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40 replies on “Knicks Morning News (2025.02.24)”
Here’s the thing, though, were the Mavericks better than the Thunder last year? Or did they just get hot at the right time? Were the Hawks really the second-best team in the Eastern Conference a few years back, or did they just get hot at the right time?
The Knicks clearly aren’t as good as the Celtics or the Cavaliers, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t beat either of them in the playoffs. It’s not likely, but I don’t think it’s some crazy thing, either. Especially now that Mitch is back. The Celtics and Cavs are clearly better than the Knicks, no doubt about it, but being the fourth best team in the NBA is still A. pretty damn good, and B. very much still in the realm of possibility that you’ll go out and win in the playoffs.
The only issue, of course, is that we won’t know until the playoffs begin, so we’ve just got a lot of meaningless regular season basketball left (I guess beating the Cavs or Celtics with Mitch, even if it won’t matter for the standings, could still be cool. And hey, maybe it will matter in the standings with the Celtics. The Knicks are only four games back of the Celtics! Granted, the Celtics look like they’ll never lose again, but still…).
I think it’s a little more systemic than that. We can’t even create the looks needed to get hot from 3.
If there’s any hope, it’s that Brunson can do what Bernard did in ‘84.
And honestly we probably would need a coaching change before the playoffs, too. I don’t think any of this is Thibs’ fault (it’s the roster) but he can’t create the game plan for an upset.
Mavs played OKC 4 times last season and went 1-3, however, in none of the losses did both Luka & Kyrie play. In the only blowout loss, neither played. In the games they missed only 1 of the 2, they lost by single digits. In the only game both played, Mavs beat OKC by 35pts.
Maybe the Mavs were worse, maybe they were rarely healthy, or maybe they had a favorable matchup. It doesn’t really matter why. What matters as it relates to our team is that they didn’t get blown out every single time they went up against OKC. Meanwhile, the Knicks have been blown out every time they’ve played Boston.
Basically, we’re counting on Mitch to come in and have the same impact as adding Luka or Kyrie…
…and KAT is so terrible in drop I’m not entirely convinced that can’t happen.
To the systemic point, these aren’t random blowouts. Nothing we do works against their defense and everything they do works against ours. That puts us out of 3 pt variance range.
We are within injury luck range, though. But it probably has to be Tatum or White. Missing Porzingis ain’t gonna cut it.
Well, i went to my mother’s to spend time with her and that would be a good decision even if we somehow managed to win the game, but given how the game went it was a very good decision. 😉 😛
I guess i’m not mad today because i saw none of it, and the final score isn’t too bad, so i’m chilling. And also i agree with Brian, what matters is how we will perform in the playoffs.
In the only game with their full team, including PJ and Gafford, Dallas blew out a full OKC by 35.
This is a huge problem.
And we definitely have problems, which if all are confirmed in the playoffs, i agree that everybody except Brunson and Hart can be used to improve the team. But obviously the opportunity has to come up, we can’t trade guys just because we want to. Also i agree with Hubert, but only for the summer, if we don’t show progress in the playoffs i think we should move on from Thibs.
Man, the blistering postgame monologue last night by Macri — the most unwavering Thibs defender of them all — was a real “If I’ve lost Walter Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America” moment for this coach.
Guess yesterday was the Tet Offensive.
Thibs isn’t your guy for serious winning. Never has been.
Both are poor rebounders and always have been. (*) None of this should have been a surprise to Leon. Fortunately, KAT helps to cover for it at least somewhat, but still.
We’re at the point of the season where nothing of any import is likely to happen. They just need to try to get healthy and running on all cylinders going into the playoffs, so they can at least take their punchers’ chance. All this other stuff is summertime material (assuming they don’t fire Thibs, which there’s about a 1% chance they would, pre-playoffs.)
(*) And it’s time for another pedantic but important reminder that rebounding is part of defense.
It’s why Thibs has to play Precious.
Precious also had 1 rebound yesterday, but 10 against Cleveland at least
Thibs is Buck Showalter. He changes culture for the better, but he is too doctrinaire to take the next step.
