NY Post: Knicks use furious fourth-quarter rally to topple Wizards

excuse me if this was brought up earlier, I haven’t caught up on today’s threads, but it appears the prominent knick who loves Andre Drummond is none other than our own Brock Allerblogger. Seems we all forget Brock was part of the cleveland FO that traded for him last year.

There’s an article in the ringer that states, rather ominously:

Once Drummond gets his buyout from the Cavs, the defending-champion Lakers and the cross-river rival Brooklyn Nets have been considered the favorites to sign Drummond on the cheap. Among title favorites, both are well ahead of the Knicks this season. But New York — and the Rose-Aller duo — can offer Drummond something that neither Los Angeles nor the Nets can.

Because of the Knicks’ cap situation, they can offer Drummond a four-year, $64 million deal,

For fuck’s sake, I finally thought I could sleep easy when Oladipo went to Miami.

https://theathletic.com/2477862/2021/03/25/the-knicks-playbook-to-acquire-andre-drummond-didnt-include-a-trade/?source=user_shared_article

Alan:
When Bullock and Rose are both healthy again, does Frank just get bumped from the rotation, or is there a chance Thibs would be willing to give Payton the Rivers treatment and just go with Quickley and/or Burks for the second unit?

Clearly Thibs sees things in Payton that he likes. He probably likes the way that Payton defends, rebounds and gets into the paint. It’s hard to imagine that he will not be in the rotation. I think Frank gets benched until the next injury. He had his chance and didn’t show much.

When Bullock is back, I’m sure Frank will go to the bench and may not play at all if Rose is available. He got two actual starts lately and both times the Knicks scored something like twenty points for the entire first quarter.

I was doing a CBR chat from 4-6 and then I had a four hour fantasy draft

who got drafted higher – Thor or the Hulk?

i always thought Thor was an underrated super hero, i mean he’s got the hammer and lightening thing going on sure, but he’s also incredibly strong, and he can fly…i don’t know, maybe because he’s a little party friendly – his super hero thing gets discounted a bit…

hard though to argue against Hulk’s single minded focus, truly the strongest there is…also, the Maestro pretty much proves the point of who’s most likely to keep carrying on…

The MVP of this game is the DJ

i caught the pre-show then fast forwarded to the start of the second half, about halfway through the 4th quarter…the DJ is good…

I like how thibs has the aggression level on julius and RJ turned up to about 10.5 at the moment…sometimes that’s just how it is, when you have someone constantly on your ass – you wanna take it out on others…

rookie years: frank looked scared, kevin looked lost, mitch looked wild (and a lot fun), RJ looked ready, quik looks like he’s in a hurry to get there, obi looks desperate…

desperate isn’t that bad, better than scared or lost…okay, he looks a little scared and lost too at times…

forgot whom mentioned it earlier, but yeah taj does set some solid screens, real wide base…

Honestly, I don’t even care if Frank gets benched for Rose. He had his chance. He’s in Year 4 and is still 1,000 miles away from being a rotation player.

It’s just not going to happen for him. It’s over.

I didn’t think I could despise Phil Jackson any more than I already do, but, well… you know.

hard though to argue against Hulk’s single minded focus, truly the strongest there is…also, the Maestro pretty much proves the point of who’s most likely to keep carrying on…

Thing is definitely the better superhero. Hulk literally smashes shit all of the time!

What the hell is any of this?

This is the sort of thing the clever GMs do, the issue is that they do them with good players and not, you know, Andre Drummond on a team that already has two good centers.

But why overpay for a guy who you think is going to be disappointed by his offers in FA? The writer points out how players w/ Drummond’s skillset aren’t en vogue and probably won’t get offered much while also telling us Aller would be smart to offer him a 4 year, $64mil deal in order to lock him up. Can’t square that circle. It’s too insane of an overpay.

Oh, I agree that a theoretical 4 year/$64 million deal for Drummond would be insane, but I think the thing they’re talking about is more like, say, signing a guy like JaMychal Green to a three year or something like that, give him more than the minimum and lock a promising guy up long term by paying him when no one else can. That’s the theory, and that’s likely the sort of thing Aller is thinking about. I have no idea why the Ringer writer then thought, “Give him 4/$64 million!” is similar to that concept, as it is not. It would be beyond stupid.

I agree, Dink, the logic wasn’t there. But I’m still not sleeping easy til Drummond is on another team.

There’s a strange disconnect with this front office. Other than drafting Obi Toppin, they consistently don’t do the stupid things the media keeps reporting they will do. I should feel confident in them but I’m still fearful.

Maybe I’m just susceptible to trolling by the media. But the the Drummond shit and the Post report about Leon wanting to make his splash this summer still have me squirming. I hope we’re just happy with our 22 year old center who provides incredible surplus value on a $2mm contract. I hope we’re excited to use *three* draft picks on good players who can provide surplus value for years to come.

A splash is the last thing this team needs.

Honestly, I don’t even care if Frank gets benched for Rose. He had his chance. He’s in Year 4 and is still 1,000 miles away from being a rotation player.

I honestly don’t care about Frank anymore. I just want Payton the hell out of the rotation, by any means necessary.

Looking forward to something like 35M of cap space the next three years being taken up by Andre Drummond and Derrick Rose.

Btw it’s ten games since some of us made predictions for the rest of the way. Does anyone still think this team is going to drop like a stone and finish the season 10+ games under .500?

The schedule isn’t that hard, and we’re pretty damn consistent. I’m still very confident this is a .500 team, give or take a win.

Meanwhile I really thought I had jinxed RJ last night with my post saying it’d been a month since he last had a game with fewer points than shot attempts. Man he came on strong in the second half. To be honest, I think I probably trust RJ more with the ball in his hands in crunch time than Randle, even though Randle hit that super-tough fade-away to pretty much cement the game last night. And RJ had some serious high-level passes last night – that pass to Taj for the and-1 was so awesome because you saw him probe and probe until RoLo had to commit, then hit the perfect bounce pass to Taj. Quickley had some great passes last night too.

And a little love for Obi today. Still totally lost on offense but his defensive effort was pretty great last night. Still think Knox should take his minutes.

by the way – Taj. That guy is great. It is crazy to me that teams searching around for bigs right now (ie. Charlotte, Lakers, Clippers, etc) did not take a look at him. That dude can play on my team any day.

Also caught some feature/interview spot after the game with RJ talking about his dad inspiring him and his granddad making him watch old VHS tapes of Ewing and Starks. Haha. Love this guy.

I have no idea why the Ringer writer then thought, “Give him 4/$64 million!” is similar to that concept, as it is not. It would be beyond stupid.

My apologies, I introduced the idea as from the ringer but it was actually from the athletic. I only mention that now because the athletic is credible and presumably did their homework, whereas if it had been from the ringer we could easily dismiss it as guesswork.

Frank: Signing Drummond now feels very much like an asset play – expecting that he will be worth more later than you are paying him. But that is a very dicey proposition. Random centers are available all the time on the buyout market or for 2nd round picks at the deadline (Aldridge, McGee) or for the minimum (Dwight, etc). My guess is that smart teams will avoid centers with big contracts unless they are Jokic/Embiid.

Agreed. Let’s assume we stay out of the Drummond race. What’s the best case scenario for him? I don’t even think contending teams would offer him the full MLE.

What’s he really going to do on the Lakers or Nets? I feel like he would just be the de facto starting center who plays the first 7 minutes of each half before the team goes small and plays much better without him.

Max: Payton’s defence is a fairy tale (and false one).
Tonight he was instrumental in every Wizards’ rally. He was in when they took a big lead, his return in the second stopped our first mini comeback, then he was there in the third when we sank deep before the comeback. He had 4 turnovers and ZERO assists in 21 minutes. We would never win the game with him on the floor.

