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36 replies on “Knicks Morning News (2025.01.22)”
Spot-on report, Owen. I’m glad you verified my opinion of Barclays vs. MSG, even forgetting fandom, no contest, right?
Jordi deserves a lot of credit. He has those guys playing super hard.
DLo had a very good game. Hard to believe he mostly underachieves, I mean, is there much difference talent-wise between him and , say, Darius Garland?
I’m the exact opposite… a die hard FCPorto fan! 😉
Thank goodness! There are defeats, crushing defeats, and then there is what happened to Benfica yesterday.
Still not sure what the strangest thing about Barclays is. The lack of Jumbotron highlights is up there. At one point, KAT got called for a foul and he looked up to see the replay and he was just looking at himself looking for 15 seconds.
You couldn’t hear anyone’s voice during the in game interviews. It was sort of hilarious since it wasn’t that loud in the arena. The mics aren’t loud enough. I don’t know, maybe I was in a strange pocket of the arena.
Also, the only celebrities other than Sydney were Ben Stiller and Spike Lee, who aren’t Nets fans. Oh, and Jose Reyes.
I got Korean chicken for dinner. That was delicious.
My only other game note. It’s really striking how skinny some of these guys are compared to Towns. Claxton and. Clowney both are unbelievable toothpicks, just insanely light compared to KAT.
I love KAT as a player but I think I would not want his age 33-36 years on my books
That was incredible work, Owen.
It is good that we’re avoiding bad losses. If this team ever does put it together, all these ugly wins we’ve banked will be useful.
It’s getting hard to imagine this team has another gear, though. Maybe a simple Derrick Rose-like trade can unlock the next level. (I hope so, bc that’s about all we can do.)
Thanks Owen for the on-site review!
Brunson woke up in the last 2:18 after a disappointing game (he was in single-figure before).
There no doubt he’s clutch but at the same time I’m not sure I like that he took 4 shots in that span, hitting the first three and missing the fourth, basically without even trying to pass.
The only time he passed the ball out of a double team Josh served OG for an easy dunk.
I’m worried hero-ball could not work against stronger teams with better defenders.
KAT’s clearly bothered by the hand issue, he admitted it after the game, Mikal disappeared after a good start and he tends to do it a little too often.
But whatever, we’re 29-16, the only thing that matters is health and now we have 3 full days of rest before the Kings game.
On other news,
Danilo Gallinari surprisingly announced his next team, the Vaqueros de Bayamon of the Puerto Rican League.
Since last summer, while expecting an NBA call that never came, he rejected offers from many Euroleague’s and Italy’s clubs, choosing to chill in Miami (where he lives) with his family, not a bad choice when you’ve earned 200+ millions playing basketball, now he found a team close enough.
They could trade Bridges and/or Anunoby for better players. Tough to push through with that many minutes at key wing positions going to negative BPM players, one of them negative on both sides of the ball; luckily, they have a fantastic top 2, which covers up a lot of warts.
But that’s the key to the next tier.
My take on Barclays is that it’s too damn loud, and it make everything else inhospitable. There are other flaws, but I just find that the loudness makes it very hard to enjoy a game there. I took my son there last season and he still talks about how loud it is.
My friend took his daughter and her comment was, “why do they only play rap music?” She never wants to go back.
Also, the security lines to get in were crazy. People were out in the cold for 15 minutes at least..
MSG remains the Mecca.
The din at Barclay’s is inorganic and non-spontaneous — essentially fake. It’s the definitive antiseptic 2020s sports atmosphere, a franchise that’s in the place it’s in only to siphon off the money that can be made from tepid, inch-deep fandom, arena suites, and media revenue sharing. The siphoning in NYC is quite good.
Pick your criteria of “real fandom,” and I’d bet a lot of money the Nets are 30th in the association in terms of number of real fans — materially below 29th. There’s no there there.
I’m gonna say it. That was a GOOD win.
Point to the abysmal scoring in the 4th quarter. Say how bad the Nets are and we should beat them easily every time we play them.
Don’t care. That was a gritty win. Our defense won the game. The captain had a bad game but came through in the end. We were gassed on the second game of a back to back, playing a rival that we’ve beaten 8 times in a row and who really wanted to beat us, but we still beat them.
The minutes thing wasn’t TOO egregious. It could have been better but it wasn’t too bad.
The team showed grittiness and heart. These are the type of games we’ve mostly lost this season. We’ve all seen how good the team can be when clicking but the difference between good and great teams are teams that can win games like this last night.
Two in a row and now we get some rest. Every game we notch a win here in the next few weeks is one less game until Mitch comes back.
I offer this as a dispassionate observation, not a cheap insult: the Barclays atmosphere is night-and-day different (read: better) for Liberty games.
It’s a back-to-back. You take the win anyway you can.
They get a couple days off, which they desperately need.
I’ve never gone to a game at Barclays, only a concert. Saw The Postal Service there in 2013, which was great.
But I do remember thinking it felt so cavernous and just had this kind of cold, corporate aesthetic to it that I did not enjoy. Good food options though.
Thanks Pags, this got a chuckle out of me
Knicks are tied for the league lead in games played with Orlando at 45.
Charlotte appears to have the fewest at 39.
