[CBS Sports] – Tue, 24 Sep 2024 14:58:44 GMT
2024-25 NBA odds preview, picks: Knicks duo among intriguing names in Sixth Man of the Year field
[MLB.com] – Tue, 24 Sep 2024 23:18:54 GMT
Knicks’ Hart pays tribute to great-uncle Elston Howard with first pitch, tour
[New York Daily News] – Tue, 24 Sep 2024 15:44:10 GMT
Ex-Knick Michael Beasley believes he should have played point guard
[Raptors Rapture] – Tue, 24 Sep 2024 21:02:54 GMT
Injury update may provide Raptors with the perfect trade partner
[Newsday] – Wed, 25 Sep 2024 08:58:00 GMT
Knicks star Julius Randle helping to give back to Bronx charter school
[Empire Sports Media] – Tue, 24 Sep 2024 18:21:46 GMT
Knicks $212.5M forward healthy with training camp around the corner
[Sports Illustrated] – Wed, 25 Sep 2024 06:15:47 GMT
Reunion The New York Knicks Should Consider
48 replies on “Knicks Morning News (2024.09.25)”
Some thoughts about yesterday:
1) I have to say having Strat being the advocate for win or bust wasn’t on my bingo card. Not at all your style, Strat. š
2) And having Hubert at the same time being the one trying to explain us how this can be good… man, is the world coming to an end or what? Maybe they just switched user+pass and are posting as the other. š
3) I think RJ is a great kid and i’m still rooting for him, it’s just that OG is a lot better for us and i can’t understand why RJ putting up good numbers will turn the trade into a bad one.
About the season, i’ll be very happy if we reach the ECF. And ecstatic if we go further.
If we don’t reach the ECF:
āOh my god. You asked me the same question last year, Eric … okay? Do you get a promotion every year? In your job? No, right? So every year you work is a failure? Yes or no? No. Every year you work, you work towards something, towards a goal ā which is to get a promotion, to be able to take care of your family, provide a house for them, or take care of your parents. You work towards a goal ā itās not a failure. Itās steps to success. I donāt want to make it personal. Thereās always steps to it. Michael Jordan played 15 years, won six championships. The other nine years was a failure? Thatās what youāre telling me. Iām asking you a question, yes or no? Exactly. So why you ask me that question? Itās the wrong question.ā
Cyber en fuego š Go Knicks!
Being a Mets fan, I dislike but respect the Yankees- but that Hart story is dope. I had no idea Elston Howard was his great-uncle. Hart was meant to be a Knick. Clearly lol
I also think the ECF is the standard for the year. If we don’t make it there, people will be fairly disappointed.
There are windows and there are windows, you know? We assembled Brunson, Bridges, and Anunoby; not LeBron, Wade, and Bosh. I don’t think it’s an institutional failure to leave the center position as it is because even with “a legitimate starter” we’re still a dark horse behind two heavy favorites.
We’ve likely got 4 years of being in the 85th percentile and I think the hope is that in one of them, the right trade materializes and things break your way. In the others, you’re just going to be one of the best teams in the NBA that didn’t win.
I wouldn’t characterize an ECF ceiling in year two of the window with pretty much all the assets out the door as success. Indeed, I’m not entirely sure what the difference is between that and “purgatory,” and whatever that difference is seems tiny and immaterial.
Reasonable minds may differ.
Those of you under 70 that never saw Elston Howard in his prime really have no idea how good he was. Didn’t get to the Bigs until he was 26 after spending two years in the military during the Korean War.
When he got to the Yankees, they had a pretty good catcher named Yogi who was 3 time MVP. Howard was athletic enough to play left field in the spacious death valley at the old Yankee stadium where it was 457 to left-center.
Eight time all star and hit > .300 three times and finished second in the league to Norm Cash batting .348! What would he get paid today?
One of the few guys in sports that not a single person ever uttered a bad word about in any context.
Fun.
Btw no one said ECF is our ceiling. Both Cyber and I said that is the level of achievement we would be happy with.
In addition to endless hours of entertainment, the biggest difference between this and purgatory is we have a distinctly nonzero chance of winning it all. We are not favorites, but it’s possible within reasonable outcomes.
