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Knicks Morning News (2025.08.27)
08/27/2025 11:00:02
08/27/2025 11:00:00
08/27/2025 02:47:00
08/27/2025 01:46:25
08/27/2025 00:20:24
08/27/2025 00:11:00
08/27/2025 00:09:20
32 replies on “Knicks Morning News (2025.08.27)”
Macri has good write-up on Mitch today. One interesting tidbit–while I obviously knew that he is the only player still on the Knicks roster from when he made his debut in October 2018, he and THJr are the only ones from that roster still…in the NBA.
thats false deandre jordan kevin knox and luke kornet are all still very much in the nba and played this past season
by the way mitch averaged career highs in stls/36, asts/36, and ft% (by a wide margin) this past season
ok jordan didn’t come until january 31 2019 so he wasnt here when mitch debuted but kevin knox and luke kornet were definitely already here
Luke was inactive for Mitch’s debut but was on the roster. My bad as Macri just snapshot the box score for his point. But please remind me which NBA team Kevin Knox is on?
knox is on the warriors and played five playoff games for them this past season he even amassed 14 points in 18 minutes against the rockets in one of those
https://www.espn.com/nba/team/roster/_/name/gs/golden-state-warriors
I’m bracing myself for the likelihood that Mitch will get traded during the season. I think Leon’s track record here is pretty clear: if you’re not willing to sign for a team friendly extension, he’s going to trade you before your contract expires. We saw it with IQ, RJ, Grimes, and Randle. The only exception is Bridges but Mikal had Leon by the balls (and frankly Leon might think that deal is team friendly given his valuation of Bridges is much different from consensus).
Facts and as it should be…it’s foolish to overpay own talent or let value walk out the door.
Think Mitch will start, perform well and sign for whatever Leon can pay him to stay under the 2nd apron or he will be traded in February. This number is probably his actual market value too.
I also thought the Macri piece was interesting — for those not reading it this morning, I’ll copy and paste this:
What may be surprising is that among the 64 players who have played at least 10 games for the Knicks in this span of time, Mitch is also first in win shares per 48 minutes with .208⁴.
It gets even better: across the entire league, among players who have suited up for at least 100 games since the start of the 2018-19 season, only seven players have a higher rate of win shares per minute than Mitchell Robinson. They are Jokic, Giannis, Embiid, Butler, Gobert, AD and Robert Williams.
Knox is currently out of contract.
The phrase Macri used was “currently on an NBA roster,” and he was correct. Knox is unsigned, and Kornet didn’t play in the game.
Doogie’s first foray back into insufferable pedantry post-ban didn’t go well.
Perhaps the best tidbit from Macri’s piece is that Ron Baker is “currently a Project Manager for the Sports Medicine department at Ascension Hospital in St. Louis.”
There’s no way we can get some kind of refund for all the time we spent arguing about the guy’s prospects as an NBA player right? Just making sure the time space continuum has no mechanism in place for that kind of thing.
Think they still call him that “mop-headed hustle-bunny” in the hospital hallways?
Ron Baker was worth it just for the world’s most hilarious player option. It wasn’t the most damaging or impactful Knicks transaction ever, but it may have been the funniest. The Travis Outlaw/Wear Bear move was close, but it’s still not quite as funny as giving Ron Baker a player option.
Was the Baker player option post-Perry?
I thought it was going to happen last season, but he recovered from the injury slower than the team initially suggested. Leon knew he wasn’t going to get full value with him on the sidelines. So it made no sense to trade him.
However, let’s face it, last year’s starting lineup was neutralized on offense in the second half of the season and not top shelf on defense either.
Starting Mitch instead of Hart solves some of the problems on defense, keeps the rebounds and also gives the offense extra possessions. But he’s worse for spacing than Hart and it subtracts playmaking. That’s going to hurt Towns and Brunson. Whether it nets out to being better than Hart or not we don’t know, but it’s not ideal.
So what is ideal?
Again, it’s a PF that can defend the paint, rebound and hit the 3 (or trade Towns and we head in a different dirction)
I think Leon knows he needs backup C for now and also that the Towns/Brunson combo has some flaws on defense that have to be addressed. He also knows that starting Mitch is not ideal for multuple reasons (even if they ultimately do it for awhile).
I think Mitch will stay here for awhile, they’ll experiment with the lineups, see if Hukporti is ready to be a backup C and if all systems are go Mitch will be traded by the deadline with a goal of getting someone to put next to Towns that will help with the defense but also space the floor.
