12/01/2024 10:43:07
12/01/2024 10:00:11
12/01/2024 09:49:00
12/01/2024 10:10:28
12/01/2024 10:32:02
12/01/2024 10:32:06
12/01/2024 09:13:14
12/01/2024 08:33:27
12/01/2024 08:10:00
12/01/2024 05:56:31
12/01/2024 05:13:00
12/01/2024 03:56:34
12/01/2024 04:00:00
12/01/2024 01:42:28
12/01/2024 00:50:40
12/01/2024 00:15:16
12/01/2024 00:12:57
11/30/2024 23:38:00
11/30/2024 23:33:37
66 replies on “Knicks Morning News (2024.12.01)”
From the NYPost story linked to above:
Lou Carnesecca has passed on. Loved those St John’s teams growing up.
RIP Lou Carnesecca,
I still root for the Johnnies, those Mullin/Jackson/Berry years were great…
Buon viaggio Luigi
After a lousy and depressing win against the Greensboro Swarm here comes another game we can’t lose against a depleted team on a 7-games losing streak (and 1-13 in the last 14).
Let’s see if they will finally learn to come out of the gates prepared…
Got to know Looie when I was in grad school at St. John’s and playing intramurals. He was a prince of a human being. The Ewing led Georgetown vs Mullin, Berry Johnnies were epic.
I guess Grimes’ knee is better.
Doogie’s Top 10 Teams at End of November 2024:
1. Thunder
2. Celtics
3. Cavaliers
4. Rockets
5. Grizzlies
6. Mavericks
7. Warriors
8. Magic
9. Knicks
10. Clippers
Doogie’s Top MVP Candidates at End of November 2024:
1. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander
2. Jayson Tatum
3. Steph Curry
4. Franz Wagner
5. Darius Garland
6. Devin Booker
7. Jaylen Brown
8. Jarrett Allen
Grimes is giving Dallas exactly what we need from Bridges. Grimes was supposedly unhappy with his role, but I hated that trade when we made it and I hate it even more now.
Grimes is too inconsistent to be a starter. However, he thinks hes a starter and wants starter type salary. Hence, he needed to be moved earlier than desired. I hated the trade too but have to trust that they tried to communicate and just didnt agree on his value as a player. Great kid.
Re: Mikal,
I wonder if him leading the league in minutes played is effecting his legs on his three and perhaps even his effort & focus on defense. Maybe the fix is just lower his minutes to 32 for ~ two weeks and see what happens.
Grimes scored 24 points against the Jazz. Whoop Dee Do.
Grimes is too inconsistent to be a starter if you need him to be 3rd option and score between 15-20 points a night. He’s perfect when you need high level perimeter defense, 3 point shooting and a little more here or there. Some of his inconsistency was Thibs playing him on bad knee last year and screwing up his entire season.
The fact Grimes is outplaying Bridges makes me quite salty. He looked like a broken man last year though so I can’t totally fault Leon.
Grimes per 36
14.4
6.6
2.6
3p% – 41%
TS% – 59.8%
On/off – +14.3
He may not sustain all that, but if Bridges was giving us that plus Grimes’ defense we might be battling the Celtics and Cavs for supremacy.
He was struggling to keep playing time but he was also playing hurt for a good portion of his time in NY last year and was basically shut down after he was traded when it was apparent he shouldn’t be playing.
No is saying he going to be some kind of star, but he’s doing exactly what we need from Bridges.
Strat, didn’t Jason Kid himself say like two weeks ago that he’s basically unplayable? – Kid had one good game. I like him & root for him too but let’s please be realistic this morning.
[Jason Kidd] on what Quentin Grimes has to do to play more: “He’s gotta make a shot, he’s gotta just relax. Understand we’re missing layups, we’re just doing stupid stuff right now and that tends to happen during the season so we’re not gonna panic over that… but he’s not a plus.”