If the playoffs break for us the way it did for Boston last year, we’re having a parade. (Then again, no one has ever gotten as lucky as last year’s Celtics team… seriously what a crock of shit their run was… and Dolan’s Razor is real so of course the Eastern Conference took a huge jump and right now is probably better than it’s been in the past 30 years… but I digest.)
Side note: remember when someone (probably Swift) once said the 2022 Knicks could win a title and then Noble described a hilarious scenario where every top NBA player got injured consecutively? THAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED FOR THE CELTICS LAST YEAR!!
They avoided all three of the best teams in the East because Embiid, Giannis, Lillard, Randle, and OG got hurt.
Then they played Miami without Butler.
Mitchell went down when the series was tied at 1
Halliburton went down in game 1.
Luka played on a bum knee the whole series.
HOW DOES THAT HAPPEN? The odds must have been 10 million to 1.
That team has a championship that you can’t take away, but IMHO all the questions about Tatum and Brown, their mental toughness, and the likelihood that they will fold in big spots remain.
“They avoided all three of the best teams in the East because Embiid, Giannis, Lillard, Randle, and OG got hurt.”
Given that Boston was clearly the best team all season long and marched through most of the playoffs without KP, I don’t think there’s much to the argument they would have had any real trouble with the Bucks, Knicks, or especially the 6ers.
Now if it had been the Wolves or the Nuggets in the Finals? That’s a legit question.
Iād have preferred the asset hoard style of team building, which we will never do here because reasons.
We did the hybrid method instead, and you can see the limitations of that strategy. We have nice players up and down the roster, some even on excellent bargain contracts. But we donāt have any flexibility left, we had to pay market value for too many of the players, and so weāre not as good as the teams that either did slightly better us at hybrid-ing (Boston) or executed the asset hoard well (OKC).
We came pretty close though! If Hartenstein had decided to come back on a deep discount just because he loves us so much, weād be right up there in the top tier. And who knows, maybe that hole at C gets filled in some unexpected way, at which point you could consider us top tier again.
The haterz have been reduced to āyeah but weāre not the odds on favorite to win a titleā and āRJ Barrett might put up efficient scoring numbers as an off-ball scorerā which is some pretty weak tea. Weāve come a ways.
https://x.com/TheDunkCentral/status/1838706193411285123
What we’re seeing is the limitations of poor asset management and hating your draft picks. If we had hybrid without those unforced errors there would currently be no limits. I’m still pretty high on the hybrid method, just have to execute better. And I still think he has enough left to make one more move, so I wouldn’t write it off yet.
Another late season dud for the Mets in Atlanta last night. Not sure why the Mets thought that moving up Severino in the rotation was a good idea, since this is already the most innings in a season he’s pitched in 6 years. But, that doesn’t really matter when the bats are silent. Not having Lindor and McNeil against tough righties hurts.
Good news is Arizona continues to lose, and now the Mets get to face a lefty. Maybe Sale is due for a bad game?
Echoing JK, I also would’ve preferred a full Presti, but we wound up with the 3rd/4th best title odds in the whole ass NBA and it would be utterly fraudulent of me to claim that falls short of whatever expectations of front offices I’ve articulated here in the past. Teams with those odds win the finals all the time, and we’re set up to have at least 2-3 seasons in that range. It’s an objectively enviable situation.
Any individual moves can and should be critiqued (we should’ve drafted Jalen Johnson, among other things), but the odds themselves per se falsify the idea that the process as a whole was some kind of failure. You can literally just respond to any E post with a link to the odds and move on with your day (or don’t respond at all unless he makes a falsifiable prediction, as per the E Rule).
It can be nice when a national media member validates your allegedly half-baked ideas but I don’t know how I feel about Perk being the one.
I will note that he is the 3rd 2008 Celtic (after Garnett and Pierce) to predict that everybody’s sleeping on Julius Randle at the 5.
Methinks this is a bit harsh. The current regime took over 4 years ago with literally the worst roster in the league and through their method now are tied for third with PHL for third fav to win the title per Fan Duel. I’m not sure how that can be stated as poor asset management. Perfect? Obviously not. Hate draft picks? I don’t think they hate draft picks, just they look at them as an asset to be used in one way or another.
Their performance is at least one standard deviation above the mean expectation… That’s not Red on Roundball GM ing…. but pretty effin good.
