a higher pick than his college performance among basketball minds we respect indicates that the upside is real. It’s just that the downside is real too. If it makes you feel any better, there were also models that were significantly more down on ja Morant than they were on RJ.
https://mobile.twitter.com/kpelton/status/1141805131647705088
The Millsperry D’oh Boys still be tilting, having apparently assembled yet another “33 wins or bust” roster for the ’19-’20 campaign.
Only this time the results will be different. Thanks to the advent of flattened lottery odds and the newfound discovery of team options, those danged windmills are finally going down.
@19 Hubert
No, I don’t think going into an investigation with a pre-existing take you are trying to prove is good methodology. You will very easily highlight the “cold hard facts” that bolster your argument and ignore or minimize the “bad evidence” that goes against your point. Best practice is to acknowledge all the facts and not prioritize a narrative.
@21 BJ sorry obviously typo we should be he aka pelton
@22 Count
The windmills may or may not go down but they are unquestionably giants.
When you drafting out of the top few, you are typically getting a player with “holes” on one side of the ball or the other. You are either getting a player that’s a clear plus defender that can’t score or a scorer that can’t defend or do much else.
What you hope is that they have the talent, work ethic, size, length, basketball IQ etc.. to fill out their body and skill set over a few years.
With Knox we got a player that lacked proven ability on either side of the ball. They took him because he has “talent and potential” on offense (which is what they value). It’s a long path from where he was last year to being a good player, but in his defense he was a lot younger and less physically developed than most rookies. His lack of physicality clearly impacted his game on both sides. IMO, it was a bad selection with Mikal Bridges on the board, but he was getting better. It’s not over for him.
Also, don’t forget, had we selected Mikal bridges, we definitely would have won more games. So we wouldn’t have gotten the #3 pick and Barrett. Each draft mistake hurts current value, but increases future value and vice versa. The system is fairly efficient long term, but some managements simply make more than their fair share of mistakes.
One thing about knox is that he was a historically efficient tanker. It would have sucked to be mad at Mitch for doing good things last year if we didn’t have Knox to bail him out with such abjectly horrible voluminous performance.
When people say things like this, they are not talking about an across the board shot reduction.
They are talking about shot distribution.
If you have Steve Novak knocking down spot up 3s at around 45% and you decide to also ask him to shoot off the dribble, create in mid range, and penetrate and finish you are dumber than a gigantic pile of rocks. Novak had almost no skill at those other things. He was a specialist. He could be wildly efficient at his limited skill, but he’d be terrible if given a very expanded role. There were always way better options on the court when the defense forced his team to try to create something off the dribble that was tougher and less efficient for even the best players.
So when someone says “reduce shots”, what they mean is limiting the player to what he’s good at.
You don’t ask Novak to do lob dunks and you don’t ask Robinson to operate in the mid range late in the clock.
Only the great players can score efficiently (relative to the norms for that shot) in a variety of ways and thus be given a high usage role to create what is needed given the defense on that possession.
Moving the ball, player movement, good playmaking skill, and smart shot selection all matter, but sometimes you need actual skill.
Not really. If they had based the numbers on only the top 3 players under 25, for instance, the Knicks would obviously have come out much higher, with other teams being much lower (especially as some don’t even have 3 rotation players under 25). The Knicks have a LOT of young players, some of whom are almost historically bad. It’s been said a number of times here, but I think people are underestimating how big of a negative effect those players had on our win total. Remove them, and our WAR would look much different.
And as for methodology, why wouldn’t you base the projections on the top 3 players? Most teams aren’t in the habit of keeping terrible players around, so it’s reasonable to think their numbers shouldn’t be part of the picture.
Of course, given the Knicks probably will keep at least Knox around, maybe their take is just fine….
It is dispiriting, though, to see how crazy good things would look if we had just taken SGA (my pick at the time) or Mikal, and Donovan Mitchell (though that was not a consensus pick here, just someone some people thought was potentially decent). Add in Mitch and keep KP and suddenly we have a bright, bright future.
Instead it’s back to wishcasting….
I’d be hard pressed to find a worse NBA player in league history than Andrea Bargnani (try it for yourself before scouring basketball reference), but man did he have better advanced stats across the board when compared with Knox on relatively similar usage.
To that end bargs even outdid elite defensive stopper Franky Smokes in defensive win share through their first two years in the league.