Grimes 1-6 from the stripe. One can always find a hole…
I’m pretty sure that if an alien is landed on Earth today and you told him that the biggest bust of the NBA season (relatively to expectations) is leading the League in minutes per game, he’ll be able to guess the player’s coach in the blink of an eye… 😀
Sounds like “y’all gave me a one year deal so I’m not playing through shit.”
He really didn’t.
Look at his game log, he was actually playing pretty well off the bench when we traded him:
https://www.espn.com/nba/player/gamelog/_/id/4397014/type/nba/year/2024
That’s 17 pts, 5.5 rebs, 3 ast per 36 off the bench in January, playing with a bad knee, too.
You can and should “totally fault Leon” for throwing in the towel on a useful and cheap bench piece.
Grimes turned down a $27m offer from Dallas and bet on himself. he belives he’s am NBA starter and should be paid starter money. Hope he wins. I miss him…great memories from Cavs series at the free frow line
Grimes was rushing his shot when he was here. Looks like he’s no longer doing it. His layups also look more coordinated. I was impressed last week when he played us.
I admittedly got caught up in the initial pundit hype regarding the Grimes trade, but that new car smell wore off pretty quickly. Grimes is a good young player who stalled in his development here, no thanks to Thibs. The salty, bellowing approach is not for everyone.
And that’s what is starting to bug me more and more. I am envious of teams that have younger, more progressive-minded, relatable coaches. I’d rather lose some addditional games but see the young players play more.
The Bridges trade is looking like a train wreck. I just don’t get the thinking behind it at all. To make matters worse, he’s been our worst rotation player yet is leading the league in minutes played. I’m confident that he will improve, but it’s painful to watch right now, especially in consideration of the cost. I am also not nearly as giddy about watching KAT’s offensive game as others here, and his defense makes me puke.
So the vibes for me are a far cry from where they were from last January. Maybe when Bridges pulls his head out of his ass and Precious and Mitch come back we’ll see some of that grit return, but for now, this team looks way too easy to score against and not that hard for good defenses to slow the offense down enough to win critical possessions in crunch time.
We’ve had a clunky schedule thus far, so the next couple of weeks, including the IST stretch, will give us more info, especially once Precious returns. But this has not been the look I was hoping for prior to the two big trades, when we were fishing around for a decent low-cost C to replace iHart and still had all those picks to play with.
It was quite weird how Grimes went from one of Thibs’s stable of untouchable hustlebunnies to Thibs’s doghouse in the space of like two basketball months.
As uninspiring as things have been, we have a four game home stand coming up against New Orleans, Orlando, Charlotte, Detroit. We will probably be 15-8 by the end of the week.
Amen.
Charter member of the club since 2020.
Very few draft picks used, virtually all the drafted young players moved out, virtually all of the draft picks missing until 2032.
Yuck.
I agree with pretty much all of the above BUT:
If you had told me right after the KAT trade that this team would be 11-9 twenty games in, I would’ve said “oh that’s a little better than I expected considering the player turnover.”
And yeah I get all the reasons why we’ve been lucky to even have this good a record… but I just think the team still needs time. It may never be a championship-caliber team, but I think this group can be good and have a puncher’s chance of getting out of the 2nd round at least.
Given that’s where they were two years ago, it’s a pretty poor return on Leon’s massive investment in improvement.
I’d rather just be watching the 2023 team that smoked the Cavs with normal participation in the 2023 and 2024 drafts, the possessed draft picks all still in-house, and a Kenny Atkinson or a Jordi Fernandez coaching the team.
E, the difference for me is that I think Thibs was an ideal coach for what Leon was trying to accomplish: the express hybrid rebuild of both the roster and the franchise’s reputation. With all the hits and misses, it largely worked like a charm…until Randle blew out his shoulder.
Since then, not so much.
IMO, you continue to be 100% wrong on OG. That was a GREAT trade, and he is being paid in the ballpark of fair market value. I like RJ more than most here, but your love affair with him is beyond weird. If you feel compelled to lash out against the haters, here’s a sobering objective take for you.
