Knicks Morning News (2023.01.27)

Randle and Brunson both aced their final all-star auditions last night and I predict both will be all-stars.

“RJ Barrett, very good defender? Are we watching the same games?”

Yes, and probably. I’m watching the games RJ Barrett is playing in and I’m assuming you are too, so yeah, seems like same games.

“It feels like he gets blown by even more frequently than Brunson,”

It “feels” literally nothing like that. That feel can only come from bias (or something else similarly inexplicable).

“You want to attribute our modest success to players other than Randle because it’s painful for you to admit that he’s been objectively great.”

Did you even read what I wrote about Randle in the game thread and today? He’s been great this year.

What I’m saying about Barrett has literally nothing to do with assigning credit for what the team has done this year, and nothing I’ve ever written on the matter could lead someone to fairly think that it does.

A 571 TS%, 38% from downtown on 26% usage with quality defense is an excellent player.

“Wait, this is all because E has a thing about Randle? I had no idea.”

Well, yeah, seeing how it’s an idiotic “theory.”

Just play the things straight. Don’t snipe hunt for “hidden agendas,” and all the rest. It’s pointless and ultimately false.

Randle’s played at an all-star level this year. No question. My only beefs with him — and they continue to be — is that he plays kind of a niche game that you can’t really contend with in his current state (Hope I’m wrong!) and that he was terrible in the playoffs when the possessions got tougher and the focus got closer, and until he shows he can play in those situations, he will continue to be on probation with me. And that he doesn’t have great feel sometimes.

But net-net, he’s played very well this year, a deserved all-star.

But even if I was way off about Randle, it still wouldn’t spill over into what I say about Barrett and there’s no reason to make that leap.

“So uh, what say you about all those pesky numbers?”

There aren’t any “pesky numbers,” but it’s good to see that you’ve moved the goalposts off the absurd “feel” that he gets burned all the time.

If some dude sat down next to me in a bar and started gesticulating that “RJ Barrett gets burned all the time,” I’d pull a Seinfeld accountant Barry Profit being accosted by Kramer and slither down to the other end of the bar.

There’s no need for that metric when you watch the games, and obviously the Knicks coach doesn’t rely on it either. Nor do the team’s defensive accomplishments and ratings ratify it.

There’s also clearly a sense afoot that the metrics are the things which are starting the biases with people and then the biases impact what people are seeing when they watch the games. That’s the only thing that can possibly explain the “RJ gets burned all the time on defense.”

That’s the reverse way of how it should be done. The metrics answer to the action on the court, not vice versa.

RJ Barrett would not be playing starter’s minutes against the league’s best wings for Tom Thibodeau if he was getting consistently burned. Nor does anything about an unbiased watching of the games show that he is. It’s the opposite — he’s not and he’s a very solid defender.

It’s pretty obvious beyond the numbers though that opposing teams target him on defense.

********************

No, this isn’t “obvious” either.

“E, last comment on this topic (and speak about ruining people’s enjoyment). I watched Barrett over and over again in the first half. When the Celtics scored, he was often standing by himself, ten feet from anyone, slack-jawed, rheumy eyed, hands out like he is asking for coins.”

Bullshit. And you’re obviously obsessed with him if you watched him that closely, which was what I began the conversation about him with. Why would you focus on one guy that closely other than to come on here and post a bunch of meaningless, subjective observations about him? Who watches a game that way?

You’re obsessed with him. It’s weird to see and read. If it was just “wrong” that would be one thing. But it’s not.

Even on the merits of the observation, which are worm high to be charitable, it says nothing about the quality of his defense, but about his (alleged) body language after the other team scored. It’s 100% bullshit, from top to bottom.

It’s not enjoyable to read an unceasing river of bullshit about one player, regardless of how many affiliated internet high fives it can generate. Sometimes when I read rivers of bullshit, I comment. Tough shit.

Damn, JK, that’s awesome. Always jealous of people with actual talent ….

