[news.google.com] — Thursday, April 13, 2023 7:00:00 AM
‘The Knicks are going to the Eastern Conference Finals’ | Amin Joseph Deadspin
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[news.google.com] — Wednesday, April 12, 2023 11:18:00 PM
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60 replies on “Knicks Morning News (2023.04.13)”
wow, some great young small forwards in the late game…
if you could choose – herb jones or josh giddey?
two fantastic players to watch but one is still 20 and the other is older than tatum.
18-36 FTs. Toronto’s players deserved to lose.
And the price for OG must be much much MUCH lower than Masai think…
BBA next drink is on me
Since there’s a headline up there suggesting a Trae Young move for RJ, I want to mention this:
Since we have Julius back on track and on a great contract, and Roby in the fold- I kinda expect both RJ and Obi to be moved this offseason. I know everyone wants a star, but if we can find a consistent scoring bigger wing that fits better between Randle and Brunson with his shooting- I’d be very happy. At first, I wanted someone like Paul George if the Clips fizzle. But now I don’t want anyone to command a lot of touches- I want the rock in Brunson’s hands alot. Maybe George at this stage of his career doesn’t mind not dominating the ball if he’s winning- I dunno.
Granted- Randle will be much easier to move as his value has never been higher. But I can’t see the team moving him. He’s Melo-ish with his physicality- when he wants to play bully ball. And I think that fits this team and this coach perfectly. He’s a decent defender as well, when he’s locked in. But if you tell me we can get Zion(and keep him healthy and in shape) or someone like Siakam to play alongside Mitch up front, then I can see the team moving Randle right now. And I’m not sure if I want to see Randle moved anymore.
Hot take. If we win the first round series, our FO won’t make any big moves this off season.
They’ll resign HART and give IQ an extension. They’ll pick up Obi’s final year and keep pat on RJ. If they end up with a pick, they’ll use it on another PF or PG and if they don’t, then they don’t.
I think they’ll roll back the same squad. It took a third of the season before we got rolling with the shortened rotation. So we left some wins on the table early in the season. HART also gave us a boost so having him the entire season probably adds another couple of wins. Plus IQ leveling up, IHart settling into his role, Grimes, even McBride, getting better. The team as currently constructed is a 50 plus win team easily. The big question mark remains RJ but maybe year two of his max contract and a summer working on his three pointer will settle him down a bit. He’s had a rough year for sure but I don’t think the FO is ready to give up on him…yet. If he performs well in the playoffs, great. If not, he’s gonna be hard to move anyways.
People assume the goal is to land a superstar and I’m sure the FO would love to do that. But it’s gotta be the right guy at the right position at the right age for the right price and the team is in such a good spot now, there is no real rush to do that. I think they’d prefer to do that through free agency or a trade situation where the cards are in our favor.
I read the Post article on how all the NY area hockey and basketball teams made the postseason for the first time in a long time and which then talked about other NY teams that are also good, like the Yankees and Mets. But its last words were “as for Jets fans, we’re sorry”.
Come on Jets, take that as a challenge and do well this fall.
Swifty, I agree with you post but it is sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy. For example if I take it to the extreme–we win a chip–then of course they roll out the same squad again. If we somehow win this series it will be on the back of some excellent performances and I would love RJ to be one of them. And it probably means your 50 win take is correct. But if we win despite RJ (which is one theme of the 47 win regular season), the weakness in the line up will be glaring, we have a ton of draft picks, and an RJ replacement (superstar, star, or just someone who is really good) may shake out if a team or two blows it up (PJ, Jimmy, OG) and if that happens it probably is the right time to effectively “overpay” to land the piece.
I’d be shocked if we don’t trade Obi. The writing is on the wall.
Amusing article on The Athletic today with scouts, coaches, and owners picking winners of the first round matchups – amusing because it shows hoop hasn’t really moved past the pre-Moneyball-era BS about the game. Amazing dearth of insight.