Of course if Mitch/Towns/Brunson is working great on defense and Brown manages to overcome the spacing issues with his offense, then let’s just do that!
Ron Baker was one of those guys that every metric imaginable said totally sucks at basketball, but the team (albeit a bad team) managed to be better with him on the court. I think he was a neutral to barely plus defender/energy guy and those kinds of things are still very underrated because they aren’t measured well, but his offense was just too bad to be in the NBA.
Baker’s option was signed in the short glorious period when Steve Mills was riding solo right on the heels of signing THJr. 3 days later he hired Perry, giving up a 2nd round pick.
Yes, but I’m not sure Leon’s “avoiding overpaying” these guys. He’s aggressively lowballing them.
For instance, the 4 year, $80M deal IQ wanted to sign with us would be a great deal today; and the $16M AAV Leon was pushing seems like a ludicrous demand.
It worked with Deuce. It didn’t work with Grimes.
So if we’re looking at history to guide us with Mitch, it seems likely Leon will offer him peanuts and trade him if he won’t take it.
I think you’re making too much of a bad team being all of 1 point per 100 possessions better in his 857 minutes in 2016-2017 and he sucked.
According to Begley and Scotto, Quickley was looking for $25M AAV and we offered $18M. Wouldn’t shock me if we would’ve met him at $20M if he was willing.
Maybe I’m misremembering, but didn’t Baker have an actual no-trade clause??
Ditto on Deuce. How do you know that this was the case with Grimes? – Meaning what he was offered by Leon and his actual market value?
I think Leon is accurately evaluating and pricing talent. Woudn’t call it a lowballing type strategy.
I don’t think single season on/off is an especially good metric unless you are going to get into a detailed lineup analysis. Even RAPM which is making a good effort to get at the quality of the players on the court (though not the specific lineup fits that I like a lot) doesn’t work so well over 1 year.
His on off for his career was +2.7.
Figure the team sucked over that 3 year period and he’s a negative player (as RAPM also suggests), but not nearly as bad as the boxscore suggests.
There are 4 players from the year before that are still in the NBA:
KP
THJR
Kornet
Doug McDermott
I’m still having issues posting and editing. Something is still amiss with the blog.
Maybe I’m misremembering, but didn’t Baker have an actual no-trade clause??
It was the player option that gave him a de facto no trade clause. Can’t remember the specifics as to why, but it was a key reason the deal was panned, since it could have been structured differently to avoid it as, with THJr, Mills was bidding against himself to a large extent.
Counterpoint: Ron Baker doing okay in +/- is some stone cold evidence of the uselessness of that statistic
“Something is still amiss with the blog.”
The posts and thoughts of farfa.
As I’ve said many times, you must also include quality of team analysis, whether he was bench player or starter, how good those units were and look at it over multiple years covering many lineups etc…
Pure RAPM broken up by offense and defense does much of that fairly well for you, but you also need to look at multuple years.
I’ve come around to liking defensive RAPM, not so much because I think it’s very accurate but because imo it’s way better than boxscore at capturing defense and some other contributions not in the boxscore.
If I see a good on/off that’s not explained by boxscore and I see a positive defensive RAPM, I uderstand better what’s going in.
So IMO if you look at multi year on/off, have a feel for the quality of the team, look at pure RAPM offense/defense with no boxscore added in you are way ahead of the game relative to boxscore.
If you take it another step with team makeup and lineup analysis, IMO you are going to get even closer to reality.
I think Baker’s career postive on/off signaled he was probaby not as bad as boxscore metrics made him out to be. You also know he was a bench player and those teams sucked, so he’s clearly not as good as his on/off. Defensive RAPM suggests he was around neutral on defense and may have been contributing something on offense that was not very apparent. So call him a -1 or -2 player like RAPM suggests. That’s not nearly as bad as perceptions.
IMO defense, hustle, switchability, making the right pass, not stopping the ball, spacing and things like that tend to be underrated by boxscore, most observers of the game and maybe even still the NBA. Lack of defense, which imo can be huge, is under appreciated in the opposite direction.
Take a look as Jordan Clarkson over the last few years.
https://www.nbarapm.com/player/Jordan_Clarkson
Ron Baker’s plus-minus isn’t totally useless, it does tell us something
And that something is, the rosters of 2017 and 2018 were hilariously bad. When Emmanuel Mudiay or Frank Ntilikina are subbing in for you, it’s not a lot to ask that the team play worse
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