I don’t care his occasional layup or fabled defence, even a broken watch get the time right two times a day, if Thibs sees something in him he’s under LSD.
His presence kills the spacing, allows teams to play aggressive because he’s a terrible shooter, plus (severe minus for a starting PG) he’s not a good distributor.
As soon as Rose’s back we need to nail him to the bench Austin Rivers’ style and let him there.

Alas Thibs will never do that, our only hope is that they don’t re-sign him for next year.

I don’t like Payton’s game either, but this is a crock. Be fair at least. The main reason we went down 17 points is that RJ and Randle shot a combined 6-28. RJ had shot after shot swatted away on misguided forays to the hoop and Randle looked like Obi Toppin. Sure, they engineered a comeback against the worst team in the league, thanks in large part to Westbrick hoisting miss after miss and Bradley Beal going 8-23.

Can we just take a moment to give some praise to RJ’s game last night?

He was awesome.

Also, I know he wasn’t efficient last night but this team would be really, really good if we combined Beal and Barrett on the wing.

swiftandabundant:
Can we just take a moment to give some praise to RJ’s game last night?

He put that team on his back and willed them to victory. The stats aren’t “efficient” because of his poor play in the first half, but damn was he inspiring last night. People dismiss stuff like temperment and attitude but the thing I’ve always loved about RJ and why I think he could still become a superstar is his demeanor on the court. And last night he showed that he has that alpha, I will win this game for us no matter what, attitude. I freaking loved it. I may have to buy a jersey.

RJ deserves praise for his 4th quarter play, but deserves much of the blame for them being behind for most of the first 3 quarters. I remember how angry the Melo-haters would get when Melo did the same thing…

Again, it’s a nice win, and RJ and Randle came through at the end, but they were the main reason we came close to losing to a shitty team with their two best players mailing it in. Alec Burks deserves by far the most credit for keeping us from being down 30 while those two were going 6-28, and Taj gave us a slew of positive intangibles out there in addition to 7 offensive rebounds. Quickley also played well overall despite another shaky shooting performance.

KnickFaninChicago: Gotta say, I am pretty disappointed in the non trade deadline moves. I think you have to consider it a failure. Initially, there was talk of bringing in superstar free agents. When that failed, the strategy wisely shifted to bringing in tradable assets and weaponizing cap space. Fail and double fail. I get that they didn’t do anything stupid, but that is an extremely low bar to clear. It would have been nice to accumulate a pick or two so that we can move up in this draft and get another key piece along with a RFA this summer. I had my sights set on Kumunga but now it seems super unlikely (i know it was already unlikely) we will be able to move a top 5 or 6 pick to get him.

I think you might be grading them against moves that weren’t available to make.

I would have loved to have picked up a first to Eric Bledsoe, but he didn’t get moved. And frankly that trade will probably still be available this summer if New Orleans really wants to do it.

Serby or Berman, can’t remember which, rereferred to Randle’s “barking thigh.” If this isn’t a thing based on a known point of contact, it sounds a bit like a quintessential overuse thing.

Re Phil: No one was saying Phil was overruled by Mills; they were saying Phil was forced to keep Mills around and so therefore couldn’t hire someone actually competent as his GM. You aren’t remotely a properly-empowered POBO if you have to keep the dolt owner’s dolt spy-pal around as your GM.

E, all merc’d out:
Serby or Berman, can’t remember which, rereferred to Randle’s “barking thigh.”If this isn’t a thing based on a known point of contact, it sounds a bit like a quintessential overuse thing.

Of course it does, how could it be anything else? It is probably true that Thibs is responsible for that ship getting stuck in the Suez canal. You just need to connect the dots.

Z-man: Of course it does, how could it be anything else?

It could be something else; that’s why I suggested the something else it could be. This is the first I’ve heard of some kind of thigh issue with Randle. It’s possible I missed something.

It could also be overuse.

E, all merc’d out: Re Phil: No one was saying Phil was overruled by Mills;

You obviously haven’t read strat’s posts for the last 3 years…..He’s said as much a billion times.

I suspect that a lot of what we are reading and seeing on TV when it comes to Drummond is coming from people that hold him in higher regard than the consensus here. It’s not like he’s a bad player. IMO, it’s just that he’s not efficient when he tries to do anything other than play at the rim, he’s a bit of a stat stuffer on the boards, and he’s not what I’d call a clear plus defender. So basically if we told Mitch to shoot some 5-10 footers (he’d certainly make some) and told Randle to be less aggressive on the boards Mitch would be Andre Drummond except he’d be younger, have more upside, and be a better athlete and defender. lol

Z-man: I don’t like Payton’s game either, but this is a crock. Be fair at least. The main reason we went down 17 points is that RJ and Randle shot a combined 6-28. RJ had shot after shot swatted away on misguided forays to the hoop and Randle looked like Obi Toppin. Sure, they engineered a comeback against the worst team in the league, thanks in large part to Westbrick hoisting miss after miss and Bradley Beal going 8-23.

My point is exactly that he made teammates around him worse with his play, offense is less fluid with a lot more of isolation and forced shots (and his passes to shooters are often “not in the hands”, making them lose timing).

There were reasons why he was traded by Orlando, not re-signed by the Suns, not re-signed by the Pels and we collect him from the sidewalk (with a discount) this year when nobody wants him.

BTW, everyone has an opinion, agreement isn’t required (and if we always share the same opinions life will be boring).

Randle has been shooting pretty poorly lately. I don’t know if it’s just a slump or it has to do with our lack of PGs, but he’s shooting worse from inside than outside the arc in March.

A question regarding the Knicks’ cap space.

Once the regular season ends, are there ways teams can use their remaining cap space prior to the commencement of the next year?

Z-man: You obviously haven’t read strat’s posts for the last 3 years…..He’s said as much a billion times.

  

Fake News!

What I consistently said was that Phil needed a good GM because he personally did NOT have good GM skills. Mills was the GM at the time. He was terrible at everything related to basketball and was more interested in Steve Mills than anything else. That hurt the overall management during that period and carried forward into the Mills/Perry era with Hardaway and Baker signings, the KP robbery trying to get Durant, and other idiotic moves

Phil is a basketball guy. His appropriate role was to give the team a direction as to how they were going to play and then slowly find players that fit together coherently so they could execute the plan. The goal being that the team should be better than the sum of the parts because the players skills’ compliment each other and the style of play was likely to lead to success. Phil was trying to build a modernized triangle team where ball and player movement were the centerpiece of the offense and a traditional PG was unnecessary.

The GM’s job is determining fair salaries, managing cap space, getting fair value on trades etc.. so the team has the flexibility to build the vision. That’s where Phil was lacking.

They are two distinct roles that have some flexibility from team to team.

It’s fair to say that I have repeatedly said Mills was a major problem for the organization across multiple regimes including Phil’s.

It’s fair to say I still think a team that defends at a high level and that focuses on ball and player movement using multiple playmakers and that is not totally dependent on a traditional PG is the best way to win championships.

Max: My point is exactly that he made teammates around him worse with his play, offense is less fluid with a lot more of isolation and forced shots (and his passes to shooters are often “not in the hands”, making them lose timing).

There were reasons why he was traded by Orlando, not re-signed by the Suns, not re-signed by the Pels and we collect him from the sidewalk (with a discount) this year when nobody wants him.

BTW, everyone has an opinion, agreement isn’t required (and if we always share the same opinions life will be boring).

Nothing personal, Max. It just seems like the Payton-haters are suggesting (or downright saying in E’s case) that Thibs is a fool for playing him, and the team would be winning more if he didn’t play. You are suggesting that RJ and Randle were shooting badly because of Payton. Really? Bricking the same wide-open 3’s and fall-aways and layups they were making in other games is Payton’s fault? That doesn’t sound like an objective take.