And to be fair, I vehemently criticized Leon for even entertaining the Spida trade in summer 2023, it would have been a disastrous veering off of a thoughtful rebuild plan. But to subsequently use even more picks on a player like Mikal Bridges? I just don’t get it. Neither do I get reuniting Thibs with KAT. It just seems like a desperate attempt to keep up with the Celts before the second apron reared its head.
All I can do now is hold out hope that the Mikal Bridges from 2 or more years ago reappears and becomes a plus player on both ends. Until that happens, or some unexpected awesome move happens, this braintrust is on the clock, especially the coach.
Strat taking a victory lap on the Grimes trade made me revisit the talk at the time. Shocker: he didn’t say anything negative about it. The only negatives came from Ben, me, and iserp. (KnicksfaninNJ was worried about the coverage being so positive, since the media gets it wrong so much.) With Grimes being unable to play and unwilling to take a crap contract, it wasn’t a DUMB trade, but it wasn’t a GOOD trade either. My final line on it seems pretty right:
Unfortunately, that’s not looking great at the moment…and I was as loud as anyone else about how great a trade for Mikal would be. Unlike Hubie, I think we should wait until the end of the year to evaluate him – but that could be a mistake, too.
Either way, didn’t like moving Grimes, still believe he has excellent upside. Seems like he needed a reality check that maybe we just couldn’t give him alone.
There was never much there there with Leon. He wasn’t and isn’t as obviously dreadful as an Isiah, so people were reading in a bunch of stuff to what he was doing and not doing that wasn’t there.
He hoarded and incinerated draft picks to ultimately acquire Mikal Bridges. That’s his legacy. There was never really any reason to believe he wouldn’t ultimately wind up there. Only hope.
As for E, as usual he derailed that conversation into talk of how DDV wasn’t a Ruff Rydah and would shit the bed in the playoffs. About as correct as his argument that the OG trade was a disaster.
For me, the measuring stick is where we were in January, post-OG and pre-Grimes trades. You have to factor in losing iHart as a sunk cost, it was going to happen no matter what. But that could have been largely remedied with a couple of unprotected picks at most.
Not sure if there is a single non-draft day transaction I am actually happy about since that time. The KAT trade was a very solid move on paper, but he continues to be not my kind of player. I’m keeping an open mind, but he’s still pretty far from winning me over.
But it’s the 5 unprotected picks (including MIL’s pick in that context) and the pick swap for a non-superstar that dwarfs every prior blunder, even drafting Obi over Hali. There is no justification for such a trade, zero. There must have been, or will be, many ways to use those picks that made more sense. THAT’S what I call an incineration!
There’s a plausible defense, I suppose, for Leon in the “January Knicks” but there was never any chance it was going to end there, therefore IMO the defense fails.
There’s also a plausible aesthetic defense for the January Knicks over these Knicks, but once things turn to aesthetics, everyone has their own tastes.
I still believe that this team is not a finished product, and that even as is our ceiling is very high, perhaps a tweak or two away (and some injury luck with the C’s and whoever wins the West) from NBA champion. It’s just that making those tweaks would have been a lot easier if we had a couple of tradable firsts still in the holster. Now there will need to be some magic involved.
“There’s a plausible defense, I suppose, for Leon in the “January Knicks” but there was never any chance it was going to end there, therefore IMO the defense fails.”
There was a plausible defense, I suppose, for the 2012 Presti Thunder. Then he ditched James Harden to make space for Kendrick Perkins and lost Kevin Durant for nothing. It only took a mere 13 years for him to rebuild a championship-level franchise with unlimited flexibility.
Still waiting on Daryl Morey to hoist a trophy, and he has had way more swings at it than Leon ever will. He handed the keys to D’Antoni, Thibs’ alter ego. Now he’s gone and guess what? Houston is pretty good!
Favorite line from the Barrett piece:
“Even as he reliably averaged around 20 points per game, his usage was informed by a lack of imagination, the basketball equivalent of rewatching The Office because you can’t be bothered to scour Netflix for something better.”
Z-Man, I’m going to call cap (as my son used to say) on just one thing you’ve said so far.