Not sure it’s been mentioned yet, but the coach has to coach well in this series. He manifestly did not coach well the last time the team was in the playoffs. He needs to play the right guys at the right time in the right combinations; analyze the strategies the other team is deploying and adjust well in real time; try to do things to make the other team, rather than his team, uncomfortable; and just generally be wise and flexible.
This series can’t be pockmarked with a bunch of “we’re going to stick with what got us heres,” and “we just need to play harders.” Can’t happen.
Regarding coaching….If the Nets didn’t blow things up, we probably would be the 6th seed and have the Dallas pick. And I wonder if facing the Sixers versus the Cavs would be worse given we would be facing a Doc-coached playoff team.
Did Thibs coach poorly or was that team just way more limited in what he could do?
I’m legitimately asking, not trying to defend Thibs per say.
Thibs did not coach well. In-game and in-series adjustments have not been his strength.
That said, he’s been more innovative and flexible this year then I’ve ever seen, so who knows… Maybe he’s grown…
Did Thibs coach poorly or was that team just way more limited in what he could do?
I think it is fair to say that he was “outcoached” that series, which doesn’t mean he coached poorly. But there really wasn’t any plan B once Rose ran out of gas and Julius was neutralised. But this year, almost by definition we have a plan B as I assume the team is preparing for the possibility Julius will not play.
“this year, almost by definition we have a plan B”
Yes, this year, the squad is so flexible, we have plans B, C, and D, and we’re blessed that many of these lineup variations got minutes during the year.
Like @Reese, I’m curious to see how Bearded Thibs plays chess this time around. Now if we could just hire an assistant coach to teach us how to inbound the ball in the 4th quarter.
I’m not going to let one play-in game sway my opinion of OG. He is the perfect fit at the three for us and his age is on our timeline. RJ plus picks for OG makes us contenders in my mind. The only thing that would change my opinion is if RJ gets hot and we have a deep playoff run. Roby gives us some insurance if we want to include Obi in a deal, but I really hope it doesn’t come to that.
We’re not the only team having problems inbounding the ball. A big part of the problem is we don’t have someone who is fast enough to run and get open.
I’m still a yes on OG too. And i hope their defeat brings the price down. 😉 I also think there’ll be more options in the summer, and what will make or break a deal will be the price.
Nice article above about Knicks numbers in transition, before and after Josh Hart.
https://www.thestrick.land/strick/josh-harts-leading-a-transition-in-new-york
I wonder who is this new member rEEsE? 😀
Just to be clear, I still believe OG can be a good fit for us*.
But at the trade deadline Masai’s request for him was reported to be “Spida-esque” and for me that’s a bridge too far.
RJ plus one or maybe two picks is a fair price.
While I agree that OG’s can be an important improvement for us, I don’t want to overpay too much for him.
* It was “one game” but it wasn’t really “one game”.
It was the most important game of the year, at home, under pressure.
And if a player can earn milions with a playoffs game (see Brunson last year), he can even lose some luster for the opposite reason.
@cyber, thx for that link. I hope someone in the Knicks FO reads it before sending Obi packing in exchange for dust.
Discussion transition buckets: “Before the Hart trade, Toppin shot a measly 60.3% on 1.7 attempts per game. Since (the trade), he has finished a staggering 86.0% of his 2.3 attempts a game at the cup. When Hart and Toppin have shared the floor together, the numbers have reflected their match made in heaven.
Lineups including the pairing have posted a league-best offensive rating of 125.0, and it’s hard not to see their transition offense at the heart of that success. They have pushed the pace in transition on nearly one-fifth of their offensive plays (for context, the NBA’s most active transition offense, the Memphis Grizzlies, boasts a transition percentage of 17.9%).
Despite their high volume on the break, Hart-Toppin lineups have also thrived on a per possession basis, with such lineups scoring 134.7 points per 100 transition plays, a mark that would rank second in the league.”
But there really wasn’t any plan B once Rose ran out of gas and Julius was neutralised.
But what would have been plan B with that team is my point? He switched out Elf for Rose in game 3 (after we won game 2). Everyone was screaming for that but that might have actually been the wrong move.