I thought he took over a roster with a latent All NBA forward who finished 8th in the MVP voting.
I would agree with this. It can coexist with poor asset management, though.
Hybridizing is much easier when you get gifted the #3 and #1 picks in consecutive drafts š
OKC’s asset horde worked because Shai morphed from a nice rookie (6th in ROY votting with a-0.5 BPM) to an MVP. Nobody saw that coming.
They also got lucky in the lottery because they moved up from 4th to second in the 2022 lottery to draft Chet in a two top player draft.
Hording assets and drafting is nice, but you need a lot of luck. A lot of teams horde assets or drafted consistently high and got bupkis.
15 guys on a roster. The roster Leon took over was 21-45… which sucks by any metric.
I suppose one can define “poor asset management” any way you like, but when you take a bottom 3-ish roster and morph it into a top 3-ish roster in 4 seasons when none of your player are >30, IMHO you did a pretty nifty job, you aren’t guilty of poor asset management. IMHO.
If Leon gets credit for the Brunson delta, Presti gets credit for the SGA delta. Gotta play it straight.
Is jumping from 21-45 with a bunch of cap space, two extra 1s, and a latent star to back to back second round exits to lower seeds four years out and clearing out pretty much all your assets “a full standard deviation” above expectations?
Seems like quite a stretch.
Expectations for the Knicks? Yeah, well above them, we’ve been a joke franchise for 20 years.
No, but getting Jalen Brunson for $20M in cap space is.
Bob thinks “the team moved forward, ergo it must have managed its assets well” is logical. It isn’t.
One great move can move you forward, and Leon made one of the best moves in NBA history. So he surpassed expectations even while pissing away a ton of assets.
Steven Adams has been cleared for camp by the Rockets. Just sayin….
Nope… I can tell you what Bob thinks…. he thinks when you go from bottom three to top three, you’ve jumped 22-24 teams in 4 years, and I think that’s a ducky performance. In the range of options wrt to managing assets, I think they’ve overall done a wonderful job.
I defy any of you to tell me with a straight face if 4 years ago when Leon took the job someone told you on the eve of the 24/25 season the Knicks would be tied for third choice to win the title, you wouldn’t have thought Leon did a tremendous job. And he doesn’t have a roster of aging stars. He has a full roster of players on the right side of their prime.
My understanding of purgatory has been you are good team but with no shot of winning it all, capped out and with little to no youthful upside.
Maybe that’s more like hell than purgatory given there is not hope.
That’s not us.
We are a C away from being in a group of legit contenders just behind Boston and OKC. We have that C, but he’s constantly hurt and may have had a setback in his most recent rehab. So we have to figure out a way of solidifying that position. But we do have tradeable assets. We have a couple of protected 1st rounders (that have very good value to their original teams and some value to others) , 2 first rounders of our own, Deuce, Precious, Mitch, Dadiet and some salary filler. So we can get to heaven.
just saw a video of some enormous hailstones falling on a suburb of OKC yesterday, I hope the iHart’s marriage survives the next 2 years.
Are still talking about asset management and hybrid method after the season we had last year and the addition of Mikal Bridges?
Every management team is going to make a few moves that don’t work out perfectly because no one has perfect foresight. A lot of what happens in the draft, with injuries, with players that are available in free agency or trade, how players develop etc.. seems somewhat random. We knew I-Hart was a solid addition, but who would have thought he’d show so much when Mitch went down it was a mistake to not sign him for longer?
The goal should be to keep getting better within a long term strategy that makes sense. As long as you make a few really good moves and no really bad moves, you will do fine. The standard can’t be perfection.
Your entire post was a non sequitur, and it’s extremely disingenuous to substitute “did a good job” for “managed assets well.”
No more food for this troll.
I, um, do not always agree with bobneptue, but this is on point.
I’ll take it a step further: anyone who specifically predicted this would’ve been written off as an irrational optimist, and I know this because I probably would’ve participated in the writing off.
I will reiterate that people can and should critique specific moves and/or non-moves. Look at the back of my Knickerblogger baseball card–I have done so many, many times myself just solely in the Leon era.
But a broad “this whole approach has failed” position is just not tenable anymore, sorry. It has been falsified objectively.