Well one thing of importance is going to happen. We are going to get a look at Mitch as part of the rotation and whether he is the same player. We are also going to get a look at how Thibs plans to use him. That’s the most interesting part to me. Do we think that Mitch will start along side KAT once the playoffs start?
One more thing on the “it’s the roster not Thibs” commentary. Yes, to a degree that’s true because KAT was a known entity on defense as a 5. However, there is a glaring weakness in Thibs strategy to me on the offensive side of the ball. We traded 5 picks for Bridges because he’s a 2 way player. And nothing Thibs has done on offense has been built around Bridges on that side of the ball. This was clearest to me in the almost loss to ATL. Hawks were hiding tiny Trae Young on Bridges. We should have been running the offense through him on those plays instead of JB iso all 2nd half. Thibs is not good at exploiting his mismatches on offense. Mazzulla for example will do that all night. This is a big flaw and to me part of the reason why Bridges is not playing well.
Sucks to get a whimper when you’re hoping for a Bang!
As always.
I watched some of the Thunder-Wolves game last night. Minnesota actually played pretty well and was ahead most of the game, but OKC just wears you down. Daigneault throws waves and waves of athletic wings at you and eventually you crumble.
And of course SGA was the best player on the court by a mile, Ant Man can’t hold his jockstrap.
I don’t think anyone is stopping Boston from getting to the Finals, but I believe OKC has the right roster to beat them.
To be clear, it’s the roster, not Thibs, against the Celtics.
Worth mentioning that Thibs isn’t doing anything that the people giving him flak haven’t defended him for doing the last 5 years.
And JK47 is the only one who mentions this but our record would be considerably worse if Thibs weren’t squeezing those extra 6-8 minutes a game out of the starters vs the other team’s subs. You saw it yesterday in the 3rd to 4th quarter. That run only happened because Thibs left his starters in against the Boston bench. We win a lot of games simply because we play our guys more.
I’m personally ok with losing all the regular season games we would lose playing Landry Shamet and Co, but Thibs wins them and he’s becoming a victim of the illusion he created.
Yesterday Boston’s bench played 65 mins compared to 57 mins for the Knicks bench.
Precious’ pursuit of rebounds he perceives not to be his or out of his “range” is pure comedy. I’ve never seen a lazier player… honestly, i haven’t… swear to the heavens… like work a little harder, clown
Still think we should wait to see what Mitch can bring to the team once he’s integrated. I think he could make quite a difference.
But I am definitely open to all possibilities this summer: moving on from Thibs, trading Mikal, OG, or KAT, etc.
The one thing I will not concede to, however, is some pessimistic view that Rose has ultimately failed or that we can’t win a championship because he’s created a team with a ceiling and we have no more assets.
I believe KAT, OG, Mikal, Deuce and Hart (and possibly Mitch) are all very tradeable. What that would involve, I don’t know. But things are very fluid in the NBA. We’re a GOOD team with a lot of good players.
And with a healthy Mitch, I think we’re one good two way bench wing away from truly competing. That might be a tall order, but finding ONE player to fit the bill is a lot easier than finding 4 or 5 to build a team.
Ultimately, it might have to be a combination of trading someone or someones AND moving on from Thibs.
Re: Thibs. I wonder if moving on from him could possibly mean keeping him in the organization somehow but moving him away from coaching. I think he has set a great tone and culture for us. I don’t think he deserves to be done dirty.
The 6-8 extra minutes have always been a component of “Moneyball.”
Thibs has never really just played it straight.
Precious has his flaws but laziness isn’t one of them. Nobody on this roster lazy, they all play hard but they also all have their flaws with some flaws being harder to hide than others.
Moving on from Thibs would not be doing him dirty if he can’t fulfill the primary objective of his employment. They don’t have to be dicks about it. It doesn’t make sense to do it until he has a shot with a defensive anchor taller than 6’9” to fuck around with for a little bit.