Useless stats due to sample size or is the Bargs rookie comp a decent litmus test?
jotd: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KCb0WSqZkY
Top 3 picks going back a few years (jury’s out on 2018)
2017
Fultz — can’t shoot to save his life
Ball — can’t shoot to save his life
Tatum — learned to shoot his rookie year, promptly forgot how to shoot last year
2016
Simmons — fantastic defender and rim-attacking ball handler, can’t shoot to save his life
Ingram — can’t shoot to save his life
Brown — could probably shoot to save his life, but still a 65.8% FT shooter
2015
Towns — reputation as a terrible, disinterested defender
Russell — similar reputation
Okafor — an objectively terrible defender
2014
Wiggins — I don’t even want to touch this one
Parker — on the cusp of being out of the league
Embiid — a legitimate two-way star
2013
Bennett — 4 teams in 4 years
Oladipo — basically Donovan Mitchell with one third-team All-NBA-quality season
Porter — had that freakishly good season but has been not much more than a role player on O
2012
Davis — two-way superstar
MKG — lol
Beal — questionable defender (56th percentile DPIPM, 27th DRPM, 81st DRAPM)
So I have Simmons (who, again, can’t shoot and definitely can’t score 25 a night on decent eff.), Embiid, Davis and possibly Beal as my two-way stars. Aside from that, we have a lot of guys who are functionally useless on one end of the floor.
Teams are still terrible at identifying talent, even near the top of the draft. And consistently, we see two-way stars like Siakam, Giannis, George and Kawhi fall well past the first few “gimme” picks.
Why not? They played the games. Knox took shots when he could. We’re supposed to give him a mulligan because… ?????????????
I think what Rama is saying is that the article should have been properly titled something like ‘ranking teams young players’ rather than core.
If it were up to me, I would likely gone after Luke Kennard/Donovan Mitchell at #8 and then one of SGA/Kevin Huerter at #9. I definitely thought Frank Ntilikina had a world of potential on defense (he was wrecking games on that end in the little tape I saw on him) before the draft and thought the pick was okay. I think what’s been holding him back more than anything at the NBA level has been his durability, and I’d even go as far as to say he has a real shot starting game 1 this season because he’s our best perimeter defender and seems to understand the game of basketball more than our other guards. Donovan Mitchell looked like Dwyane Wade and his overall TS% was poor but he did much better in conference play.
The thing is, I’m a regular guy who loves basketball, and I’m sure I would have done a much better job drafting than the Knicks. I would have missed Porzingis and taken Justise Winslow, but I’d rather have Winslow, Mitchell, and SGA over 4 years than what we ultimately ended up with.
I think I love you.
If Knox hopes to compete with Bargnani he needs to up his hilarious lowlight generation. I can’t remember laughing at a single thing Knox did last year. It is very disappoint.
Put me in the camp that also had a bit of a problem with the methodology. I don’t think the Knicks “young core” is dramatically better tomorrow if they decided to just cut Knox today. The Knicks would certainly be better in the short run from that decision, but when you talk about a “young core” I think more about potential moving forward, and Knox may still eventually produce some positive value at a point when the Knicks are trying to win basketball games. Certainly if he keeps playing like last year his expected minutes are going to decline dramatically (I hope), making a massive negative contribution less likely. I would have floored each player’s value at zero before taking the sum.
Speaking of Donovan Mitchell, can anyone explain why on his CARMELO projection page his WAR numbers indicate a drop from two seasons ago of 6.5 to last season 1.0? I really can’t see what caused this and wonder if it’s a one off glitch just in the visualization or a deeper problem.
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/carmelo/donovan-mitchell/
https://www.basketball-reference.com/players/m/mitchdo01.html
Some drafts are going to be deeper than others and there are always going to be mistakes because it’s so difficult to project the development of 18 year old kids. You can only more or less know where they stack up with other kids their age. There will be fewer holes and more upside at the top.
That said, you are making my case that draft picks and tanking have become overrated and overvalued when you are picking 18-19 year olds.
Still, I don’t agree with you about trading down. You are still way more likely to get a real star near the top. That’s the hard part and the whole point behind a tank. You have to go for it .
I should add, some of the guys that have been drafted top 3 in recent years are still 4-5 years away from their peak and can still improve in areas where the are lacking. When you are 18-19, you are 5-6-7 years (sometimes even more) away from your peak.
On this board we dismiss you at 20 unless your BPM and WS48 is good when those measurement suck to begin with and certainly can’t project the next 3-5 years.
Was just in my car flipping around the Sirius XM sports channels, and one of them was running through the NBA win totals projections and the hosts would pick over or under.
They went through a bunch of teams, and when they got to the Knicks at 27.5, all 3 guys just burst into laughter and that was the end of the segment.