Maybe I sound like I have a case of Thibsophelia, but as I said previously, I think the W-L record speaks for itself. He is widely considered an exceptional defensive coach, and if he believes that Payton is a plus for the team on that end, I’m going to take his word for it, especially when it results in a record that is a billion times better than what Vegas and most serious pundits predicted. I certainly give him more credit for RJ’s and Randle’s improvement than many others here, so maybe my takes sound agenda-driven, but in my opinion, I don’t see them playing as well under most garden variety NBA coaches. He’s a hard-driving, demanding coach, and they are willing to be driven hard and have much demanded from them. Coaches deserve credit for building chemistry and synergy and grinding out wins with the roster they have. I’m more about that, and less about who plays how many minutes.

KB Apprentice: I agree with you up to a point. Last night RJ was not perfect, and (arguably) mediocre. But, I’d rather watch RJ’s performance in that win — where he really was a big factor at the end — rather than watch a game in which he has great stats over four quarters but he/we lose.

I know that’s eye test stuff, but I like that RJ is learning how to recover from his own failures and find a way to win. I think that’s an important part of being a great player.

That’s fine, but not really my point. First, I’d always rather see a win than a loss, and I’d always rather see a player play better for 4 quarters than play shitty and redeem himself with a burst of heroic play. But taste differences aside, it doesn’t really matter. Most good-great players have nights like RJ had last night throughout their careers…but they also have night where they suck for all 4 quarters, where they are great for all 4 quarters and everything in between.

My point is, call a spade a spade. When he deserves credit, credit him. When he deserves criticism, criticize him. Keep things in perspective. Nearly everyone is on the same page in being optimistic about RJ and his trajectory. We may quibble about his ceiling, but we agree that his floor is a very good front-of-rotation player. But last night, against any decent team, his (and Randle’s and Payton’s, etc.) performance in the first 3 quarters would have resulted in a 4th quarter of garbage time. So yeah, it’s a positive that he (and others) pulled it together, we are in full agreement on that.

E, all merc’d out: The fact that the team is winning more than Vegas thought it would win doesn’t have anything to do with anything on this subject. If the team is winning X more than Vegas thought, it would be winning X plus something more than Vegas thought if it didn’t play Payton. He’s a terrible player and he takes minutes from a far better player. Teams win less than they otherwise would if they play terrible players way more than alternative-possibility better players. Sports 101 stuff.

You’ve been dead wrong on just about every prediction/projection/insinuation you have made since preseason. Congratulations! Your streak is intact!

E, all merc’d out: It could also be overuse.

Randle got the proverbial charlie horse when he and (RJ?) jumped into each other trying to guard someone. I’m all in on hating Thib’s over-use of Randle (and others), but this is NOT an example.

I’m conflicted on RJ. Delighted by the 4th quarter, but holy cow did he suck before that, and not just bricking shots and driving into traffic like my grandmother — he was passing to the other team and completely ignoring open teammates.

Eye test alert, but lately it’s seemed that every first quarter has RJ playing like this, and then he ‘reverts’ to form as a decent (or quite good) NBA player. Last night it lasted for three quarters. I wish I had energy and time to do a first quarter breakdown for the last 10 games or so, but I find myself cursing at him early in the game and then relaxing. I’ll chalk it up to his being 20, I guess. I’d just like to see him come out of the gate making good decisions, since he clearly can do it.

If Thibs didn’t play Randle and RJ so much what would our record be right now? What place would we be in? Most of us wouldn’t even be posting in this blog right now due to a lack of interest.

cybersoze: Ok, Morey would’ve done a lot more in this time, but they are steady and with the exception of Obi, everything has been approved by this board.

Well, some have reluctantly come aboard on things like the IQ pick, and some are still griping about all the 1-year guys, not going all-in on Beal, and Thibs being hired in the first place. I don’t sense the consensus beyond acknowledgement that there hasn’t been a colossal blunder that sets the team back 5 years.

Z-man: Nothing personal, Max. It just seems like the Payton-haters are suggesting (or downright saying in E’s case) that Thibs is a fool for playing him, and the team would be winning more if he didn’t play. You are suggesting that RJ and Randle were shooting badly because of Payton. Really? Bricking the same wide-open 3’s and fall-aways and layups they were making in other games is Payton’s fault? That doesn’t sound like an objective take.

Maybe I sound like I have a case of Thibsophelia, but as I said previously, I think the W-L record speaks for itself. He is widely considered an exceptional defensive coach, and if he believes that Payton is a plus for the team on that end, I’m going to take his word for it, especially when it results in a record that is a billion times better than what Vegas and most serious pundits predicted. I certainly give him more credit for RJ’s and Randle’s improvement than many others here, so maybe my takes sound agenda-driven, but in my opinion, I don’t see them playing as well under most garden variety NBA coaches. He’s a hard-driving, demanding coach, and they are willing to be driven hard and have much demanded from them. Coaches deserve credit for building chemistry and synergy and grinding out wins with the roster they have. I’m more about that, and less about who plays how many minutes.

We agree for the most part on Thibs, pointing to a couple of what I perceive as his weakness doesn’t make me a hater, I think he’s doing a good job, the defense and chemistry are for real and games like yesterday, where he resisted the temptation to put in the “starters” because IQ, Burks and Taj were playing so well with RJ and Julius, are encouraging.

Payton didn’t have a role in Randle missing open shots yesterday, when he played well I wrote it, but in general I don’t like how the offense plays with him.

Hubert: Sure there is definitely some of this.

But surely you don’t think Woj and Shams are playing connect the dots, do you?

There is guesswork and there are reports. Oladipo seemed like the kind of guesswork you’re talking about but our well known obsession with Obi Toppin was a report.

This Drummond stuff felt like a report. There is no way anyone would look at the knicks roster with Mitch, Noel, and Taj and say “hey, let’s make up a Drummond thing, that seems credible.”

I guess my point is I don’t think anyone is “making things up” per se. I think there are a lot of people around the league who still are basically expecting the Knicks to chase every big name. When you add in the Aller-Drummond link, I do think on the surface there are plenty of people making the connection and that filters through the news in a way that makes it seem like there’s smoke whether there is or not.

I also think we give more focus to the Knicks stuff for obvious reasons but there’s as much scuttlebutt about Drummond linking him with the Lakers and the Nets as the Knicks and the Celtics is starting up as well after they dumped Theis. Maybe I will quickly be proven wrong but I’m surprisingly confident that Drummond is not going to be a Knick.

I think the Poirier waiving isn’t official yet, but it’ll probably happen. What i hope is that it’s to get a look at G-League guys on 10-day contracts (have i already mentioned we need a backup PF? LOL), and not Drummond.

The Athletic’s piece on Drummond was written by Joe Vardon,
the same guy that wrote an infamous “Don’t rejoice Bucks fans, Giannis is still going away soon” article just hours after his extension.
I’m scared but I’d be terrified if the rumors come from Shams, Amick, Hollinger or Aldridge…

Begley says there’s still no consensus among the front office about Drummond, and that several key voices don’t see him as a fit. As for post-deadline movies, he writes:

Drummond isn’t the only big man on the Knicks’ radar. As reported earlier this week, John Henson and Norvel Pelle are also among the players they’re keeping an eye on for their open roster spot. If Gorgui Dieng is bought out, he has a Knick connection: Dieng played for Thibodeau with Minnesota.

cybersoze:
So recapping yesterday’s deal:

We’ll have a look at Terrance Ferguson, but probably there’s nothing there. Poirier will be waived, so no teammates to practice french for Frank. Philly’s 2021 2nd RP is #59 as of now, and there’s no chance it gets better than #55. Miami’s 2023 2nd RP is top 55 protected, so it’ll be #56 or worst, and most likely will not convey to us at all.
Doing this or just waiving Rivers and letting him choose the team he wanted to play for, is almost the same. But hey, let the Terrance Ferguson time with the Knicks begin. Over/under on the months he’ll be here at 4.5?

To me this seems more like a front office helping out another deal for a small benefit (maybe very small) and thus being a good league citizen. My guess is the best benefit of this deal is that other front offices will probably be more willing to help us when we need some small help with a deal of our own.

