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31 replies on “Knicks Morning News (2025.01.11)”
Here are two images that I think are important to keep in mind.
Here are the current Eastern Conference standings…
And here are the NBA champions of the last 16 years or so (however many I could fit without the type getting too small. Adding more teams just adds to my point, so it’s not like I’m trying to hide anything here)….
Notice something? In the past twenty-nine NBA Finals, the NBA championship was won by a team who was in the top three in their conference.
The Knicks are currently in the top three in the Eastern Conference.
Pathetic blowouts suck, because, well, you know, they’re pathetic, but they don’t mean shit in the long run, just winning enough to put yourself in a position to win in the playoffs is all that matters. The Knicks might not do that. Maybe they’ll fall apart this month. I doubt it, but maybe it could happen. But that has nothing to do with this pathetic blowout. You can’t miss the forest for the trees, and the Knicks are right in the thick of the Eastern Conference still, even with these recent pathetic losses.
Also Toronto, Dallas, Milwaukee, Cleveland and Denver winning chips gives me hope. You don’t don’t have to be a juggernaut like you did in the 80’s, 90’s, and 00’s.
That said, per Exhibit A, we’re 3 games back of Boston, 3 games ahead of the play-in so this could go a lot of different ways 🙂
Last night, I found myself having Zion thoughts.
Oh, totally, Dan, that’s why I said that things can go bad, but if they do, it won’t be because of a handful of games in January, ya know?
True, it’s January, there are 43 games left to play, we’re 25-14, this team could easily win 50-52 (maybe even 55) games, and the regular season, once you’re in a top playoffs spot, isn’t so meaningful.
But we’re in a downward spiral, with bad losses against the mediocre Bulls (yeah, we were on a B2B and yadda yadda) and ultra depleted Magic.
We need to step up, ASAP.
True, OKC is a very good team and losing with them shouldn’t be a disaster (just like it wasn’t last week, where the 2nd quarter was probably the best we have played this season), but there are losses and embarrassing losses and this one fall easily into the second category.
We need to step up ASAP.
I agree with Monica McNutt’s postgame comment, they took an haymaker (12-0 OKC run to end the 1st quarter, from 19-17 to 31-17), went down and put themselves in a fetal position.
Something fe wrong.
They were flat from the start and not for the first time this season.
We’re not used to a Knicks team that waves the white flag without a fight or even a fake comeback, they were subdued effortlessly.
I’m sorry for our warrior Josh Hart, but this group has no soul or identity and maybe they’re starting to tune out Thibs.
For instance, while Brunson beefed up his numbers from the line, his start of the game was “paynesque” (and an harbinger of things to come), he basically didn’t pass the ball on the first three possessions, missing all three shots, and that was BEFORE we learned that OG and Mikal were empty as a deflated baloon…
Thibs have been dwarfed in a short span by Mosley and Daignault and the absolute lack of adjuments after last week’s game was stunning.
The game started and we didn’t know what to do, except pumping the ball to exaustion, with no movement, no involvment of KAT in the low post, nothing.
Thibs is doing his worst job since the infamous “lost season” where he was unable to reign in Julius Randle’s behaviour all season long and stuffed his doghouse with other players instead.
Leon has his responsabilities too, his indifference toward the draft and consequent inability to bring young fresh legs to the roster is a black spot in his resumee (not that it matter, Thibs wouldn’t have used them).
The players aren’t innocent too, they are tired, exausted, squeezed to the bone by a madman, but they look as mentally empty than they look tired.
They’re unable to react and they lie waiting to be steamrolled every time the other teams makes a run.
I still think this starting lineup is one of the best in the League, the season’s isn’t over, better days should be ahead, but we’re on the brink, three years ago the month before the ASG destroyed us, let’s hope this year is different.
I agree with you. I don’t think you can argue with certainty that we’ve witnessed something rotten. I didn’t watch the breakdown in the Orlando game but I think that would be my biggest concern. Two losses to OKC and to a not-terrible Chicago on a back-to-back don’t worry me much.
I think OKC, BOS, and CLE may have the 3 best teams of the 2020s, save last year’s Boston team. Perhaps we’d be favorites in the 5 years before that, but not this year.
At least it’ll be fun to watch those 3 in the playoffs.
Notice something? In the past twenty-nine NBA Finals, the NBA championship was won by a team who was in the top three in their conference.
our non garbage time defensive rating against teams outside of the bottom 10 in offense is 118.5. league average is 115.6, so we are bottom five. as rare as it is for a team to really contend without both an offense and defense that are at least above average, it’s unprecedented for a team with that kind of performance on either end against non-terrible opponents — even the notorious 21st ranked lakers defense. i think like it or not our puncher’s chance relies heavily on our lovable but slightly resentful monster truck connoisseur to come back balling.