It’s really hard to be a Knicks fan right now.
there is seriously no way we are below the pistons or what okc currently has (picks notwithstanding)…
the core that we have is pretty good… it could have been a LOT better… but even if you look at atlanta… there’s not much separating them from us…. trae young is nice… but i think he will have roughly similar overall career value as rj…. maybe higher peak with shorter career but overall i don’t think it’s leap and bounds over rj…. collins and randle are about a wash… slight edge to collins….
but dsj and payton are just a lot better than anything else on the hawks roster…. they have hunter.. reddish… and huerter… and those guys might not even get second contracts…
@32 THJC
As others have already pointed out , it’s not about giving him a mulligan. Knox’s efficiency (rate) projection should definitely take into account what he did last year. My problem is with the minutes/ usage projection that would be required to accumulate that much negative WAR at whatever negative rate they are projecting. 538 seems to be projecting minutes/USG based on what happened on the court last year, and while that is generally a sound methodology I don’t think it makes sense in this case if you think they were trying to tank last year and are not trying to tank this year. Every offseason move bolsters the idea that they want to win. So to argue that the Knicks will continue to play Knox at high enough usage to rack up that many negative WAR, you’d have to believe the Knicks are so dumb that they don’t realize how bad Knox is. I just don’t think that is true and I believe that either Knox improves enough on a rate basis to not be that negative or if he doesn’t improve and the negative impact is less than -4 WAR next year because his minutes/ USG are decreased.
Either way, I don’t see how it is intellectually useful to include a negative contributor as part of the young core, unless the team has poured in resources to the player after they knew how he would perform. The Knicks spent a draft pick on Knox as a project, in the large scheme of things that is not a big investment that would guarantee bad playing time, not nearly as big of a deal as future draft picks or salary cap commitment. You could say they invested minutes/ USG into Knox last season, but I think the tank would minimize the cost of that investment and actually made it positive.
anybody here familiar with the monty hall problem believe that some elements of it apply to the draft? for example; the odds of picking right higher in the draft at #X is less than the odds of picking right lower at #Y and #Z. I’m wondering if we could extrapolate this chart to more or less find those odds and always trade down for greater probability at finding more value.
chart that calcs VORP by draft position: https://external-preview.redd.it/-nHAJifVbqgJj49MAviDiDUcjwcpvC0Q9ptSq9yyJL8.png?auto=webp&s=ee06cc5cfdd5607931a0234367b3856b6d774391
jotd: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1JyCzHyWME
If you’re horrendous as a rookie, even compared to other rookies, the odds are kind of stacked against you being good at some point in the future. I’m sure there are some outlier players who were as fucking horrible as rookie Kevin Knox and then turned out to be really good, but generally if you stink even compared to other 20-year olds you’re going to stink compared to those same players when you’re all 25.
This seems pretty simple to me, I dunno man.
I do think there’s some chance Knox turns out to be decent, simply because if you’re tall and can shoot, you have a chance. But I wouldn’t call him the “core” of this team. Trier is more core, and he was undrafted, FFS.
The Knicks should have kept trading first round picks, but only so long as they got back two second round picks for each one. Then we could have built an amazing team….
Also, the ringer’s 25 year old cut off conveniently excludes Randle (9.3 WAR) and Payton (5.1 WAR). Not necessarily intentional but all these potentially arbitrary decisions are less random when you go into an analysis looking for a certain outcome that fits your priors.
Isn’t the fundamental problem with this methodology is that they present the data holistically? If you just remove Knox from the equation entirely, I’d imagine the Knicks would suddenly vault to a top-half of the league young core.
I also just don’t think CARMELO is a very useful projection system, but even with that, I think there’s a better way of presenting the argument here than to just sum up WAR and call it a day. That feels lazy, as does the inspiration for the article being that the Knicks young core is garbage. Very easily could have got 2-3 more sources for WAR projections and provided a more complete case for every team. I also think summing up top-3 WARs for young players on the roster would have provided a more complete picture. Again, I’d imagine if you include Mitch, RJ, and Randle or DSJ, the Knicks would look better in comparison to more teams’ top-3 young players.
https://images-wixmp-ed30a86b8c4ca887773594c2.wixmp.com/i/4f8e10a4-2fa1-48fb-92af-2161b23cee76/dothpo-a73156f3-6b48-482a-890c-1a2f48188f26.gif
i hope all is well for everyone…38 days until the world championships kick off…
It’s quite a large investment. It’s not as bad as, say, giving $150M to Wiggins, but it’s still wasting a draft asset that probably could have been flipped into two late picks, or maybe a later pick and a future pick swap or a couple 2nd rounders. (Any of which would likely have yielded more value than Knox’s wretched season.) There’s diminishing returns w/r/t keeper draft-pick ROI as you accrue more of them, i.e. that a team with 20 first rounders in the next two drafts will, due to the short supply of high-production players, draft a lot of disappointing players and/or be unable to produce a lot of value from those picks given the limited roster slots available. But still, a Knox-level bust is more palatable when you have 3 1RPs instead of 1. This was the crux of my argument to trade the #3 for the 8, 17 and 35.