Re the media:

1. Agents always, always, always use the Knicks’ “interest” in a guy as a way to drive up his market price, be it either his trade market price or his free agent price. This leads to bullshit being out there.

2. Beyond the real plugged-in NBA writers, of which there are maybe like five (*), there’s a massive Knicks for Clicks economy going on. This is an avid and large fanbase and there’s also an avid and large LOLKnicks contingent out there. This leads to bullshit being out there.

(*) Start with Woj and Shams and go from there. It doesn’t go much beyond there. Berman isn’t remotely plugged in.

Apparently our hero Brock is being considered for the GM job in cleveland

Yeah, I think last night was super encouraging even if RJ played poorly the first three quarters.

The Wizards suck, sure, but they do have Beal and Westbrook and the fact is, any NBA team can beat any other team on any given night. And even a bad team like The Wizards are going to come out super motivated in the 2nd game vs. a team that killed them the first night. I wasn’t surprised at all that we got behind like that in that situation. What is encouraging, both individually for RJ and for the team as a whole, is that they didn’t pack it in after the 3 quarters. They could have easily done that. Its wins like these, games where the team plays bad for the most part but still finds a way to win, that help a team go from bad to good to great. A W is a W.

Hope we can win one against either The bucks or miami.

Yeah, at this point there’s really nothing more to consider, he’s had 4000 minutes in his career and he’s shown nothing.

That’s not really it. As poster Frank says, player Frank has shown flashes – occasionally whole games! – where’s he great. Composed on offense, a demon on defense. The frustrating thing is that you could see how he could be a plus player. But I finally bailed last week because of the inconsistency: his blah games are more frequent than his good games, and he’s injured a lot of the time. You just can’t count on the guy, not even for consistently great D – getting lost on a screen, not recovering from a switch fast enough.

So I’m finally out on him, but not because I agree with Bruno or humper that he doesn’t have potential or hasn’t shown anything – it’s because those flashes are too few and far between to give any confidence that he’ll ever do it consistently. And if he doesn’t do it consistently, he’s not a professional.

Which is why on the flip side I’m IN on RJ. He was so terrible last night – so many drives into traffic only to get blocked – but through force of will he pushed through that and played really, really well in the fourth quarter. He showed up even though he was being shown up. THAT is a professional. His fourth quarter was hugely impressive not because he was great the rest of the game, but because he was so terrible and did not give up. No quit. That’s easy to love.

Knick fan not in NJ: To me this seems more like a front office helping out another deal for a small benefit (maybe very small) and thus being a good league citizen. My guess is the best benefit of this deal is that other front offices will probably be more willing to help us when we need some small help with a deal of our own.

Yeah, from that pov i would’ve done it too, so no harm done and some good will added. 😉

Think of the capital it’s going to cost to fix the gaping hole at PG that Tyrese Halliburton would have filled on a rookie contract. All the cap space or draft picks we will spend trying to fill that gaping void it is capital that could have been used elsewhere without that colossal blunder.

This team is permanently handicapped from reaching the heights it could have reached had Rose not been fixated on Obi Toppin, a player so plainly ordinary that literally every KB poster who watched two minutes of video could tell he was a pass.

Right now Tom Thibodeau is taking mostly the players Scott Perry and Steve Mills assembled and making them really good. Credit to him, and credit to Rose for hiring him. But please don’t act like this front office isn’t already blunderful.

Hubert: Think of the capital it’s going to cost to fix the gaping hole at PG that Tyrese Halliburton would have filled on a rookie contract.

Very much agree, up to a point (I’m here tomorrow night too, folks). He’s now firmly in the starting line-up, had another strong game last night. But he had only one assist in almost 34 minutes in a game his team scored 141 points. Like Quickley, he’s not really a point guard. He’s a really smart, good, heady basketball player, and in their new three-guard line-up is probably perfect. He was a huge whiff for us, just horrible, but I’m not convinced he was the answer to our point guard hole.

Hubert: I think you might be grading them against moves that weren’t available to make.

I would have loved to have picked up a first to Eric Bledsoe, but he didn’t get moved. And frankly that trade will probably still be available this summer if New Orleans really wants to do it.

It would’ve been nice to pick up a first, but if you like Lonzo, then freeing the Pels of Bledsoe just makes it more likely they match any offer sheet. Wondering if that is why they passed.

Thinking about Beal, and why in the world he would want to stay on that team. Westbrook is there until the end of his contract – Washington could attach all their picks for the next 3 years and it’d still be hard to convince a team to take on his bricklaying and his contract. Hachimura is meh. Davis Bertans is nice but a tertiary player. Deni seems fine, but clearly not a difference maker. I find DC to be an awesome city, but if I’m Beal, I try and get out of there.

BernieEarnie: Huh?My recollection was that there was collective disappointment that we didn’t grab a PG, but not that he would not be any good. Why make this up?

Your recollection is wrong.

Hubert: Right now Tom Thibodeau is taking mostly the players Scott Perry and Steve Mills assembled and making them really good. Credit to him, and credit to Rose for hiring him. But please don’t act like this front office isn’t already blunderful.

Sure, because Noel, Burks and IQ (not to mention that Rose and Taj and even Payton, who were brought in on the cheap, unlike when he was brought in by the Mills/Phil/Perry regimes last time around) have had nothing to do with the team’s success this year. It’s so tedious to listen to you discredit/minimize the FO’s impact with these dumb superficialities. Like it was a bad idea to keep the good stuff that was in place and fill in around it with more good stuff? While maintaining flexibility going forward? And last I checked, it was the FO who hired Thibs and surrounded him with a firewall of assistants and scouting/analytics/cap management gurus.

Since Rose was hired, front offices all around the league have made countless dumb moves. Look at what Chicago did yesterday, and people here were drooling over their guy. And here at KB, every dumb “done deal” like trading for Westbrook or Oladipo or Beal, has not happened. We are still in the same great position going forward as we were when he took over. And you call that “blunderful?” LOLOLOLOL

Most people at draft time wanted either Hali, Hayes or Vassell, and Kira and Deni were liked by some. Obi was not even on the radar until very late, and no one was eager to draft him.

Even so, some thought that Obi would at least look like an NBA rotation player in short order since he did have reasonably good stats in college.

@Z-Man: Ok, you’re right and i’m wrong, there’s no consensus on the actions of the front-office.

538 has us at 10-17 the rest of the season. We can probably get closer to .500 but it will be tough – the west coast trip in May in particular will be brutal. 13-14 on the rest of the season – for 36-36 total which should give us a shot at the 6th seed. (Also I don’t know if 538 has factored in trades/injuries yet into their predictions – they still have the Raptors with a high chance of making the playoffs for example and I’d be more bearish on the Hornets with out LaMelo and the Pacers definitely without Warren)

Something like this:

Ws:
MIA, @MIN, @DET, MEM, TOR, LA, NOLA, CHA, TOR, CHI, @HOU, @MEM, CHA, BOS

Ls:
@MIL, DAL, @BRK, @BOS, @DAL, @NOLA, ATL, PHO, @DEN, @PHO, @LAC, @LAL, SAS

cybersoze: The one thing making me happy yesterday was to get to wacth Westbrick, a huge bullet we dodged there. This isn’t a decline, he’s not an NBA player anymore. Probably not even the most pessimists of this blog would’ve predicted this level of play from him.

I was the biggest pessimist and I’m not sure this is entirely out of line with what I thought possible, you’d have to check my comments. I certainly thought he might have a but of a bounce back, but this was always a possibility.

What I didn’t predict was so much of his poor performance would come from FTs & TOs. That’s weird to me

Hubert: Your recollection is wrong.

Hubert, read what you said. When you use the words literally everyone it means just that. I know some posters thought he would not be good but that was a minority.

E, all merc’d out:
Re Phil:No one was saying Phil was overruled by Mills; they were saying Phil was forced to keep Mills around and so therefore couldn’t hire someone actually competent as his GM.You aren’t remotely a properly-empowered POBO if you have to keep the dolt owner’s dolt spy-pal around as your GM.