LA, MIL, SA, UT at 41.
As a result, we have 4 of the top 5 in minutes played, but per game Brunson drops from 5th all the way to 22nd.
I don’t mind Barclays. It is a very weird vibe sometimes though. I try and go at least once a year, the A10 tournament is alot of fun. For like $20 bucks you get two games and sit really really close.
Last time I went to a Nets game, I was popping 25mg gummies all day long like tic tacs. We did the Knicks matinee and the Nets at night. At Barclays, I was fried. Someone came up to me and asked if I wanted to participate in a game for jet blue vouchers. I had to guess the SNL cast members name based on their character or something. I said “naaah”. The poor intern was shocked. I didn’t wanna space on Andy Sandburg’s name in front of 20k people high as hell. Turns out the game was super easy and I would have won tickets anywhere in country for free.
Not my finest hour.
Good catch, EB.
Glad I missed this one. It sure seems like they’re content not trading Mitch. I guess they’d rather hope for the best than take back minimum value, which makes sense.
I agree with Hubie, though: this team need another DRose-type deadline trade.
I mean, I’m glad we got the W but this was a classic “2025 Knicks” kind of win. Brute forced our way to a narrow win over a subpar opponent by playing the starters 37+ minutes each.
I’m on board with Hubert’s takes here: it’s possible that we might be thankful later that we banked some of these brute force wins, but at the same time it’s hard to see where this team is going to find another gear. Maybe all of the heavy minutes for the starters turns them into some sort of high stamina cardio-cyborgs, and when the playoffs roll around it just ain’t nothing for them to play 42 minutes each. Maybe we walk through the raindrops when it comes to injuries and it turns out Thibs has disrupted the NBA by playing a playoff rotation for 100 games, with no significant downsides.
None of that seems terribly likely to me, but it’s clear that’s what we are going to have to hope for: that Operation Brute Force doesn’t come with a price tag that will need to be paid later.
The food is better at Barclays, the overall watching experience is worse. I don’t know if it’s the lighting, or the physical design of the arena or what, but it doesn’t feel as good as the garden.
I should also mention that Mikal & Hart are still 1st & 2nd in minutes and OG drops all the way from 3rd to 7th. Thibs still Thibodeau-ing what he Thibo-does, just not quite as bad as some of the reporting makes it seem.
Owen, curious what you mean by describing Sweeney as “definitely very mid.”
Mikal has played over 1.5x as many minutes as the top Net, who — as we all know — is Jalen Wilson.
If there is a next gear, it’s going to come from a combination of two things: 1. KAT, Brunson, and/or OG getting over the various dings or worse they’ve been dealing with, and 2. Some kind of depth reinforcements, whether it’s a healthy Mitch, some kind of trade, or both. We saw in December how great this team could be when the starters were all healthy and energized. Right now, they’re nicked up and/or dragging. Even having one more Circle of Trust guy will work wonders.
“Owen, curious what you mean by describing Sweeney as “definitely very mid.””
I’m guessing that he might mean “not as attractive as she’s cracked up to be,” based on the fact that all he could see was her “physicalness.” I don’t think she’s all that attractive, anyway, and she might actually be a worse actress than Winona Ryder. 🙂
He might mean “not that approachable” or something like that instead, though.
Here’s the crazy thing:
KAT +9.9 on/off
Payne +7.3
Shamet +6.9
Deuce +5.3
OG +3.1
The bench has been better than the starters. They should be getting more minutes.
Heat with Jimmy back losing at home to the Blazers is pretty surprising.
“Mikal has played over 1.5x as many minutes as the top Net, who — as we all know — is Jalen Wilson.”
In what world is 9/3/2 non-starting 27-minutes-per-game Jalen Wilson “the top Net”? Even in this particular game, he only played 28 minutes, which was fourth on his team.
EB, last night was particularly exasperating on that front. The non-KAT starters clearly didn’t have it on offense (and even he couldn’t shoot), so that group would dig us into a big hole, then the KAT + bench lineups would kick ass, only for Thibs to pull them the second Fernandez started putting his own starters back in. In past years, with more obviously deeper teams than this one, Thibs has been much better at riding the hot hand. This year, it feels like he defaults to relying on the starting five every night, regardless of how well they’re playing as a unit.
Yeah, I mentioned a couple of days ago about Thibs’ seeming inability to stick with what is working (“riding the hot hand”) in a particular game. It’s bad.
And he used to be pretty good at it! If IQ was killing the opponent, for instance, he would close the game. Heck, by the time of the OG trade, Thibs would even sometimes sit RJ in the fourth quarter if it was clear another combination was working better.
But the talent differential between the starters and the bench (even Deuce) seems so vast that Thibs just keeps defaulting to the former group, no matter the context.
This one.
No Net has played every game. Nic Claxton has played the 3rd most games. He’s missed 7.
Cam Johnson is 2nd in total MP and he’s missed 9 games.
The world in which anyone who reads at a 3rd grade level could tell the context was “total minutes played.”
It’s amazing you dense you are. In a comment that specifically says minutes played, you still can’t figure out he’s talking about total minutes played. You’re like a child who needs everything spoonfed to them.
So now 37 minutes is too much for a starter?
I always thought the thresh hold was 40 minutes.
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