You’re right that now that Knox is a Knick, there was no point in *not* playing him, as it came with minimal cost. But we can’t ignore that the Knicks had very few draft assets and lit one on fire with the Knox selection. If he turns out to be an NBA-level starter, it will be one of the greatest turnarounds we’ve seen in our lifetimes. It’ll be like Jose Bautista or Steve Young going from bust to MVP candidate.
https://www.basketball-reference.com/players/g/gilgesh01.html
nah b
Count: “Millsperry D’Oh Boys”-priceless.
Agree on the D’oh Boys. I expect that to be a NY Post backpage headline when Porzingis drops 45 on us in his return to the Garden.
@49 THCJ
Of course the first round pick spent on Knox was largely a waste both in hindsight and at the time they made the pick given the information they had. I think we unequivocally agree on that. My point about investment was that the sunk cost of having spent that draft pick on him and whatever shine being the former #9 pick still remains on Knox should not be sufficient incentive to allow Knox to accumulate -4.1 WAR next year (CARMELO’s projection). The FO signed almost exclusively power forwards. How does that read as an environment where Knox will get a big enough role to be that unproductive. On a rate basis we agree that Knox projects to be a negative player, I just think the downside is limited because you can just not play him if he’s that bad.
But there’s no damage to losing games this year. If anything, it will be helpful. Knox should play 3,000 minutes en route to another top-5 pick.
Knox(‘s reputation) shall die so that the 2020-24 Knicks may live.
I am mostly fine with sacrificing Knox’s future to the tank gods, I just don’t think the Knicks are on board with that (yet), so I don’t think pencilling in a heavy -WAR to next years win projection, or worse, a projection of our “young core” for 5 years makes much sense at this point.
Also we disagree on the merits of marginal wins and how flat the lottery is, but neither of those should affect the Knicks decision to play bad Knox if their goal is to win games to start the year.
sga is good… and i really wanted him as the pick as opposed to knox… but there’s no way anyone would trade mitch and rj for him…. on that basis we’re well above okc when you include dsj randle and payton….
Whether the methodology is flawed or not, you have to say Frank + Knox + Barrett is not the kind of yield you hope for after the last three years.
I would trade RJ for SGA in a heartbeat. The only rookie-contract player I’d trade for Mitch is Luka.
And Mitch and Trier don’t count why exactly?
I think there’s no point trading either Knox or Barrett now, as we don’t have player we should be building around instead to use them as assets. It’s better to bank on them becoming volume scorers at least, because those always have some trade value, and keep them on the chance they become good. If we had signed stars or had great young talent to build around already I could see it, but there’s not point in trading them right now unless it’s for a clearly better player, and those deals aren’t going to be available.
okc doens’t have anyone else under 25… that’s why i’m saying rj and mitch > sga by himself…. sga for rj is mostly even and i might even do that trade if offered…. but when you include mitch also it’s not close… and that’s why there should be zero argument that we’re better than them…
Because the losses didn’t lead to the Knicks getting them. Mitch was selected with a buyable 2nd-rounder and Trier was a UDFA. When you tank for three years, you hope to use those “high-upside” lottery picks on, uh, good players.
Tanking is good when it leads to (1) great rookie players or (2) a high trade return on those high lottery picks. The Knicks have turned three consecutive shit-sandwich seasons into 2 scrubs and a guy with a pretty bleak statistical profile. I know, I know: he’s a good defensive rebounder! And he might end up being the starting PG at some point this year, and it’s been awhile since we’ve had a point guard worthy of watching nightly.
If you’re banking on getting most of your surplus value out of your 2nd-rounders and UDFAs, what’s the point of keeping those lottery picks? Why not just trade them for a big haul of 2nd-rounders?
What Jowles said.
Also, Trier might suck, too. I think Iggy is likely going to be a better feather in their cap than Trier.
The Knicks traded for the pick that became Mitch and part of that package was Kanter, who most certainly contributed to losses last year.
Seems really arbitrary to not include Mitch, Trier, Randle or Payton as part of our young core. I could see not including Payton since he’s a 1 and 1 but Randle is here for 2 years and is 25 years old with a 3rd year team option. He absolutely is part of our “core.”
But you know…LOL Knicks AMIRITE?
Trier and Mitch and Randle don’t count because if they counted it would change the author’s predetermined outcome of the article, which is that the Knicks are LOLKNICKS.
“…it would change the predetermined outcome, which is that the Knicks are LOLKNICKS.”
Fixed this for you.
I’m all for the “pump and dump” strategy with Knox and RJ. Let them hoist a ton of shots, rack up some points, miss enough to help the accidentitank and then flip them to somebody dumb for something good.
The problem with this is that we’re the dumb team that seems to highly value inefficient volume scoring. So if we successfully “pumped” Knox and Barrett we would probably skip the “dump” part.