Do we have to do this again?

PHIL: I like Joakim Noah
MILLS: Okay how much money do you want to offer him
PHIL: Listen, I don’t know what numbers are
MILLS: How about 4 years 32 million
PHIL: Those are numbers, I don’t know how to use those
MILLS: Well if we give that much money to Noah we won’t have much left to—
PHIL: I SAID NO NUMBERS
MILLS: Okay I’ll sign him
PHIL: Triangle

Whatever good or refraining from bad the FO has done will be swept away entirely if the end product is three or four year deals to Derrick Rose and Andre Drummond for 35 mil-ish a year. Maneuvering and keeping your powder dry so you can win a buyout bidding war for Andre Drummond isn’t crafty, it’s dumb af.

Hubert: Anyway, I don’t have a Rose POV yet. I’m still waiting for more evidence. Right now I’m leaning towards thinking he could be good for us. But I’m still scared shitless of what he may do this offseason. We shall see.

Hate to tell you, dude, but this is a POV. And so is the rest of the mostly nonsense that you post. You just like to have it both ways. You spout extreme views, then hedge with more bullshit so that you can claim that you were misrepresented when things don’t go the way you blathered on and on about.

E, all merc’d out: As to the final verdict on both the FO and Thibs — too early to tell. Room for worry on both, some good things from both. We don’t have to have a hawt take every single day.

Dude, you are MR. Hawt Take himself.

538 has us at 10-17 the rest of the season. We can probably get closer to .500 but it will be tough – the west coast trip in May in particular will be brutal.

538 wins projection system is pretty good and usually is pretty accurate for team level projections however in-season it has a tough time if anyone is making an improvement or if minutes distributions get out of wack considerably… i don’t think the latter will happen.. they basically have it roughly right and a few minutes here or there isn’t going to impact much….

but i do think RJ’s mid-season improvement is hiding the real potential of this team and that’s sort of what’s missing from RAPTOR…. with Mitch out we probably should have been ~.500 team but with rose replacing rivers’ minutes and RJ balling out … we were considerabily better than that….. and i happen to think RJ has dusted December RJ in his trails and when you account for his stinkers as only happening 10-15% of the time instead of half the time… he starts making a considerable impact on the offense…

if RJ starts reverting or if randle starts collapsing due to his depressed 2p% then we’re probably closer to the 538 projection and that’s certainly possible but if we’re anything even sniffing a league average offense then we’re probably a slightly better than .500 team which would probably net us a close to .500 record with the remaining games….

@ShamsCharania:
Andre Drummond has agreed to a contract buyout with the Cleveland Cavaliers and will become a free agent, sources tell TheAthletic
Mar 26, 2021 · 1:51 PM ET

Be afraid, be very afraid 😛

There are few things more amusing to me than Phil Jackson apologists (including Phil himself) rationalizing Phil’s colossal failures and looking for scapegoats to pin the failures on.

Please never stop doing your thing, Phil truthers. You complete me.

JK47: Please never stop doing your thing, Phil truthers. You complete me.

LOL

One thing we didn’t discuss yet – the new Bulls. What do you guys think are their chances for a real playoff spot (top6) with Vuc? They were on pace to be the odd team out of the play in, but i think they’re not in that position anymore, maybe it’ll be Toronto now.

I think you have the right attitude, swift. But just because you want to say “c’est la vie” and be happy doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. The opportunity cost of striking out with a pick like that is devastating.

swiftandabundant: Missing out on prospects by making the wrong pick sucks but its not a debilitating move for a franchise if they do the other things right and if they have extra picks to make up for striking out sometimes.

You’re absolutely right about this, though.

Keep in mind that “being set back 5 years” doesn’t mean “we’re shit for 5 years.”

It could just as easily mean we’re really good but we can’t get to the next level bc we’re short a player or a trade chip that we could have had.

Toppin looks lost. We gave Frank four years. Next year for him. I would rather see Taj as the backup power forward.

my moment of clarity regarding phil came during that lisa leslie interview where he felt it necessary to defend his posse comment – i had no idea anyone could be that disconnected and arrogant, it was like he never left his own head…

forget putting together a team, i wouldn’t have trust the guy to rearrange books on a shelf…

swiftandabundant: a lot of picks outside of the top two or three picks end up being bad picks.

Do you think that’s a function of the draft being a crapshoot? Or because the NBA decision makers who live in the high lottery each year are totally and hopelessly incompetent?

Look at some of the franchises that have been basically bailed out by one rookie-contract player. SGA is a star right now, and has a ton of upside. Doncic is an MVP candidate. LaMelo was leading a playoff team in BPM before his injury. Trae Young is the ball-dominant scorer on a team that’s finally at .500 for the first time since 2017. Zion Fucking Williamson. Ja Morant.

The problem here, swift, is that when the Knicks pass up on a “safe” bet like Haliburton, that means that he goes elsewhere. And although he’s on just one of 29 teams that the Knicks will play against, those draft fuck-ups compound over time. SGA could have been a Knick instead of Knox. The useless win against PHI on the final day of 2017 essentially swapped us with SAC, who got Fox while we got Ntilikina in a largely unremarkable draft. And they did it yet again in 2018, dropping behind BRK in the standings.

It’s not about missing out on one player. It’s about the repeated loss of opportunity while other teams get richer for simply not fucking up at their draft slot. Toppin wasn’t ever going to be a franchise cornerstone, so it’s not like we drafted Jah Okafor and watched him inexplicably go from a world-beating offensive powerhouse in the NCAA to a guy who’s in his athletic prime yet can’t find the floor on a 12-31 team, even when he’s healthy (they are 1-11 in the games he’s played spot minutes in).

It’s repeatedly seeing good EV plays on the draft board and doing something completely useless, like drafting a total fucking scrub like Ntilikina or Knox or Toppin… over… and over… and over.

In his piece on possible buyouts and their destinations, Hollinger wrote that, being the only team with cap space and could offer to everybody a (multiyear) contract above the minimum, we could do something with players like Otto Porter and Dieng if they’re relesed,

He even put together a (admittedly) long shot for Dinwiddle if the Nets want to save money on luxury tax.

He sadly mentioned Drummond in the same sentence as Porter, causing me a panic attack… now I desperately need a real zen master…

I don’t understand – whose minutes would Drummond be talking? I know we all think it’s a terrible idea but I really, truly don’t understand the logic

Jowles, I agree with you that we’ve messed up with our recent top picks – Frank, Knox, Obi. I mean, damn, if we’d just made the unsexy boring picks that we knew could be decent but maybe not great players, our arsenal would be STACKED right now and we’d be sitting pretty.

But for every Obi or Knox pick, there’s a Quickley or Mitch pick later in the draft. Maybe it’s not one for one like that buy you get my point. I think the way to play it is instead of trying to hold out on wins as long as you can to get the top picks…you should trade when you can for extra picks all over the draft but especially in the first round. This way you give yourself more chances to hit on a player and also more leeway if you screw one up. We’re not the only ones who screw up top picks and outside the top 2 or 3, that 5 to 12 range is super dangerous. I think you’re right though that range is so dangerous because teams have fooled themselves into thinking that because they have a “lottery” pick that they’re supposed to draft a star. So they pass over the safer pick because they get fooled by 3 on 3 workouts, youth and athletic potential.

Don’t look now, but in 300 minutes Dennis Smith has averaged 13pts/5reb/7ast/2stl/1.5 blocks per 36and shot 36% from 3 on 5.3 attempts per 36. He’s still not a hugely productive player (.076 WS/48 and 1.2 BPM–pretty good!) and his TS% is still ghastly but, idk, I feel like we should’ve given him more of a shot before writing him off and trading him for D-Rose. Though maybe he would’ve never done this without the change of scenery.