“I’d rather lose some additional games but see the young players play more.”
I’m sure you believe this with all your heart, and part of me agrees — but considering we’re 20 — no, 19 — games into a season with a bunch of new starters, including one who is crapping the bed, and we have a winning record despite that, and every loss (and most wins) still results in shouts on this site of “fire Thibs!” and “trade X and Y!” and “Z should never have been picked up!” (not you, player Z) and on and on.
That’s obviously and clearly not all on you, but saying you’d rather lose a few more games with a different configuration may need a slight reality check.
We all get this. But considering we were losing iHart no matter what, Leon had to do something, and I think most felt positive when the Mikal trade went down. Hopefully he can at least recoup some trade value by next summer, if he simply cannot fit what the team is doing. That should bring back at least a Grimes type and/or a 1st or two. It won’t kill us just like the Dejounte move didn’t kill Atlanta.
I suspect Bridges is pressing too hard to prove he was worth the price paid for him. As a fifth starter, he’s good, and he is Thibs’ best option. But the price paid for a player has a big effect on how fans, including us, think about a player. We can’t discuss him without thinking about all the draft picks we spent. It was the same for Bobby Portis. His high salary made him unpopular in NY. Never mind that it was a one year contract. As soon as he was underpaid in Milwaukee, everyone liked him again.
I’m going to try and separate my opinions of the trade (clearly an overpay), from my opinions of the player. As a player, his shooting is better than the fifth best starter on most teams and that’s ok with me. In terms of defense he’s not playing up to his reputation, but that could improve. To put it another way, if we hired him as a free agent for his current salary, I think the grumbles would be quieter.
Being an old school Big East fan with the Hoyas, I have profound respect and admiration for Lou Carnesecca. Rest well, sir.
99!
!!!
I think about 75% of our flaws boil down to the fact that a guy we traded a fuck ton for is sucking on both sides of the court. If Mikal was playing to the back of his basketball card we’d probably be in the 14-5 range with reinforcements on the way.
Maybe there’s a little more juice left to squeeze out of the “gelling” stone but I actually think KAT has been integrated pretty damn well. The reason Mikal isn’t “gelling” is because you can’t “gel” when you’re playing terribly.
You can make a bull or bear case here. On one hand, you can posit a la Josh Hart that the most recent 19 games are an outlier in a 7 year career. Simple yet compelling.
On the other, 19 games is genuinely long time for a high-ish usage player to go into slump. Maybe more worryingly, there are bad indicators that go beyond “slump” i.e. the fact that a 6’7″ guy is taking 5% of his shots at the rim and gets to the line and has attempted 2 free throws in the last 5 games.
It’s hard for me to make any kind of prediction because I genuinely can’t think of an analogous situation. Sure, lower usage and/or less consistent guys like DDV and Randle see variations in their play fairly frequently. But a guy having 7 seasons all within a dependable range of production just flopping in his 8th is a new one for me.
The hardest thing about Mikal (outside of watching him) is coming up with a plausible hypothesis for what’s going on. As Noble says, it’s sort of unique, at least in my experience as well. It does not seem to be a lingering injury. I struggle to believe he’s cooked at his age. My best effort is a combo of pressing way too hard (combined with not knowing how to fit in) with a still-busted three point shot.
It’s a little Ben Simmons-y. Which is scary. If I was Thibs, I’d have him play one-on-one over and over again against Hart. And maybe take a point off (and yell at him in that voice) for any mid-range jumpers. And when he’s not doing that, show him endless game film of Hart going to the rack. And tell him to “Just do that.”
Any time remaining, shoot threes from up top.
I’m mostly kidding, but sort of not.
Wasn’t the back problems that derailed Simmons’ career?
I still believe that Mikal will be a useful player, maybe he’s working on too many things at the same time and that makes him now look like a mess. I’ll wait for the playoffs to ask for him to be traded. Some players play great and impress us and then they fade away in the playoffs, maybe Mikal is the other way around.