When you all talk about RJ’s “bleak statistical profile” are you referring to him scoring the most points of any freshman in ACC history while maintaining a solid 52.9% 2pt% and a passable 30.8% 3pt%. Or maybe it’s the 8.6 rs/40 or the 4.9 asts/40.
There are a couple of red flags in his poor defensive numbers and overall catch and shoot stats but nothing that screams huge risk. People on this board treat Barrett like we just drafted Knox part 2 but Barrett has legit and impressive stats. He doesn’t have any of the glaring red flags Knox did.
Yeah, this board is fucking insane about RJ. He’s going to be a star in this league and we should be ecstatic that he’s on our team.
RJ will struggle scoring, we should all expect that, but if he can be a plus rebounder and passer already I’m happy with him. We just have to wait and see, I’m not too high on him but I definitely disagree that he looks like a complete bust, there are actual tangible aspects of his game that are interesting and productive, unlike Knox where the only thing we can think about is the decent 3 point percentage and his age.
Why do you think RJ will struggle to score? He is in pretty elite company when it comes to scoring in college and was a great scorer at the prep level and in international play. I worry a bit about his jump shooting and a lot about his defense but I have very few worries about him scoring.
swiftandabundant, c. 2023:
“Get away hell! It would have been the same if he had been drafted #3 fifty times. And what if he should bust? He won’t bust. Elite scorers don’t bust in their rookie contract nowadays. That was what all franchises thought. Yes, but what if he should bust? He won’t bust. He’s just having a bad time.”
(Spoiler alert, for those who are unfamiliar with Mr. Hemingway: he busts.)
i AM WRITING THIS IN INVISIBLE INK SO THAT NO A-HOLE WILL BE ABLE TO SEARCH IT IN THE FUTURE AND LAUGH AT ME FOR WRITING IT
kNOX IS GOING TO BE GOOD. rEAL GOOD. i GUARANTEE IT.
Bookmarked
But what if he should bust? He can’t bust. Yes, but what if he should bust? He can’t, I tell you. Don’t be a fool. It’s just a bad time. It’s just nature giving him hell. It’s only the first contract, which is almost always protracted. Yes, but what if he should bust? He can’t bust. Why would he bust? What reason is there for him to bust?
@67 yup. I’m surprised that this is our profile post-Carmelo, yet here we are…
What the hell, Jowles. What the hell.
@77
Farewell to Arms quote – rewritten.
@78
Not quite. But isn’t it pretty to think so (also a nice summary of some of the discussions today).
Opens with some of my favorite opening sentences for any novel:
That’s some writing right there.
Would you bet your soul that Knox would bust ?
Would you bet 1$ that he’ll be an all star one day ?
You really can’t tell for sure.
Everything’s possible !
The only difference is on probability.
Saitama2006.
The RJ hate is absurd
@79
Here’s the original:
Aww yes. Jowles had been so nice to me up until today. But sure enough, if you disagree with him, he eventually has to to put you down because he’s so smart and you’re obviously dumb.
Did I mention anything about RJ’s scoring?
Just so you’re fully aware. I like RJ not because of his scoring but because of his court vision, passing and rebounding…things that a supposed stathead should love in a prospect. I think he has the potential to take over a game in many ways besides scoring. His efficiency and shooting are the biggest issues and they’re tied together.
but go ahead and be an asshole about it. Its what you do best. 🙂
Is it possible that the Knicks would win Only 10 games this season ?
Why not ? If most players suffer season ending injuries and we bring g-leaguers its not impossible.
Is it possible that we make the playoffs ?
If Fiz become Popovich and all our players find the meaning of life and happiness while all the ADogs of the other teams go down with injuries we may even get the championship.
What’s the most possible thing to see this year tho ?
My eye and my experience say 25-35wins.
It’s weird, this board goes so roller coaster on RJ. Of course, THJC has always been a sceptic, but the general concensus started out expecting him to be the pick, was relieved when he was picked that the FO didn’t pull a Rui and reach to pick someone else, buyer’s remorse about his shooting percentages, abject horror at the first two summer league games, sober optimism at the end of summer league, now back to buyer’s remorse that he same box score models are giving us the same underwhelming at #3 but not horrible rating as before…
RJ’s production is going to be high variance, highly dependent on whether he can optimize his shot selection and improve his FT% and shooting %. If he can pass and rebound that will go a long way towards earning a place on the court while he works on his weaknesses. I think bringing in all the new acquisitions will help build a functional offense around him and help push him away from the darkest timeline chucker RJ and towards a more productive player more likely to achieve his upside. It’s a crapshoot though for sure. I don’t think picking RJ is that different than the Bucks picking Giannis, as there was nothing publicly available about him production wise statistically before the draft IIRC. Also not sure what level of competition you would use for Greek A2 league ball, so all the models basically had him as a gamble. Of course its less stressful to do this at 15 than 3, but RJ has been much more vetted and scouted than the Greek Freak had been.