When you hoard a fuckton of assets, you have better odds that one or two of them turn out to be super awesome. I mean sure, you gotta do more than just hoard the assetsā you have to know how to draft well. The upside of course is huge. The Thunder found star players in the draft and via trade, and also found highly useful complementary players, some of whom are rotation players and some who were flipped for other valuable pieces, like Giddey/Caruso.
Nobody ever said that the tank/asset hoard IN AND OF ITSELF is some sort of magic bullet. Itās the better way to do a rebuild though, because IF YOU DO IT RIGHT you end up with a very long window of contention and a lot of flexibility.
But if we had done the hybrid right, that would be true of us, too.
We had Jalen Johnson in our hands and chose to make a terrible trade instead.
We had Jalen Williams in our hands and chose to make a terrible trade instead.
We traded for an extra lottery pick, drafted Jalen Duren, and then gave him to Detroit to dump 1 year of Kemba Walker.
That’s not a requisite of the hybrid method. That’s just a series of incomprehensibly stupid decisions.
If we simply didn’t give them Jalen Williams for those worthless Fugazi firsts, the hybrid team would be ahead of the asset hoard team right now.
It wasn’t the method that put us behind the Thunder. It was the mistakes.
The Thunder didnāt nail every single transaction they made either. They drafted some guys that havenāt really panned out. Thereās a greater margin of error when you have more assets to spend though.
They amassed a lot of darts, and enough of those hit the board. Theyāre STILL sitting on a ton of assets, while also possibly having the best active roster in the NBA. They have four first rounders and a pick swap in NEXT YEARāS draft. Two more in 2026. Two more and another pick swap in 2027.
Some racket they got going on over there.
We didn’t need to nail them all, either. Just one. So we had a big margin for error, too.
The thing that really separates us from the Thunder is not that we hybrid, it’s that they fleeced us. They got one of the 20 best players in the NBA, and we got Fugazi.
ESPN came out with their annual future NBA Power Rankings and Knicks are 3rd behind OKC and Boston. They were 8th before last season.
oh do I long for the days of sumptuous cap space and oddles of draft assets – sez no fan of a young 50 win team…
no, we are not in as good as shape as the celts, thunder, or arguably 1 or 2 other teams…
we are no doubt in it to win it though this season…let the good times roll…
Blah, Blah, Blah, Hubie… This is a results oriented business and Leon’s results going from bottom 3 to top 3 in 4 seasons w/o a top 6 pick is well above expectations.
Did they make some sub optimal moves… certainly. I rank his performance as way above expectation generally… B+ to A-. Grade his asset allocation any way you might, but the only crew you love more is OKC and much of that was blind luck moving up in the lottery from 4 to 2 to have Chet fall into their lap and the 1-1,000 shot of a nice rookie morphing into a young MVP. Way to play results.
we missed you E š
and, for the record, I meant to say “odles”…it’s Swiss for: a whole lotta and your basketball ideas are bizarre…all in one word…
you are about to have a very quiet and lonely season of despair senor…
Cool but the actual argument was that the Knicksā hybrid method could have outperformed the Thunderās asset hoard method with better execution.
Maybe address this to E next time bc your points had nothing to do with anything I was talking about.
Yes… any reasonable method executed perfectly with 100% hindsight could outperform anything a human might do. Excellent point. In other breaking news, if my mother had balls, she’d be my father.
I’ve never had a stronger love hate relationship than I have with the 2024 Yankees.
As a baseball atheist, can someone clue me in on all the Yankee doom and gloom this season? Theyāre a top-2 team in the AL. What more do you want?
Boone sucks and 7/9th of the lineup is pretty easy to keep off base if youāre a good pitcher.
When I look at box scores of Yankee games, their opponents always seem to have a lot of lousy hitters too (at least by batting average). But Iāve only looked at a small sample. Has the analytical emphasis on walks and home runs driven batting averages down across the league?
The Yankees lead the American League in runs scored and are 4th in batting average. Lest you think that is because they play in a hitter friendly park, they are tied for the MLB lead with a 117 wRC+. That is park adjusted. They have the best record in the American League.
MLB hitters are batting .243 this season.
This is just woeful to a guy who grew up enjoying the likes of Tony Gwynn and Paul Molitor.