We played a young inexperienced Cavs team. They’re a very very different team now with maturing 4 all-star level players.
Minus iHart (always knew that we were gonna loose him although no one believed me) + whom are you willing to pay and ride out the next 4yrs with – Randle? – IQ as your back up guard? or RJ? – good luck getting our of the first round with that team?
I think the KAT for Randle may end up being Leons best trade.
Yeah I don’t find any of the recent non-Mikal counterfactuals compelling.
-We’d be worse with RJ + IQ instead of OG
-iHart was gone the second OKC backed up the brinks truck
-KAT >>> Randle + DDV by leaps and bounds
The Grimes for Bogey/Burks trade was short sighted, but that was the whole point! We traded on some future equity because we felt there was a non-zero chance a healthy January 2024 Knicks team could win a championship. Whenever those kinds of trade do not in fact result in a championship, they’re easy to bash in hindsight. I ain’t gonna participate in that though–you trade Quentin Grimes for short-term help if your title odds aren’t 0%.
Also, worth noting Bogey being signed for an extra year facilitated the Mikal trade, which reads as a searing indictment at the moment but was a clear benefit ex ante.
The argument that a team couldn’t get out of the first round when in the real world it already did get out of the first round is one I’ve never found particularly compelling.
In terms of age/inexperience, Jarrett Allen, Darius Garland, and Donovan Mitchell are all older than RJ Barrett.
That Cavs team is seen as “inexperienced” because the Knicks spanked them. It’s virtually the same team as today’s. Classic question begging.
This is a good thread on the decline of Mikal’s defense.
https://x.com/_analyKnicks/status/1862967974186860769
Two 1st round exits later…they’re different players experience wise.
The 2023 playoff Knicks would be, too.
“We’d be worse with RJ + IQ instead of OG”
Maybe literally right now. Toss-up or lower as we move on. Playoff defense was worse last year, team is underachieving now.
“KAT >>> Randle + DDV by leaps and bounds”
You’ll get a lot of argument around here on that one from “January Knicks” devotees.
The “bear case” also has to incorporate the virtually inevitable OG and/or KAT injuries. They’ve turfed their depth since ’23 and have little to cover for those guys.
I’m going to try to refresh everyone’s memory on thiis. I may not have perfect recall on this, but this is what I remember.
He started off a little slow and was fighting for the starting job.
He started playing a little better, hurt his knee, went back to the locker room, then came back to play later in the game.
He was struggling with that same knee issue the rest of his time with the Knicks.
He was traded to Detroit.
They tried playing him, but almost immediately concluded he should not be playing with that bum knee and shut him down.
I assume he came into this season healthy again. He got off to a slow start but is playing very well now.
I remember us all being super excited when Leon pulled off Mikal Villanova for Bojan +future late first round picks, – now I’m just happy he declined extension. Still a TBD but far from a sure thing.
There’s no assurance whatsoever that the ’29 and ’31 ones are going to be late-round. You can pretty much say the same thing for ’27. It was a terrible trade; all that’s left now is to try to salvage at least something from it.
IMO he should be putting most of his energy into playing defense.
IMO Thibs should reduce his minutes, but he’s probably too thickheaded.
Fewer minutes might have a positive impact on both his shot and defense. He’s on record BEFORE all this saying on some podcast that when he increased his role on offense it was tough to keep defending at the same level. So if he said that out loud BEFORE this decline, he’s screaming that maybe 30-35 minutes would be better on both sides. Deuce is doing a terrific job. So it might be a double benefit. Deuce is playing better than Bridges anyway and Bridges may improve.
Add to what you wrote, “He expressed some marginal disdain at being stuck in the corner, and Thibs put him in the doghouse, and then he was traded.”
Thibs’s emotional volatility on the matter was no good. Overly reliant on the hustlebunny Quentin brought, including in the playoffs, then chateau bow-wow, all in the span of a few basketball weeks.
That’s actually quite lame. Should have been taken into account pre-trade (if it was said pre-trade.)