On Greek A2 league ball you shit on the stats and use your eyes, imagination and cross fingers.
weird is welcome…it’s one of the best things about this board…
as painful as it may be to not have our prognostications immediately revealed – we’ll all have to be patient and wait to see…
for the record – i think mister RJ will be a plus player this year, with a positive vorp and bpm…no gaudy mitch type numbers, but, maybe he can have a spencer dinwiddie type impact as earlier as this year…
Trier and Mitch were counted, Mitch explicitly so. Under 25 is a reasonable cutoff for ‘young’, I think it’s maybe a year too old, but Randle gets cut off. CARMELO has a lot of problems which are compounded with less experienced players but why the hell would anyone think the Knicks’ young players are any better than 20th in the league? Mitch is good. RJ might be too slow to play in the NBA, has a bad 3% and a disappointing 2% for someone who mostly scores at the rim but he’s our second highest rated player. DSJ can’t shoot either. Trier and maybe Iggy can score but are bad at defense and basically everything else. Knox and Frank are the two worst players in the entire league who get playing time. You can hope, sure, but our young guys collectively are not impressive. I could see an argument that we might be around 15th, but certainly no higher.
Also, it is real dumb to argue that Knox and Frank being absolutely horrible shouldn’t count because they won’t be playing. Every other team’s shitty kids that won’t get any pt counted. It’s not their fault we have such shitty players.
Randle is 24. He turns 25 in November, after the season starts. Maybe that’s why they didn’t count him but as of right now, he’s 24.
After reading so much Hemingway tonight i think im ready for my first book. I already found the title inspired by Ron Baker’s :
“You’re too mediocre to good to dream tanking…again !”
You’re conflating arguments. I asked that in response to Hubert, who listed only Knox/Frank/Barrett. Jowles said that’s because they were the first round draft picks, not second or undrafted, which you can buy for a song, thus they don’t count as the result of the bad record. I feel like everything counts, or nothing does – you can’t arbitrarily decide to ding the team for the bad choices without acknowledging the good.
….and to the contrary, I think it’s disingenuous to write an entire article about how shitty the future is for the Knicks because of their terrible under-25s when some of those under-25s aren’t going to get any burn or be with the team and when other teams have 1 under-25 and that’s it. If you’re writing about “the young core,” maybe you shouldn’t write about players who almost certainly won’t be in the young core. I mean, many of us think we won’t be seeing Frank in a Knick uniform again. And his numbers are half the awfulness that diminish the perception of the “young core” as being promising.
It’s arbitrary to list the first round picks without listing the second. They all count. It’s also arbitrary to list all the players on each team as part of the “young core” when on each team – not only the Knicks – the bad players are likely to be gone in a year or two, and therefore not part of the “young core.”
The only reason I’m not more strenuous about it is because there’s a real chance that Knox continues to suck and yet remains part of the Young Core because the FO doesn’t understand just how bad he is.
Point being, if they took the top 3 kids from each team and used them as a representative sample of the Young Core, that would be a lot more apples-to-apples than the holistic BS they did do.
Okay.
That’s in no way disingenuous. It applies to the shitty prospects on every team and it’s not measuring how good a team will be, it’s just trying to gauge the quality of their prospects. It is strange that you think this particularly disadvantages the Knicks.
According to NBA.com, the Mavs have 6 players under 25, the Bucks have 4. Those are the lowest. Knicks have 8, most teams have 7 or 8 with a handful having 10 or so. All our shitty young guys are in your head because they are our guys, you are ignoring that every team tends to have some shitty rookies riding the pine.
Also, guy had a hypothesis, then he tested it. Might not be the best way of testing it, but that’s how you do science. Nothing about what he did made the Knicks look any worse than we are. You’re claiming bias where there is none evident.
I agree, but let’s not be so binary. Just because I’m worried about RJ doesn’t mean he’s Kevin Knox.
With the #3 pick in the draft and selecting a highly touted prospect, I was optimistic we might get someone who could make an all NBA team. Barrett seems like his ceiling is a good player. He could be a taller Bradley Beal, or (as a recent article suggested) the new Jamal Mashburn. That’s not exactly foundational.
If we get a good player at 3 and two guys at 8 & 9 who barely belong in the league, that’s a very low yield on three high picks.
Who hates RJ?
I’m optimistic about him. I’m just not sure he’s a sufficient reward for last season. That’s not hate.