I passed out at the end of the first quarter certain of the eventual outcome.
I too want to see Mitch out there
The Thunder were able to hold KAT to two 3PAs over two games (and they were both in garbage time last night). Not a lot teams gonna do that but the ones that can will usually kick our ass.
Brunson only had two 3PAs last night, as well. They pretty effectively smothered our bread and butter and Thibs doesn’t have anything else on the menu.
Let’s see how we do against the Bucks tomorrow. That’s a far more significant bellwether.
I think the idea was that if the other teams’ overplayed the KAT/JB two-man sets, Anunoby and Bridges would then stand wide-open at the trifecta line and knock down a lot of trifectas and then the teams would no longer overplay the KAT/JB two-man sets.
None of that has happened. Is it personnel? Is it the coach?
Daydreaming the best for this roster also had OG and Mikal contributing greatly to routinely shutting down the perimeter and in the wildest flights of fancy shutting down combos like Tatum/Brown in big playoff games.
None of that has come close to happening.(*) Is that personnel? Is that the coach?
It looks like, barring injury or sickness or hangover, Milwaukee will at least come in here fully healthy with their complete roster. While it certainly won’t be a “measuring stick” game, or even a “statement” game, the Knicks beating them by 20 or somesuch would at least be a quality win that could be pointed to and would likely reverse this recent slump.
(*) Over the last week, we’ve seen two top-level perimeter and overall defenses come into MSG — Orlando and OKC. The most superficial of eye tests will let the eye tester see the massive difference between how those teams look playing perimeter defense … and how the Knicks look. Night and day. The Knick defense is, frankly, poor.
OKC shot 24-32 against Brunson & KAT for 59 of their 126 points.
They weren’t the only problems—they shot 7-10 against Deuce and 7-13 against Bridges—but boy did OKC know where to eat their lunch.
They didn’t exploit KAT & Brunson quite so much last time, of course their percentage against Towns wasn’t quite as good either.
Instead of watching a demoralizing Knicks loss I wisely watched a terrible texas football loss
Since Christmas, we have made the fewest number of 3PT shots in the NBA and are shooting 27.8% from 3.
I guess you could spin this in a reassuring way–that’s simply not going to last. I agree to an extent, but, eye-test alert, when I watch the games I come away with a few impressions about this that make it feel like more than pure luck:
1) our 3PA quality has dropped off
2) our guys’ misses look like more of the “I’m out of sorts, fatigued, etc.” variety as opposed to “you make some you miss some”
1 doesn’t entirely check out empirically. Since Christmas we’ve generated 131 wide open 3PA (17th in the league) and 117 open 3PA (12th). Those aren’t great numbers, but also don’t spell disaster. The problem is we are hitting them at mind-bogglingly low rates–29.8% and 27.4% respectively (dead last for open, 29th for wide-open).
So that leaves us with 2, the idea that for some reason or another, our shooters are missing shots they should make at a ridiculously high rate.
Maybe it really is just luck, I don’t know. But it’s brutal to watch right now.
It’s hard to know how much of our 3p% and opponent 3p% is noise vs. good/bad defense over the last 5 games or so, but if I wasn’t already clear :), I think this is a very tired team with some injuries.
IMO that explains some of both sides of it.
You can visually see low effort levels on defense and shooters often talk about tired legs leading to lower shooting percentages.
Throw on top of that we have issues with Towns/Brunson on defense even when we are playing at 100%.
I don’t bet many basketball games anymore. I was going to make a very big bet on OKC last night, but the line was not attractive enough with us a 4 point underdog at HOME when i checked. That tells you what both I and other gamblers think.
IMO that’s why we find ourselves in this mess.
If Mitch comes back and can get himself into shape and stay healthy, I think that will mitigate some of the problems on defense and reduce some of the need to play Towns so many minutes.
Longer term (most likely in the off season) I still think we need a taller PF that can help defend inside to put next to Towns.
I should add one more thing.
I think Brunson is playing poorly. That’s not just because he’s not hitting 3s or is tired or has some leg injuries he’s playing through etc.. He’s in “I have to do everything mode” way too often. Sometimes you just have to accept that a defender is doing a great job or the other team has a strategy that is making it very difficult on you. When that happens you have to move the ball and not dribble around trying to create something tough against elite defense. It was one thing in the playoffs last year, but this is a new year with better players. If they are missing because they are tired too, so be it. But play the right way!
Good thing we’ll always have January 2024, because January 2025 isn’t that great.
Still Trey Lyles, and he’s got the Kentucky pedigree that we should love. Then again, so did SGA.
And Kornet. Let’s get him back in the building. Perfect.
I watch Collateral after my Fubo free trial expired at HT.
Good call by you guys.
I’m honestly surprised they had that many shots against someone.
