Knicks Morning News (2024.12.27)

hubert, congrats on seeing a great game from great seats with your young son. Brings back memories!

I have very mixed feelings about today’s game. On one hand, I do think that games are often won or lost based on random 3pt variance. On the other, it is a marvel to see how shooting skill has evolved.

But the defending champs who are favored to repeat are shooting 55% of its shots from beyond the arc and only hitting 36.5% of them. That is not aesthetically pleasing to me, being that it largely has come at the expense of the mid-range and post game, which I love to watch.

For me, there’s an aesthetic break-even point somewhere in the 30-40% range for 3’s. Jalen Brunson’s offensive game is a microcosm of what I enjoy most about basketball. At 6’1″ he scores in every aesthetically pleasing way imaginable…he’s taking 36% of his shots from 3 and hits 42% of them. 50% of his shots are neither at the rim nor from 3.

Yet league-wide 3PAr is 42.4% with a make rate of 36%. That’s a TS% of .540. That’s not ideal. It also suggests that Brunson should abandon his midrange game and take more 3’s, which I would hate to see.

I would love to see some “Brunsonification” of the rules. Not sure what the best way to accomplish this…whether moving the line out, or maxing how many threes a team can take or make, or allowing more hand-checking…but that’s how I see it.

“What I mean is that there is so much overlap between Bridges/Hart and Bridges/OG that it seems like it’s impossible for all three to be effective together.”

Is there any more overlap than there is with Tatum, Brown, White, and Holiday?

That all of Bridges, OG and Hart do some of the same things well is a great thing, not a bug. It’s a healthy Venn diagram, with enough individual differences to make their similarities a non-issue.

The bug continues to be how to hide Brunson’s and KAT’s issues on the defensive end. So far, the answer of having 3 good-great defensive wings on the floor with them has had mixed results. Would the problem be solved by whatever defensive PF-C you could get for Mitch and one of those 3 wings? I doubt it, as it would cost something either in the starting lineup or in bench depth. At the end of the day, with Mikal playing well, we look a lot more cohesive and a lot less vulnerable. Let’s see how January goes, and in a larger sense, how the season and playoffs go. Leon shouldn’t block incoming calls or stop making them, but let’s see how much juice is left to squeeze out of this orange before passing judgment and tinkering in a way that resets the gelling clock. January should be very telling in terms of the necessity for pre-deadline moves.

Maybe I’m in the minority here but I don’t really engage in any of the “tweet-style” social media, including tiktok, instagram, or the like. My go-to is yahoo.com. It has a daily list of links from both sides of the political spectrum. I pick and choose what I read, and try to do it in a way that keeps me as unbiased and well-informed as possible. I also look at the NYTimes, NYPost, FoxNews, and CNN every day and try to flesh out the spin from substance.

Personally, I think raw shooting percentage is a lousy metric to use in a vacuum when evaluating the aesthetics of the game.

This should be especially true for us Knicks fans who place a high value on defense and the lunchpail ethic.

To me, there is aesthetic value to grinding out a defensive possession to force a tough, contested 2, and there is aesthetic value to making that tough 2 over whatever the defense throws at you. Today’s offensives along with rules that heavily favor offensive players have made those kinds of defensive possessions far less a part of the game, and in my opinion, to its detriment. Not that the late 90’s was beautiful basketball, but I loved the aesthetic of a lot of those low-scoring bloodbaths between us and the Heat/Pacers/Bulls. But obviously things are never going back to those days, or even worse, to the early 2000’s.

Again, guys like Brunson and SGA epitomize the way of playing I find most aesthetically pleasing. They would have done what they do in any era, maybe at a lower 3PAr but not much. A guy like Bernard King, who I think was the most exciting offensive player the Knicks ever had, would still be great in today’s game, but that back-to-the-basket in-your-face post-up game would probably be swapped out for facing the basket stuff.

Opinions vary but Bernard had a legit argument for MVP that year. Definitely my favorite single season offensive performance. Dude was glorious to root for, and single-handedly almost dethroned an all-time great Celtics team.

Not defunct at all. Just not drunk on Fox News MAGA kool aid.