I read the article and didn’t see anyway that they singled out the Knicks. They ranked all 30 teams after all. We came out 20th; which, given the tendency of the press to laugh at the Knicks, is actually pretty respectful. Randle wasn’t counted because their definition of 25 or over was if you turned 25 before the middle of next season. There methodology of course assumes their player rankings to be the word of god, but what else would you expect, it doesn’t imply any particular bias about the Knicks.
It is much less than people expect for those picks, but it’s probably not that far from average league wide historical drafting experience.
(oops, posted on the wrong thread!)
I’ll try to make a case for Knox improving. Essentially, Knox is in a very rare club. Only 8 rookie teenagers in NBA history have put up more than 900 FGA: Luca, Durant, Melo, LeBron, Wiggins, Knox, Mudiay and D’Angelo. Mudiay and Knox are the only ones to have a WS48 of under zero. But as far as TS% goes, Doncic let the pack with .545, followed by Durant (.519) Wiggins (.517) Melo (.509) Russell (.506) LeBron (.488) Knox (.475) and Mudiay (.437). However, Knox was second in this group in 3pt% (behind Russell) second in 3PAr (behind Doncic) and second in DRB% (behind Doncic). He had the lowest AST% but also the lowest TOV% and get this, the lowest USG%.
If you make the cutoff 800 FGA, the list grows to 12 (Steph, Tatum, Booker and Cliff Robinson). Knox is 4th in 3pt% and 2nd in 3PAr. Also 4th in DRB%.
Lower it to 700 and it grows to 18 Knox was 6th in 3pt%, 3rd in 3PAr and 7th in DRB%
19th.
Lower it to 600 grows to 32. Of those 32, Knox was 7th in 3PT% and 4th in 3PTr. He dropped to 16th in DRB% but get this: he had the 2nd lowest TOV% out of the 32 players.
Finally, lower it to 500 FGA and he moves to 9th, 4th, and 19th, with the 3rd lowest TOV%.
So we can conclude:
1) 19yo’s that shoot as many times as Knox did are extremely rare, suggesting that this role was way over Knox’s head.
2) His 3pt shooting percentage ranks him among the best teenagers ever in that category.
3) He shot 3 pointers nearly 40% of the time, and his 364 attempts were third among teens ever. This suggests that his % was not a small sample-size fluke.
4) He was a very respectable defensive rebounder for a teenager.
5) Considering that his Usage rate was a middle of this pack 22.3%, his extremely low TOV% is a positive, as it suggests that he was either shooting or making safe passes, bumping up his PPP a bit, although this is probably nullified by his low OREB%. Still something to build on.
@Grocer
You can call that ringer article science, but it is way closer to p-hacking than actual replicable science. In science you actually don’t set a hypothesis and then look for data to prove it. You design an experiment to test something and state what your observation will be if the experimental condition is no different than the control. Importantly you have to design your experiment to test the thing you are setting out to test. I don’t think if you purport to test the young core you hold a model’s projection of a young players poor performance against the “young core”. You say other teams are also penalized for there negative young players, but interestingly very few of those players actually exist.
Frank, despite being negative last year, has a +3.7 WAR CARMELO projection over the next 5 years. Collin Sexton and Knox are the only players that were remarked on as having a negative impact, and I wouldn’t be surprised if those were the only negative contributors anywhere close to them. The model reflects the fact that young players tend to improve on average, so when you’re dealing with players under 25 and looking at cumulative WAR over 5 years, you have be quite bad to be negative, and most are at worst neutral. Looking at low WAR players last year the only 5 year cumulative negative ones are Antonio Blakeney (Bulls) at -2.3 WAR, Frank Jackson (Pels) -2.7 WAR and our own Zo Trier at -2.1 WAR. Seems like being on a tanking team might not be good for your CARMELO projection. Oddly enough Josh Jackson who was just as garbage as these guys for the Suns for the last two years will provide the Grizz +3.1 WAR somehow. I’m hopeful that this implies that being in a better system/ role and not being fed minutes despite sucking will actively help our young players improve. We’ll see.
You set a hypothesis and then look for data to test it, which is what the author tried to do. And while it says ‘core’, it included every young player on every team (with the exception of foreign rookies who aren’t in the database). You’re getting hung up on semantics. The CARMELO WAR is a bad predictor of future performance particularly for young players. It’s not a good study. But it also is not biased against the Knicks in any particular way.
@Grocer
Also you seem to be confused about why minute projection matters. WAR is not a rate stat, so any negative WAR projection could be turned into a 0 WAR projection just by not playing that player. In that way “Every other team’s shitty kids that won’t get any pt counted” is just completely wrong. If they don’t get burn they don’t contribute to WAR in either direction.
I’m pro-Knox, too, and I think you make a great case.
It still sucks that we took him at 9. He’s an Iman Shumpert-level prospect. We had better choices.