Where do you get these stats, btw? I was trying to find them earlier.
I am surprised how good their defense is without any phenotype standouts. IHart obviously but they were able to suffocate us with a bunch of mid dudes no one has heard of. No problems rebounding with a small lineup either.
Joe going 8-11 from three also felt six sigma to me. He was shooting from 38 feet on a few of those and barely touching the cord.
“unironically”
Rarely am I accused of that, Hubie. It was a nice take-down, but you’re still wrong, if patronizing while being so.
Noble did a nice summary of my thinking behind my post last night just up above, so I won’t belabor his points. But I will note that on Monday we shot 18% from three. I don’t think any Thunder played in that game. And on Wednesday Mikal and Jalen went 3-15 from deep, which wasn’t only a fluke (see ‘variance’) but part of a pattern.
The Thunder get lots of credit for a stifling defense. But something else is clearly going on.
NBA.com’s box scores. You have to switch it to “Defense” in the drop-down menu where it says “Traditional”. They also have matchups if you want to see how they did against specific guys.
It takes them a while to put up the defensive stats.
Take them with a grain of salt. Watching the clips that are attached to them (except today apparently), they don’t always get it right. Plus players can get blame for plays that may not be their fault.
The other problem with having no bench and the starters playing so many minutes is that it also messes with the team emotionally when they get behind.
If a team has a strong bench and the starters get behind early, the bench players are thinking “I can’t wait to get in and turn this game around” and the starters know they have a legit second chance later in the game when they do come back in.
As it is now if the starters get behind they’re already thinking no way we can win this game and the bench players are probably just pissed bc they’re not going to get a legit opportunity to turn the game around.
So it’s not just about being physically exhausted and injuries. It’s also about the psychological affect this has on the team.
This team right now is the definition of a fair weather team. When it’s going well they look unstoppable but they have no ability to change things up or change momentum and fight back when they’re down.
The frustrating part about KATs defense is that when I complain about him not putting his hands up, it’s usually after he did a pretty good job moving his feet.
Every game, if you look at the boxscore, you’ll see that the opponents give roughly twice as many minutes to their bench than the Knicks. It’s remarkably consistent. Even bad teams manage to find minutes for 9th and 10th guys, and sometimes beat us. We have had some of the best injury luck in the league, so you can’t chalk it up to that.
I don’t want to attribute the team’s shoddy recent play solely to the minutes factor, but you combine the top heavy nature of the roster with a coach who has a very limited circle of trust, and bad things are going to happen. We’ve been getting iron man type performances in terms of minutes from players who have historically been injury prone, and that just seems like a ticking time bomb to me. None of this seems to be heading in a good direction: the team is looking more tired and dispirited, with some of the key players seeing some severe efficiency dropoffs.
This is a pretty good team but we’re kidding ourselves if we’re thinking “puncher’s chance.”
“IHart obviously but they were able to suffocate us with a bunch of mid dudes no one has heard of.”
There is literally no one on the OKC roster that I hadn’t already heard of previous to this game being played.
That said, we can’t let Isaiah Joe (who averages less than 9 points per game) get 31 on us. First it was Andrew Wiggins, then Coby White, and then this guy. The pattern is so easy to see. Once we see one of those guys hit two or three 3-pointers in a span of 90 seconds or so, we don’t do anything to close out on them better. It’s very obvious that we say to ourselves “well, they can’t just keep hitting like that!,” but then they do keep hitting like that because we do nothing to change our defensive strategy on them.
Prior to Christmas we were 26th in number of 3PT shots but converted them at 39.6%.
It’s clear we don’t take enough threes.
It’s also likely that the 39.6% was a fluke and this is the regression.
Josh Hart was at 40% prior to Xmas, for instance. Since then he’s at 30%. Nothing unusual there.
Brunson was shooting 42% on hard shots, which is kinda insane. He’s 20% since.
Payne was at 41.5%, he regressed to 33.3%.
KAT, fwiw, has gone UP from 44.7% to 46.7%! That we are failing to get him more 3PAs is my biggest problem with Thibs.
OG and Bridges are the two guys whose shooting has gone down more than you might expect but both of them have had to take much harder shots than the corner 3’s they’re mostly comfortable with.
Three of tonight’s seven NBA games are postponed tonight: two because of the fires in L.A., and one because of an icestorm in Atlanta. It’s upon us.
The other one (Jaylin Williams) could even help. He’s only 22, so still young enough to improve.
This is hoops malpractice. Isaiah Joe is a known commodity. In his 4 seasons in the league he has hoisted 1100 3s (10.5 att/36) and hit them at 39.2%.
Now it was a little surprising to see him run hotter than the Sun, but it wasn’t surprising to see him wreck the game with copious uncontested looks.
It is malpractice not to adjust.
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