I’m honestly more relieved about Rose and the FO than I am happy, and that extends to the draft picks too. Of course I wanted all those players over Knox and Obi, but Mitch and Quickley were good picks, so it compensates a bit. Of course I’d rather be just happy, but I’ll take the sense of relief over the absolute dread that was Phil Jackson or the other clowns we had to endure. Of course I’d rather have good trades instead of sitting still, but still an improvement over getting Oladipo or something like that.

When was the last time there was a “name” on the market that wasn’t connected to the Knicks. Literally every player with any name value is always connected to the Knicks. What I’m saying above is maybe now Leon is using it as a quid pro quo with his agent buddies.

Tyrese and Bridges would definitely change the outlook dramatically. Tyrese got hot again last night, 6-7 from three.

The rare glimmers I see from Obi are when he is in motion without the ball and can catch the ball with a head of steam. He’s not a guy you can just have spotting up at the three point line.

The idea of signing Drunmond for 64 million is astonishingly stupid. I don’t believe it.

I guess there is a possibility Drummond could go back to being a reasonably valuable big. Strange things have happened, like him becoming terrible in the first place. But just seems a crazy use of our resources when we already have two better centers.

Alan: One less thing to worry about.

I’m sorry for JB but happy as a Knick fan…

No team nails every draft, but if we had just made the right pick one time we could have Shae Gilgeous, Mikal Bridges or Tyrese Halliburton.

Any one of those players would be perfect fits for this team. Sigh……

One less thing to worry about.

are you keeping a list al 🙂

Ok so hear me out here.

If you believe the stories out there, most of the Knicks brass does not want Drummond but some do. Thibs is said to love Mitch, they brought Noel in, of course Thibs loves Taj. So I think we can definitely rule out that it’s Thibs that wants Drummond. I think same for Wes – he’s a Kentucky guy, and the guy most likely to get even fewer minutes if Drummond comes is Noel, a Kentucky guy.

No – the most likely person to want Drummond is the same guy who wanted Drummond in Cleveland – Brock Aller. Aller is all about assets. If you get Drummond to sign with your team, you also get his S&T rights. The signing team in a S&T has to be the team that you played on at the end of the prior season.

The Knicks have a ton of cap space next year and so can sign him to whatever they want. Most importantly, they can trade him to a team that doesn’t have cap space, but would send back players and/or picks for the right to trade for Drummond.

Drummond is basically a free asset floating in the wind right now. Aller is thinking that if we get him under our roof and capture his S&T rights, we’ve created an asset out of thin air. If there isn’t a team out there that wants him in S&T (or a S&T that is good for the Knicks), then we just let him go, no harm no foul – the only thing that is lost is that NYK players this year don’t get paid extra to get us out the salary floor.

From Drummond’s perspective – going to the Knicks now – a team that can pay him more this season, but also can basically offer him anything this summer – that greatly increases his potential market and earning potential this summer. If he goes to the Lakers or whoever for the minimum, then next season he can basically only sign with teams with cap space or slot into an MLE of some sort – the Lakers would only have non-Bird rights which are useless on top of a minimum contract.

Anyway, that’s what i think is happening.

My point, jowles, is that every team misses in picks, even the good ones. It happens all of the time. Instead of focusing on the past mistakes we should just let it go. We’re still in a great spot and if we hit on like two out of our next 5 first round picks we’ll be fine.

The 4/$64M number is so insane it can’t be real. I mean, if you’re getting bought out you are per se not worth that contract. You don’t even need anymore details than that, such as details indicating Andre Drummond has been straight up bad this season. You don’t need those.

Just signing him for the remainder of the season would be…kind of annoying but fine I guess? Typically you do not seek to add depth at the position at which you have the most depth, but it’s not completely insane to think his S&T rights could be worth something as per Frank’s theory. The problem is we just saw what the trade market for Andre Drummond yielded, and it was, well, nothing, but maybe at $10M AAV or so we could nab assets for him.

The overwhelming likelihood is we’re overthinking this and the front office wants to sign Andre Drummond because they think he’s good for dumb reasons.

Brodie Van Wagenen gave up assets and spent money to acquire Robinson Cano, even though the Mets had a perfectly good second baseman named Jeff McNeil at the league minimum.

Andre Drummond is the Robinson Cano in this situation, and Mitch Robinson is the Jeff McNeil. You already have surplus production at the center position. Fix a problem that needs fixing instead.

I can’t believe it either, but if they do it, they’ll get to Phil’s level with just one move. That’s hard to do. 😀

they only wish they could reach Phil’s level with a single move. What you don’t understand is that it is not Leon Rose’s job to decide what to pay Andre Drummond. We have the vice president of contracts for that. And it is not Leon’s job to choose whether Andre Drummond ought to be a player to whom we will pay a random amount. We pay the director of unvalued players for that. And if we so happen to throw in a no trade clause, kindly direct your complaints to the recently hired deputy general manager of irrelevant minutiae.

Leon is not an assembly worker! He is not a contracts person or a trade person or a draft person or a coach hiring person; he is a basketball person. We pay Leon millions of dollars to point the team in the right direction. Yes, the referees typically do this as well, but only Leon knows the value of occasionally pointing at the wrong basket to teach player x at cost y some essential lesson about humility and vertigo.

Is there another example in the history of the league where a 2 time AllStar, in his prime, is dumped for a lousy second round pick, and a few months later his new team admits to losing the trade, can’t recoup the lousy 2nd round pick, and has to pay him multiple millions of dollars just to go away, and the player STILL has a place in the league?

well dwight was miles better than drummond at peak and he was only 31 when the hawks dumped him to charlotte who had no interest in keeping him, and yet he has stuck around as a low cost player for years since.

None of SGA, Mikal or Hali were sure things, they were better risks than the guys we picked. Still, it’s kind of karma that all 3 of them turned out to be good.

Yeah, the two names most associated with the Knicks at #8 that year were Mikal Bridges and Michael Porter jr, if I recall. One was the safe bet with the low ceiling, the other was the unknown because of his injury. Then Kevin Knox played some 3-on-3 in front of Steve Mills and the world was forever changed…

damn, Malik Monk

I know, he’s a Celtic, but Robert Williams III (aka Time Lord) is good…

The problem really is not only how we didn’t get the absolute best cases, like SGA or Haliburton, is that we somehow managed to draft pretty much THE worst player for the projected position we were in. Drafting Monk or Kennard over Adebayo would have been bad, but they’re both better than Frank; SGA is better than Bridges or MPJ, but both are much better than Knox, etc.

Not hitting on the ideal player is painful, but it’s another thing to just draft a guy who 3 or 4 years into their career has not shown yet he’s a NBA player at the very least.

Safe to say at this point the Knicks are almost guaranteed to finish in the Top 10, now it’s a matter of finishing in the Top 8 to give themselves a better chance of making the actual playoffs.

Another night, another James Harden being James Harden performance. The Nets are staying in the #1 seed race without KD and Kyrie, and yet people will trash on this guy still.

Whiffing on Obi at 8 and crushing the IQ pick with a late first rounder shows you that it really helps to have extra darts to throw at the board when you’re rebuilding. Imagine if we had been doing that all along. That’s what the “collect assets” gang here has been advocating for.

The Knicks did kind of a half-assed job of it but still came away with some good young players. It works!

I find it amusing that when we evaluate the what-ifs, every time you guys put the players that already panned out on the picks we missed, and still maintain that we would’ve drafted Mitch and IQ. Is there a team that nails ALL PICKS, be it 1st or 2nd rounders, for 4 consecutive years?
So 3 very good players is an ok result of this last 3 years (i’ll not comment how Dolan let Phil make the pick in 2017, to then fire him in the following days, so i don’t include that year), and one of them is starting to look like an all-star (RJ). Add to that the finding of an all-star on the cheap in the free-agent market, and we’re not that bad. Of course we could’ve been better, but man we could’ve been worst, and if we performed like the old Knicks we would most definitely be in a worst position.
But let’s not think what could have been and just discuss what the plan for the future should be! 🙂

Tonight is a big game. I’m expecting a loss, but hopefully everyone will be healthy and we will play a solid game.