After the game yesterday I said that while I didn’t have access to the stats, I got the impression from watching that we simply do not do much to try to proactively address the defensive issues KAT at center presents.
This is of course one piece of data that comes from 3 games against one team, but:
Simply pretending KAT is Isaiah Hartenstein does not seem to be working. I’m under no illusions that we’re one adjustment away from being a stout defense, but Thibs is uniquely stubborn when it comes to adjustments even when his team reach “nothing to lose” territory.
“And JK47 is the only one who mentions this but our record would be considerably worse if Thibs weren’t squeezing those extra 6-8 minutes a game out of the starters vs the other team’s subs.”
If our record were considerably worse with this roster, folks would be clamoring to fire the coach, just for other reasons. Seriously, does anyone think that if we were 30-27 at this point and clinging to the 6th seed that the fine folks here would be saying “Hey, at least he’s resting the starters!”?
Maybe there is a rare example of an all-team that is hovering just above .500 with an all-in roster where the coach seems to be playing possum by resting starters for non-injury-related reasons. At the very least, that coach would have to have 100% trust from the front office/governor.
But in this case, folks are essentially saying that Thibs is detrimental on both ends. He’s propping up a shitty FO by running the starters into the ground to create a mirage of a contender, yet he is also bad at X’s and O’s to the point that he shouldn’t be winning even with playing the starters more, that they are winning in spite of his shitty coaching.
I mean, whatever, I guess that’s an opinion.
During that Knicks run late 3rd early 4th there was a possession where KAT switched and was ISOd by Tatum who couldn’t get by him and took a contested step back 20 footer that missed. Now you don’t necessarily want to live and die with KAT switching everything and being left on an island but it’s probably preferable to drop coverage, even moreso if Mitch is also on the court which would give protection at the rim.
This is a little bit reminiscent of when Mike D’Antoni, a similar coach in some ways to Thibs, was coaching the Knicks.
Pringles knew how to coach one way. He was going to play fast tempo SSOL regardless of who the personnel were. The front office gave him personnel that was rather ill suited to playing in this style. Toney Douglas is the point guard? Run it anyway. Mike Bibby? Run it anyway. SSOL didn’t really work super great without an elite point guard, but whatever.
When you have these dogmatic coaches that are only gonna coach one way, you have to give them the personnel to coach that one way or it’s going to be a frustrating experience.
If there was no downside to doing the One Weird Trick and playing the starters at Game 7 minutes levels for an entire season, I wouldn’t really care. I’d still make the obvious point that the team’s W-L record was a bit inflated compared the non-One Weird Trick teams, and to temper expectations accordingly when we reach the playoffs and everybody is now doing the One Weird Trick.
I do believe there is a downside, however, in the form of wear and tear and fatigue. If there wasn’t, you would think that everybody would just play this way. Yet nobody else does.
I don’t think it’s a REASON to fire the coach. I do think it makes us appear to be a bit better than we actually are.
Barring injury and Sam Presti Manchurian candidating the thunder we’re not really supposed to win this thing for a good bit.
The way the Hawks pivoted after the disastrous Murray trade definitely gives me hope if, ultimately, this lineup isn’t working.
That said, I think Mitch could add a lot, albeit, probably not enough to push us past the big 3… but hopefully we’ll have enough to at least hang with them this season.
Oblique strain for Sean Manaea, who will likely begin the season on the IL now.
I don’t want Stearns to panic, but the situation with the rotation is looking dire. Assuming nobody else gets hurt, we’re now looking at a very thin Senga-Holmes-Peterson-Megill-Blackburn rotation to open the season.
Realistically they needed another arm anyway, so it looks like it might be time to cash in a couple of prospects.
And I like the guy and don’t hate the trade, but we are not getting $42 mil of value from OG, and we likely never will tbh.
I know we needed 2-way wings like an mfer, but it’s going to be very hard to build out a full rotation with KAT and OG’s contracts on the books. Just throwing that out there.
Can I interest the Mets in one Marcus Stroman?