Knox had a TS% of 55 in the summer league. Obviously, that’s not the NBA, but if Knox can do that in the bigleague in a year or two he’ll be okay. The lack of playmaking and the bad defense are still huge problems, but there is a realistic path for him to become a decent NBA player-something like a Carmelo when he could shoot 3’s on the Knicks but worse on defense?
I did say that it was a bad stat. It’s still stupid to accuse the author of bias because he didn’t make a special exception for Knox. But, if we pull out Knox’s numbers entirely the Knicks move up to 14th. Does that make you happier? Cause being mediocre after ignoring our second worst prospect doesn’t particularly make me happy. I don’t see any reason why Knox would get benched this year tho.
RJ Barrett is going to be really good at basketball for a long time. His name isn’t Zion Williamson or Brandon Clarke, though, so he’ll never be a favorite on this board.
I am not very good with advanced stats so id like to ask from the stat freaks in here to show me which stat from the Scottie Pippen Rookie season(22yo) indicates his Hall of Fame career ?
Re: Knox, his development will be contingent on three things: IQ, court awareness, and hard work. He has a nice, humble way about him, and looks like he wants to put in the work to be good, but frankly doesn’t seem all that bright when it comes to the nuances of the game. He’s often a step behind the play on defense and is pretty much useless without the ball on offense. I could see him becoming a better shooter, scorer and even passer (he had some nice looks to Mitch and a couple of drive and kickouts) but his defensive awareness is just atrocious…a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. As opposed to Mitch, who wrecks opposing teams offensive sets on a regular basis. Not sure how much of that can be taught. He seems way more willing to learn than Wiggins, anyway.
That’s crazy. If he’s good, we’re going to love him.
If he sucks ass on almost every level but scores a lot of points, he will probably tear this board apart.
A decent outcome for Knox would be somewhere between Tobias Harris and Rudy Gay. Something in that genre. Melo is on another planet offensive skill-wise. None of these guys were ever worth max money or a #1 guy but Melo is the best of the lot.
I still think Knox will be a more valuable player than either Bridges. Only 2 guys picked above him shot better from 3, and he shot better from distance than Mikal and Miles, He also shot better from 3 than Trae, Grayson, and Doncic. That’s nothing to sneeze at, given his age.
I think he was disingenuous about it and chose a data set that supported a conclusion he had already made. Pretty sure that isn’t science.
The bigger point I’m making is that the data set he chose is a stupid data set to test his basic point – that the future of each team is related to the current usage of ALL the players under 25 on each team. If you predicted the success of teams based on the usage of all the players who had been on the team the previous year without accounting for new players, trades, and other deltas, it would be obvious how stupid that is. This isn’t that much better, because it’s pretty obvious for every team, not just the Knicks, that it is extremely likely the bad players will no longer be on the team in future years. So they are predicting success/failure on a data set that is certain to change not only because new players will come in (draft, signings like Randle who may be under 25, trades) but because current players won’t be in the team if they continue to suck. Ntilikina is an obvious example, but so is Knox. If he continues to be terrible, he won’t likely be on the team, or at least getting that kind of usage. He was on a tanking team that tolerated him sucking because it helped their larger goal.
So realistically, a better test of a team’s future would focus on the best young players on each team, because those players are more likely to continue to get minutes. In that scenario, the Knicks would do significantly better, but that wouldn’t give them the LOL Knicks they’re looking for.
Saying things like “if he sucks on every level but scores a lot of points” shows your bias against him. RJ is a great rebounder and passed all ready!
STOP BEING BIASED AGAINST BAD SHOOTERS
Maybe the Bulls went from 40-42 to 50-32 his first season. 🙂
But seriously his offense was horrid as a rookie but his overall well rounded game on the defensive end (rebounds/blocks/steals) argued he was a real player. His ws/48 was pretty impressive for a guy who couldn’t shoot an ounce.
This is kind of a Cardinal O’Connor “which doesn’t belong and why”:
https://www.basketball-reference.com/play-index/pcm_finder.fcgi?request=1&sum=1&player_id1_hint=Scottie+Pippen&player_id1_select=Scottie+Pippen&player_id1=pippesc01&y1=1988&player_id2_hint=Frank+Ntilikina&player_id2_select=Frank+Ntilikina&y2=2018&player_id2=ntilila01&idx=players&player_id3_hint=Kevin+Knox&player_id3_select=Kevin+Knox&y3=2019&player_id3=knoxke01&idx=players
Jowles, why are you obsessed with his shooting and ignore the other aspects of his game that make him a good prospect? If this was turned the other way around and I was touting a guy solely based on the fact that he was a good shooter and he was bad at most other aspects of the game you would be roasting me.
https://www.basketball-reference.com/leagues/NBA_2019.html
Sort by eFG% and tell me what you see at the top, and what you see at the bottom.