TNFH is obviously not going to just leave this one alone, since he has a very difficult time with any pushback and has a hard time seeing it in any sense but “trolling,” but in fact Tom Thibodeau’s minute allocations, the team’s defensive performance with said allocations, RJ Barrett guarding the league’s best wings in starter’s minutes for Tom Thibodeau, and watching the games is indeed far better evidence than the black-boxy metric he’s citing.

RJ Barrett as the league’s 646th best defender is drunk at the bar caliber stuff. If people want to believe that, they can’t be stopped, I guess. But it would be way better if they wouldn’t pollute a Knicks board with such relentless nonsense and if they do, to occasionally expect pushback.

Tom Thibodeau is many things, and I’ve written about my opinion of many of them, but one thing he absolutely, positively is not is a guy who plays a bad defender starters minutes against the league’s best wings for three straight years. In fact, he overshoots in that direction so much that he winds up starting Elfrid Payton in playoff games, plays Alec Burks at point guard, exiles Kemba Walker and Evan Fourier, and plays Deuce McBride rotation minutes.

Fair questions Pags. I didn’t really expect that my celebration of Randle and last night’s win, with some positive comments about another player on the team would get such relentless blowback, but instead of getting into this metric or that metric, I’ll throw out my opinion on metrics generally.

There are a lot of them, in all sports now, some better, some worse, marketed heavily as the “best,” with a premise of being definitive. If one throws off an obviously absurd opinion — RJ Barrett as the 646th best defender in basketball being one, but there are a bunch of them in all sports — I typically don’t bother with the details of the metric or why it’s wrong, I simply move on and deem it not really useful, certainly in the sense of explaining things it obviously doesn’t explain.(*) (I’m sure the answer to why it’s so off is some combination of poor definitions or poor observation or poor analysis or poor interpretation.)

It’s also now crystal clear that a lot of people read and study the metrics and then proceed out from there to watching the games and what they see and perceive in the games is greatly, if not definitively, impacted by what they see in the metrics. That’s quintessential tail wagging dog. I absolutely now believe that is happening with RJ Barrett.

As to Tom T., I’m not appealing to just his authority, it’s also the case that the Knicks have had good to very good defenses with RJ playing major starter’s minutes against the league’s best wings.

But at the end of the day, my downside is that five or six otherwise good dudes on Knickerblogger think I’m way off or even full of shit on the matter. That really isn’t a lot of people and the question at hand really isn’t some big huge massive question in the great scheme of things. “OK, I think RJ Barrett’s a good defender but he actually sucks on defense.” I can manage to survive.

(*) As to those who rely invariably on this one or that one, if they don’t know how to falsify the metric’s methodology they don’t really know the metric. With a black box metric, that’s not really possible — that too is another reason to just move on.

“But you know what I mean? He’s not a complete sieve on defense. He’s not too little or too big. He can score. He can do some playmaking. He can do some defending. He’s like the most jack of all trades, master of none dude that we have on our team and that is why he has played so many minutes from day one.”

/raises hand.

Let’s add, “can create offense on his own very well, including getting to the rim on his own very well, and that is a rare and very valuable skill (and is vastly underrated by virtually all the metrics people point to.)”

On your Randle points, Swifty, he’s still on probation with me but he can certainly get off probation if he plays well in the playoffs. I hope he does!

People can be mean. Just don’t be stupid. Or boring.

The “clutch gene” is typically dispensed with by certain types in two primary ways. First, some joker will cobble together some “model’ with inevitably defective premises that will purport to show that a player actually only “ranks 137th in adjusted expected points in the last five minutes” or somesuch so all the non-scientist types who think he’s good in the clutch are all wrong.

Or the entire notion of clutch will be dispensed with and people will insist that a possession with 30 seconds to go in a tie playoff game is “no different” than one in a tie game in the second quarter of Magic-Pistons on a Wednesday night in March.

“The guy who has spent 3 years coming up with bizarre armchair psychoanalysis of Julius Randle thinks everyone needs to stop talking about RJ Barrett’s true shooting percentage”

Didn’t I mention it in my “Fort Sumter” post this morning? It’s 571 over the last 25 games. I’m pretty sure I mentioned OG Anunoby’s too a day or two ago. And Cam Reddish’s.