The only thing I can think of would have been to play OBI more minutes but that alone would not have swayed that series for us. I doubt it even wins us another game.
People forget not only was Mitch hurt but Noel got hurt too. so literally we were starting TAJ at center by the time that series ended. Outside of Randle, the only scorers we had were Rose and Burkes (who both did what they could). IQ had some nice moments but he also wasn’t nearly the player he is now.
All I’m saying is I don’t really know what great plan B Thibs was supposed to role out in that series once it was obvious Randle was neutralised.
RE challenging the Jets to make the playoffs this fall…
Don’t worry, acquiring Aaron Rodgers will pretty much guarantee the Jets not only make the playoffs, but apparently get to the Super Bowl this next season.
At least, that’s what I’m reading on JetNation!
🙂
puff piece in NYMag about how the Knicks are fun to watch especially *because* they haven’t signed a big name celebrity STAR PLAYER — (basically paraphrasing a lot of the comments on this board).
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/04/nba-playoffs-the-knicks-are-much-more-fun-without-stars.html
i think the thibs criticisms are more that he operates the team like a giant cruise ship… where small tweaks takes a long time to integrate… rather than like a speedboat where you have game to game adjustments… he’s not a master tactician… and his offensive sets are illustrative…
so in the sphere of thibs capabilities/strategy…. you can’t really blame him for not making adjustments because that’s not what he does…. like you don’t really play obi and randle together all of a sudden in the playoffs if you never played them together in the regular season… but that’s also the problem.. he has a bit of a narrow view on things and so if the main thing you’re doing gets stopped.. then you’re going to get exploited….
the main thing we do.. and the main thing we’ve always done is run a lot of iso… and so once a team stops one of your iso guys… then that’s the ball game… thankfully brunson is pretty creative against a wide variety of matchups but he’s also had his troubles against certain guys.. fvv for one… and randle has been better staying away from those midrange fades… but the thing with tough defenses is that they tend to keep you away from the things you like doing so it’ll be interesting to see what happens with better players but also against a much better defensive team…
and also i think it’s pretty bad strategy to always be super reactive to whatever a team is doing against you.. that type of knee jerk type of response leads to schizophrenic decisionmaking… which also has applications outside of basketball…
you should have a rock solid strategy that you’re willing to ride or die with.. so there’s nothing wrong with an iso heavy approach… but you should be prepared for it to be stopped at some point and have other approaches ready… watching randle clank fadeaways only having rose flip floaters does not scream preparation to me.. that’s more rose taking it upon himself because obviously nothing else was working because that was the entire plan was to give it to randle in one specific way and he was forced to shoot fades which he wasn’t hitting…
and we’ll see how much thibs has grown in this series because he should have more than enough tools to show what he can do now…
Thibs made zero adjustments to Randle being neutralized. You aren’t supposed to let your best player get neutralized and then if it looks like he is getting neutralized, it’s incumbent upon you to un-neutralize him.
Query whether Thibs’s passivity led to Randle then seeing himself as unsupported, which in turn lent a psychological component to the whole thing, magnifying the underlying basketball issue.
RB, agree with your first point (although I suspect it might be de-neutralized). Not sure I agree with the other. I do think the series helped screw with Randle’s head, at least partially leading to the next year’s disaster, and I’ll give you that Thibs’ failure to be creative in solving the playoff problem led to that failure and head screwing, but there’s no evidence I’ve seen that Randle felt that Thibs was to blame. Even if my circuitous hypothesis suggests Thibs played a part.
going in to next season – is josh hart going to be our starting small forward…and, is that okay?
I like him and quik off the bench, along with ihart and a new starting small forward – we’re a solid 8 deep…
Can you imagine the buzz in NYC,- if Zion as Knick doing windmill dunks pregame but not playing in a do or die game because he doesn’t feel like Zion yet?
“Thibs made zero adjustments to Randle being neutralized. You aren’t supposed to let your best player get neutralized and then if it looks like he is getting neutralized, it’s incumbent upon you to un-neutralize him.”
This. Isn’t. True.