Given what we’ve seen of Mikal’s D, one naturally wonders if his rep on that end has been inflated since the get-go. Or, as is quite possible, he’s materially declined athletically, and with the decline has gone the D. It of course is Leon’s job to try to anticipate these things, though it isn’t always easy.
I agree, but i don’t think Thibs will do it. I think he believes in what Mikal is working on and also thinks that the most he plays through it the better. I guess we’ll have to endure this and hope for the best.
Right now, our games are really annoying to watch. I don’t like the games even when we win. LOL. I miss last year’s team. Although we knew we didn’t have a good chance to go far in the postseason, those games were epic.
I don’t think anyone anywhere would argue that the Bridges trade was good value (even before what we’ve seen so far), but it was a defensible trade IF we were getting the Mikal we thought we or at least they thought we were getting.
Focusing on value is part of how you accumulate the assets you need to eventually put the best possible player at each position. That’s the early part of the process whether you are rebuilding via draft or via draft, free agency and trade.
Once you’ve accumulated enough of those assets and ultimately a few “core players” your standards for value can start declining. At that point you are focused almost exclusively on finding the best possible player available for the remaining positions you need.
At that point, the core was Mitch, Randle, OG, DDV and Brunson.
Upgrading DDV to Mikal was projected to take us to another level because imo and most other opinions Mikal was clearly the better two way player over his career. They overpaid to do it, but they thought that was close to the final piece.
What happened after was Mitch had a setback, they desperately needed a C, have always been interested in Towns anyway and made that move to upgrade C.
The combination of Mikal’s defense falling off a cliff and putting Towns at C created a “fit” problem defensively. That’s where we are now. What they did is defensible. It just didn’t work because Mikal’s defense has been bad. But we still have to get a look at the team when Precious and Mitch are back and we can hope Mikal’s defensive struggles can be worked out. If not, we have an issue.
I believe it was said after the trade but before the season started. He was basically echoing what a lot of two way stars have said about the impact of getting the toughest defensive assignments and also being asked to carry a big burden on offense. It’s really tough.
It’s a piss poor argument with no I Hart or Mitch or Precious. Imagine the defense and offense with Randle at the 5 for 40 MPG…
I’ve mentioned Mikal’s defensive decline and speculated on his athletic decline as well. It’s a real kick in the pants that Grimes ranks 7th in screen navigation. Deuce ranking 2nd should expedite Mikal’s move to the bench.
Weird that Mikal was actually pretty good against ball screens last year, unless it’s a scheme issue.
another crazy beautiful day in so cal…
some of y’all worry a bit too much at times…definitely think waaaay too much about basketball 🙂
shit, i read most of it though, so…
sound therapy, intentional breathing, and counting (one one-thousand, two one-thousand, three one-thousand, etc.) works best for me to manage anxious feelings…
out doing some gardening today…all geared up in compression gear, brace and whatnot…
something about the feel and smell of healthy dirt just does it for me, to that point – salinas, california has some of the prettiest dirt on earth…more than once i’ve pulled over by a farm around highway 68 just to get a closer look…
gotta be honest, these days i’ll need to rest up a day or two after spending some hours digging around in dirt…
i think about doc bob (knick fan in celtic land) a lot…the years and miles on the road, just amaze me…like those monks in what was once tibet, sitting out in the snow with no worries and just the power of their mind…
plus 60 now, my body definitely feeling different…late 40’s noticed the aging stuff, 60 +, and it is present daily…
i have no idea how the knicks are going to perform game to game…usually in the past, good or bad, i had an idea…
right now we are a little better than a .500 club…so good wins and bad losses here they come…
the fixation on mikal is: necessary 😛
took a moment to think of the right word…
dude is not smooth and silky, he’s sleepy and slow…shorten his rotation minutes and give him caffeine…
maybe never going to the rim, or really bumping in to other players much, is how he stays healthy enough to play game after game…
no, i’m not calling him soft…
E rebranding as The Quentin Grimes and 2022-2023 New York Knicks Supporter is hilarious anyone who doesn’t have the memory of a goldfish