Looking through all the baskets made against KAT, he looked pretty good when playing on the level (switch) with players settling for jumpers. But if he’s back further it let’s players (mostly Tatum) get a head of steam and as soon as that happens he’s cooked because he can’t back peddle or put up his arms for crap.
I said something about switch not working well for the Knicks, but idk, seems more promising than drop.
The issue is the PoA defender getting caught on a screen and not being able to recover. If they can get over or get back to their man, it’s not an issue.
So the question is how often will it happen that a defender can’t get over the screen? If it’s more than a couple times, you should probably roll the dice with KAT in switch.
OG got caught 3 or 4 times on screens and looked like early season Mikal trying to get over them (i.e., getting stuck there the whole play). But Tatum shot 1-7 when OG was on him. In that case, you want OG on him if he you can. But those times he can’t, it was an automatic 2 points.
*This was only times a shot was attempted against KAT, there could’ve been breakdowns in switch or excellent drop coverage that didn’t result in a shot I didn’t see.
Also, there was a play I couldn’t quite make out, but pretty sure KAT put his arms up only to drop them immediately before the shot.
On another play, he close out to White and doesn’t put his hands up. He’s literally right there and the 6’4″ White shoots over him because he doesn’t put his hands up.
After KAT hit the 3pter that got them within 4 early in the 4th quarter White responded by hitting a setback 3pter on OG with 2 secs remaining on the shot clock that was deflating.
howdy fellow knickerbloggers…I hope the week is starting off well for you 🙂
interesting to wonder just what our record might be with a different coach…
talent wise we seem to have a top 10 roster…way top heavy at the moment, shallow bench…
with one rim protector on the team who’s been hurt all season…
more and more looks like one of either OG or mikal needs to be moved…
without an all in on every game coach like thibs, maybe we lose 4 or 5 more games so far this season…
maybe not…
not this season, but I would really like for us to replace thibs this off season…
I think the comparison of Thibs and D’Antoni is valid…in fact, I’ve repeatedly made that comparison since he was hired. Both are rigid, both have doghouses, both ride their starters (remember when D’Antoni rode Lin “like Secretariat” until he ran him into the ground?) And both don’t give a shit about what the media or fans, or even their own front office, thinks.
However, it seems to me that these panicky conversations are becoming pretty unhinged. I am not buying into the narrative that our players are disproportionately gassed or dinged up due to heavy minutes, especially after hearing that they practice less intensely than other teams. I am also not buying into the puddle-in-the-street shallow narrative that Thibs is a shitty X’s and O’s coach who is grinding out wins by playing his starters against other team’s scrubs. I agree that he leaves starters in too much, but there are many games where that has nothing to do with the outcome of the game relative to what other coaches do, e.g. he’ll pull the starters with 2 minutes left instead of 6 in a 20-pt blowout.
In fact, if anything, the team should more banged up and be losing more, especially if the starters are too worn out to compete.
And again, this team has had one of the weakest benches in the NBA over the course of this season. Deuce is decent but undersized. Payne is okay. Precious is just as often bad as good, but he did help Thibs weather the OG injury. Sims and Huk are replacement level. Shamet is both shitty and undersized, although playing a bit better lately. I don’t know if any coach who cares about winning is going to give tons of minutes to those players other than Deuce, and even he’s been injured.
If folks want to conclude that there’s an enormous difference between playing 37mpg like Mikal and Hart, and playing 35-36mpg like Brown and Tatum, or 36mpg like Murray and Jokic, or Durant and Booker, and DeRozan and Sabonis, whatever. Our two stars, KAT and Brunson, are playing 35mpg, pretty close to where all the other all-NBA players are playing, e.g. Shai, Giannis, Hali, Bam, Powell, Harden, LeBron (actually higher) , AD are all at 34. There is zero reason why they should be more gassed or banged up than those guys.
Let’s say thibs plays Mitch 20mpg on average for, say, 20 the last 25 of games. I’m interested to see how will that play out in terms of starter’s minutes. In other words, how many of those will just come at the expense of Precious and Shamet, and how many will come from KAT and OG?
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