He inserted Rose into the starting line-up in game 3. The series was tied 1-1 at that point. Putting Rose into the starting line up was supposed to give our offense a second reliable scoring option in the starting line-up and relieve pressure from Randle, which it did, but it still didn’t help Randle and it took our 6th man out of the second unit.
Other than that adjustment, what were Thibs’s options? No one seems to be able to answer this yet everyone blames him for not making adjustments. Point Forward Burke? Put Rose back in the second unit and start IQ, who had no PG experience at that point?
Play Theo Pinson?
Perform an excorcism on Randle so he didn’t hesitate to shoot 3’s when he was open?
Thibs won a playoff series with Nate Robinson as his 2nd leading scorer.
Funny thing Z-Man is I was legit rooting for the Raptors last night cause I figured they’d beat the Heat too.
Thanks for the link Cyber. I agree that JHart’s rebounding and ability to grab and go, along with IHart’s rebounding and passing, really allow Obi to play to his strengths and hide his weak defense and rebounding. I just think that unless he plays at least 20 minutes a game it’s kind of a waste. I would love to see him take some of RJ’s minutes in this series.
the common one made at the time was playing both obi and randle in the same lineup…. the other was banishing payton but that eventually happened but probably should have happened about 40 games prior…
i don’t personally fault him for it… but again… he probably should have tried it out to see if that would be an option come playoff time…..
listening to doc rivers on nba today…
he must be a handful for the organization…he says what he feels, which can be interesting at times…
still dogging his clippers team like he wasn’t there too…
“Can you imagine the buzz in NYC,- if Zion as Knick doing windmill dunks pregame but not playing in a do or die game because he doesn’t feel like Zion yet?”
Haha. No doubt. That Zion interview sounded like Zava’s dialogue from TED LASSO. I want no part of that guy on this team.
it’s a fair defense that we were just a pretty bad team in 20-21 with mitch hurt and quite a bit worse than atlanta, especially without randle shooting lights out. my biggest complaint from that series was our utter failure to really force the hawks to protect trae young on defense, especially given how anemic our offense looked. they hid him on bullock and we hid bullock behind the line as usual. at a minimum we should have been constantly screening with bullock to try to bring young into the action, yet we barely tried it. we also should have pivoted harder from the randle iso and run more pnr, especially with burks and randle or ideally double drag type stuff to include trae’s guy. almost everthing burks did was in iso or catch and shoot from a randle whirling kick out. not to say it would have made a huge difference, but when you are in the desert on offense and your opponent is starting one of the worst defenders in nba history you have to aim the spotlight.
example of one of the rare times we did it, despite taj looking like he is intentionally trying to fuck up our spacing. this is one of 2 screen assists bullock had in the series.
https://tinyurl.com/u2dvft94
Re Randle: “By league rule, the Knicks must release a Game 1 injury report by Friday at 5 p.m. (ET).”
I think it’s fair to say Thibs doesn’t run a lot of plays to target weak defenders. It’s not like I keep notes on it, but when a team is blatantly focusing on one of our players I notice it. I’ve even noticed examples of teams running a lot of picks to get one of our better defenders off a star player (I’ll keep the name anonymous 😂). I rarely see any of that from us. We run our ISOs against mismatches, but there doesn’t seem to be much targeting.
I think we can be fairly sure teams will be targeting Brunson.
we grill (rightfully so) julius a bunch for that last playoff performance, thibs was as bad if not worse…
even elf’s mom knew he was having coaching issues…
come to think of it, i don’t think our offense started clicking this season until brunson moved us more to a half court team (ihart and jhart are now moving us back to transition, at least with the second unit)…basically not until jalen told tom to just give him the ball…
We run our ISOs against mismatches but there doesn’t seem to be much targeting.
This is contradictory.
But since two years ago whenever we’ve tried OBI and Randle it’s been pretty bad, no?
He’s saying that we run iso if a poor defender happens to be guarding our guy, but we don’t force switches to get out guy on the poor defender.
We did do this in one of our games against Miami when RJ went off, forcing Herro onto him.