I don’t think anything is safe. If we lose Julius for 3 weeks and go an an 8 game bender, we’re probably out of the top 10. But I would certainly say that we should make the top-10, with a puncher’s chance for the top-7.

Kristaps Porzingis dropped 31 points with 18 rebounds, three assists and three triples in 38 minutes vs. Indiana on Friday.

Where’s Strat? 😀
PS: Of course, don’t look at the efficiency, as it takes away some of that slashline shinning.

A five-game lead with 27 games left? That’s pretty big. Toronto isn’t this bad, but I think they’ve dug themselves too big of a hole, especially as now they don’t have Powell to help them get back (although I loved them getting Trent Jr. back. He’s kind of perfect for them, really, as he allows them to play Spicy P. as a bit of a small ball center (with OG Anunoby as the small ball four while Trent Jr. is the small ball three instead of Powell).

Really, overall, I like Toronto’s basic setup. They have VanVleet, Siakam, Boucher and Anunoby all signed for the next two-three seasons. That’s not a bad core. And they’ll have money to surround those guys with help (heck, they could even bring Lowry back). And now they will likely have Trent Jr. for the next few seasons, as well (he’s an RFA unlike Powell being a UFA). Their problem was that they lost literally 3/5 of their NBA Finals starting lineup in back-to-back offseasons! Heck, of the 8 guys who played for them in their clinching Finals game less than two years ago, just three guys are still on the team and one of those guys is a 35-year-old free agent!

Yeah, Masai is still the man. But they look like a top-10 team and we don’t really look like a top-6 team, so a likely scenario is that we will both be in the play-in mix.

Oh, absolutely agreed that when you look at the Knicks and the Raptors, it doesn’t feel like the Knicks should be five games ahead of the Raptors (and it’s not even like Nick Nurse is a bad coach or anything), but five games in 27 games is a ton to make up. They’re only two games back of the #10 seed, though, so yeah, I could easily see them and the Knicks both in the play-in games, I just don’t see a realistic scenario where they catch up to the Knicks, which would mean that the Knicks would at least make the play-in games.

I do agree, too, that it seems hard to believe that the Knicks will finish ahead of the Celtics and Heat when all is said and done. 23-22 for the Knicks, 23-22 for the Hawks, 22-23 for the Celtics and 22-24 for the Heat (losers of six straight!). It’s not like the Knicks have much room for error.

Strength of remaining schedule for the 8 teams in the East that’ll be in the 4th-11th range (with opponents combined winning percentage):
1. Chicago Bulls – .513
2. Toronto Raptors – .510
3. Best team in the world – .508
4. Charlotte Hornets – .496
5. Atlanta Hawks – .494
6. Miami Heat – .492
7. Boston Celtics – .490
8. Indiana Pacers – .475

It won’t be easy, but hey the Raptors have a (slightly) more difficult schedule than the Knicks, so yeah at least we should be ahead of them when all it’s said and done.

A win tonight sure would be huge, especially after the Celtics kicked the Bucks’ ass last night. The last time the Knicks beat a team with a winning record was almost a month and a half ago (it was the Hawks, and the Hawks obviously didn’t have a winning record at the time. That was before they won eight in a row. You would have to go back to the first week of February for the last time the Knicks beat a team who had a winning record when the Knicks played them, the 12-10 Blazers, who were playing without three of their starters).

It really is a testament to Thibs’ devotion to winning every game at all costs that the Knicks just don’t lose to bad teams. They don’t often beat good teams, but they don’t lose to bad ones and that’s a very valuable thing in the NBA.

swiftandabundant: Philly tanked straight up for what, 5 seasons and only got Simmons and embiid out of it.

Popovich has been the head coach of the Spurs for 25 years and only won 5 championships.

The Lakers had Kobe & Shaq for 8 years and only won 3 championships.

The 96 Bulls played 82 games and only won 72.

The 96 Bulls played 82 games and only won 72.

Lebron has only made it to 9 of the last 10 NBA Finals.

Philly tanked straight up for what, 5 seasons and only got Simmons and embiid out of it.

This is true if you arbitrarily decide the the surplus picks and flyers they were able to acquire as a result of not chasing wins don’t count. Otherwise you have to count Saric, Covington, Harris, and a lot of other guys currently on their roster if you trace back various asset histories.

The former two were parlayed into Jimmy freakin’ Butler, so that seems like a pretty serious omission. Harris is also a pretty damn essential part of their team.

Just imagine Philly picking Wiggins or Jabari instead of Jojo and visualize their future.

Just imagine Philly picking Wiggins or Jabari instead of Jojo and visualize their future.

i just imagined this and you’ll be relieved to know that in this universe they nabbed KAT and tatum instead of okafor and fultz, so it turned out okay for them. also jabari parker left to play in china and accidentally ran over patient zero with his scooter on a day trip to wuhan and the worst thing about corona was still the taste.

That’s really the most amazing thing about the RJ pick. It was the first year they intentionally tanked and they got RJ Barrett and their automatic response was, “Okay, well, enough of that! Who needs results like that, am I right?”

And so they get Obi Toppin instead of LaMelo Ball.

It’s great to get top talents for free but let’s not forget that the goal is to build a team and go for the chip. Not just babysitting Superstars before a competent team steal them.

Knew Your Nicks:
Drafting high is good.
Drafting right is better.

Cool. Can you define “drafting right” beyond just pointing to teams getting lucky on non-lottery picks, or explain how drafting right and drafting high are mutually exclusive? If you can draft right, surely you are better off drafting higher where you get the maximum amount of options.

Mike Honcho:
“Draft smart, not high” feels like the basketball equivalent of people saying they didn’t want a stimulus check because they’d rather rise and grind for it. Shooting yourself in the foot by deliberately ignoring an available advantage is not a virtue, folks.

To be fair, that’s not exactly what he said. He says drafting high is good; drafting right is better – which really, he’s right. High draft pick busts Darko, Kwame Brown, and Anthony Bennett are some examples where teams blew it drafting at or near the top. Drafting high typically gets you into the range of true impact talent, but you still have to not select the wrong guy.

Obviously there is some luck involved, I mean the same people drafted Obi Toppin at 8 and then Immanuel Quickley at 25 or whatever. It’s not like those guys took stupid pills before they selected Obi but the stupid pills wore off when they took IQ.

You can absolutely find good players later in the draft, in fact this is something that the Knicks seem to do well for whatever strange reason. Our problem has been that we haven’t stockpiled enough darts. We did okayish with the darts we had, but more darts would have been better.

Also – if the Knicks (and Mavs) make the playoffs, they’ll likely have two non-lottery mid-round selections this summer. So in that case, drafting right comes more into focus.

If you can draft well with the 20th pick you usually don’t draft high in the lottery.
No need to.

And it worked despite two different GMs trying to blow up the rebuild as soon as they got their hands on it.

Sixers shit worked. No doubt about it.
Trying to figure out why it worked don’t seem as hate to me. Just bball talk

Raven:
So with all these draft pick discussions, I totally randomly picked two teams to look at in terms of how they did versus how we did in the first round.
Would you rather be these guys?

Orlando Magic
2017
6 Jonathan Isaac
25 Anzeis Pasecnics
2018
6 Mo Bamba
2019
16 Chuma Okeke
2020
15 Cole Anthony

Then you have the Lakers, who did better, but interestingly not a single pick is still with them:
2017
2 Lonzo Ball
28 Tony Bradley
2018
25 Mo Wagner
2019
4 D’Andre Hunter
2020
28 Jaden McDaniels

I honestly don’t know what this really conveys, as it’s random and only 1/15 of the NBA. I guess it intimates that whiffing on first round picks might be a thing, and perhaps not entirely and only Knicksy (although overall we had higher slots to screw up, so there’s that).

I’d lean towards Jowles’ oft-stated take that poorly-managed teams are lottery frequent flyers in part because they are poorly-managed and thus draft poorly. I think most of our recent drafting falls into that category, with the exception of the last couple years where we’ve done better despite whiffing on Obi. RJ, Mitch and IQ is a decent lottery haul, but it sure would have been nice to add any one of Bridges, Haliburton or SGA to that mix instead of our other scrubs.

It’s even more annoying because the same people who scream the draft is a crap shoot and all about luck won’t ever acknowledge the fact that the Sixers were one miracle shot away from having a chance to beat the depleted Warriors in the finals. When it comes to that discussion, they’ll just say the Sixers failed straight up, luck only gets considered as a variable when it fits their own personal narrative.

If that ball doesn’t hit the rim the perfect way 4 times what would you be saying? “The Sixers only got one ring from 5 years of tanking not worth it”?

“Draft smart” is kind of like “win trades.” I mean yeah, no shit, it’s better to draft good players. Good players are nice to have.

Let’s bump up the level of discussion above obvious tautologies.

One thing I will say is the Knicks’ strategy after they draft a guy is absolutely horrendous. They did not have a coherent plan to actually develop any of Obi Toppin (let’s take this rim running five who can stretch the floor and make him a 3&D power forward), RJ Barrett (let’s give him the worst spacing in the league), Kevin Knox (we know he’s a project but let’s run our offense through him), and Frank Ntilikina (he played shooting guard in the French league so let’s make him an NBA point guard). It’s literally the most frustrating thing for me about these Knicks and I hope we just draft better because players’ development on this team never seems to be aided by the infrastructure. If Julius Randle didn’t up his 3 point shooting by 15 points, something nobody saw coming at all, does RJ Barrett have the season he’s having now? The Knicks really struggle with the whole idea of putting five guys on the court whose games complement each other.

the real conversation here is too nuanced for people who just want to fuck around on a blog. at some level of precision it’s too nuanced for anyone to tease out. it’s almost comically facile to just proclaim the draft a crapshoot, or, alternatively, to say it’s not a crapshoot you just need to draft well. it’s unavoidably a difficult to parse mix of luck and skill.

masai made what may be the single worst pick in the history of the the second round when he took deandre daniels 37th and 3 of the next 4 picks were dinwiddie, jerami grant and jokic. that same draft he took caboclo 20th. the very year the jazz absolutely stole gobert at 27, they also gave up an extra first to move up from 14 to nab knickerblogger hofer trey burke. giannis went 15th.

and yes, with only 30 teams and a far cry from a idealized efficient market setup, there likewise is ample opportunity to be predictably stupid or above average. people like to say shit like “the draft is a crapshoot” or “just draft well” because nuance is boring and in some arenas unpersuasive. but the boring fact is that drafting higher increases your probability of success by relatively modest and noisy amounts, and an important part of team building is comparing this potential uplift and its expected average effect on wins with the marginal cost of losses when you are bad.

in reality the luck factor is large enough and the sample is small enough that you may never get to feast in the bounty of your own smart bets. there are many worlds in which buford didn’t get duncan and manu and steve mills landed on kawhi and butler. it’s hard to wander in the wake of the dunkard’s walk for a living, even if you have a better map. there’s a reason morey went to philly and not some team with a stable of promising probabilities.

but as a fan who can’t get fired it still make sense to root for the better odds. especially when the marginal cost is tiny, like 29 wins vs 22 wins.

Some of the bad picks we have made recently were high ceiling gambles, when there were clear high floor guys available. High floor isn’t sexy, but we’d be in a lot better shape if we went for floor over ceiling with some of these.

I love this part the best, “The Celtics also offered a first-round pick and a young player to Orlando for Gordon, sources said, and they were prepared to add to that haul, but the Magic accepted Denver’s offer, which included Gary Harris Jr., R.J. Hampton, and a first-round pick, before Boston had a chance.”

I imagine Ainge, “But that’s not faaaaaaair. You didn’t come back to us to see if we would raise our ‘final’ offer!”

Love the blithe assumption that the Sixers would have just won the overtime and then beat the Bucks, like for sure.

Danny Ainge is going to retire as a guy who was almost the greatest executive of all time. I can’t wait until he almost lands Andre Drummond.

To illustrate how badly the Knicks have whiffed on their recent high draft picks, compare them to other perennial lottery teams. Including the Knicks, five teams have taken at least 4 players in the lottery over the last 4 seasons. This is who they picked. (I’m using the team that actually kept the player; e.g. Phoenix gets credit for Mikal Bridges even though he was technically drafted by Philly).

Knicks: Frank, Knox, RJ, Obi
Suns: Josh Jackson, Ayton, Mikal Bridges, Cam Johnson, Jalen Smith
Bulls: Markkanen, Wendell Carter, Coby White, Patrick Williams
Hornets: Monk, Miles Bridges, PJ Washington, LaMelo
Hawks: Trae, Hunter, Reddish, Okongwu

The Suns got three rotation players, one bust, and a TBD who’s not looking good so far (Smith). The Bulls got four rotation players. The Hornets got one potential star and three rotation players. The Hawks got one star, one possible rotation player, and two TBDs who don’t look good so far.

The Knicks got one rotation player with small star potential, two busts, and one TBD who looks like a sure future bust. That is by far the worst outcome of the five teams.

I know we’ve made two good late picks in Mitch and Quickley. But you can’t keep blowing Top 10 picks like we have and expect to build a sustainable foundation.

fucking around was my intention after waking up before drinking coffee and going to work but turned out a usual googlemarathon

proceed cautiously my friend, they are eyes lurking behind the screen, ready to pounce at a moments notice…

what kind of coffee?

i like coffee hot, no stuff in it, like the way it smells, tastes okay, good for a bit of a buzz, almost never drink it though…

Popper:

As Knicks coaches remain in place, so do the centers. Hearing Knicks not very active in Andre Drummond pursuit. They like their three defensive-minded centers and want to see what Mitchell Robinson does with the starting role again.

Once again, Brian, I must express disappointment that you have yet to grant me photo embedding power for occasions such as this.

Drummond to NY was so blatantly idiotic it had to be fake news for clicks. lmao

in reality the luck factor is large enough and the sample is small enough that you may never get to feast in the bounty of your own smart bets.

The other nuance is that each choice changes the flow; every action has consequence. If we had chosen SGA instead of Knox, for instance, he would have had a significantly better impact on wins, which would have worsened our likely lottery position when we chose RJ. So you can’t really say “we could have had SGA, RJ, and Hali.” It is extremely unlikely we would have had the third pick if we had chosen SGA, and more unlikely that we would have had the 8th pick had we chosen SGA and RJ.

In other words, the smarter the bets, the smaller the draft bounty.

Also nice would be

Payton – Hamstrings; The Team When He Plays (Out)

TheOakmanCometh: Hawks: Trae, Hunter, Reddish, Okongwu

So the Hawks have Trae + Reddish when they should have Luka but it’s the Knicks that failed hard at the draft. Ok.

Lamarcus Aldridge will sign with the Nets!
This is getting Extremely Ridiculous

OK so all of a sudden tonight is a huge opportunity for an unexpected win.

It’s hilarious how the Bucks, like the Nets, just decided to give the NBA the middle finger.

My guess is that their starters are:

Bryn Forbes
Sam Merrill
Pat Connaughton
Thanasis
Brook Lopez

Yeah, the reactions are absurd. “Do something about this, Adam Silver! How can you let this happen?” What is LaMarcus Aldridge supposed to be doing on the Nets that is so worrisome to people who don’t like the Nets?

it’s fun to win but it also kinda sucks when the other team tries to concede

I know he kind of sucks now, but I’d still swap Jeff Teague for Elfrid and not look back…

Wouldn’t mind having Lamarcus and Blake on my bench…instead of “Harpers and Pinsons”

seder vs knick game…tough call