Neither Obi nor Randle can defend the paint. Obi should get some of RJ’s minutes.
Everyone should get a piece of RJ’s minutes until he’s down around 18-20 and becomes our secondary scorer off the bench (a role he’s pretty well-suited for) alongside IQ, making the way for Hart to start. I think that if Hart moved into the starting lineup, he would have a small adjustment period where he might decline slightly from his current production, but it wouldn’t be long before he started to thrive. I kind of prefer IQ remain a “microwave” off the bench. The only thing that would concern me would be if we started to hear rumblings that he was unhappy about his non-starting status (he actually wouldn’t be incorrect about deserving to be a starter), but that hasn’t happened yet and may never happen. He might actually enjoy his current role off the bench, and he doesn’t seem like much of a grumbler, anyway.
None of these things would happen in the playoffs, anyway. I’m talking about next season.
point of the story – thibs was facing termination before he would change…
it’s obvious he can cause his players to have affection/devotion – play hard…
but yeah, just two years ago, he had like the worst minutes rotations in the history of minute rotations…
i wouldn’t have minded us signing snyder as coach…
look milo, you got me hating on thibs now…
If thibs is gonna get outcoached by wes unseld jr…well..we got problems…
also, it’s funny that people think we are going to con masai into rj and some sorry picks for OG …any GM worth his salt knows what RJ is all about…
*** If thibs is gonna get outcoached by wes unseld jr…well..we got problems***
Thibs was 3-1 against the Wizards this season, but I don’t see what that has to do with JB Bickerstaff being a pretty good coach.
bickerstaff….unseld..whatever…the 40 yrs of sitting on an nba bench witht the word “coach” attached to your job title should amount to something at this stage…
and there is a reason they call it the “regular” season…nobody cares what you did …it’s did you bring home the bacon in the post season…
“We run our ISOs against mismatches but there doesn’t seem to be much targeting.
This is contradictory.”
It’s not.
You can give the ball to a guy that happens to have a good matchup that night and/or you can run picks to create switches that create mismatches. It’s the latter that we don’t do enough of.
A mismatch is targeting. This is so dumb.
Our offense is the 4th most efficient offense se in the league. If RJ was even an average 3 point shooter it’s be even higher.
Didn’t I read that the Knicks were the #6 offense EVER? That’s crazy. We’re reaching a point where the 2015 Warriors arrive via Time Machine and don’t even recognize the game anymore.
The Spencer Dinwiddie/Kyle Kuzma beef is perhaps the dumbest NBA beef ever.
Thanks, Brian, now I can never unsee Dinshittee…
Hahaha, saw it yesterday when one of Kuzma’s tweets was suggested to me, and immediately thought “is this for real or is this a refurbished tweet from April 1st?” 😀
What i took from this hilarious beef (when it’s dumb, it’s usually hilarious, right?) is that Michelle Beadle resembles a lot our very own Rebecca Haarlow. 😮
https://twitter.com/FanDuelTV/status/1646165484126060544
It’s a good point Donnie. I didn’t realize the Knicks were that high but I know the Kings were. Kings also have a tiny SRS for being the best offensive team of all time.
I am betting some smart stat person will come along with some sort of re-scaling mechanism.
But overall, three points are more than 2 and people have well and truly realized it up and down the line.
The weird part of being the 6th best offense ever, if that’s correct, is that we benefited relatively less from the 3pt revolution. All the teams ahead of us on offense this year are top-6 in efg% and as we know, the Knicks are kinda terrible at putting the ball in the basket, ranking 19th.
The others are also bottom-10 in ORB% while we’re 2nd.
The other mind-boggling stat is how good we are at not turning the ball over. Which seems totally counterintuitive, based on watching the games. Which I guess might be because we don’t often get beat in the patented jump-the-passing-lane type plays, but instead periodically jump-pass the ball directly to the other team so egregiously that it feels like it poisons whole stretches of the game.
Probably also helps that we don’t really pass that much — what are we, ranked 28th in assists? Which also seems wrong, as the team seems to share the ball so well this year, but again, the dangers of the eye test…