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LeBuffalo

Fr, i see so many players completely change their release trying to take a free throw line jumper just because hes somewhere near by, even if they didnt have to

Didn’t Brunson PURPOSELY ask for below max so the Knicks would have money to pay other guys to put around him?

Yep. Willingly took less money to compete. Even now he’s in the 1st year of a 156 mil contract making only 35 mil this year, even though he’s playing at an all nba level.

A lot of us would be fine with him taking a 1B role, would save him a lot of energy for clutch plays in the playoffs.

credit to brunson for being unselfish, but i feel like most stars nowadays are honetly pretty similar? i don’t think there are really any carmelo-type “this has to be my team” players in the modern game. like i don’t really see ant or tatum throwing a fit if they were paired with jokic and suddenly they’re the second best player on the team. jokic himself wouldn’t care if someone were better than him. he’d probably be stoked lol. sga and giannis too; i mean they’re so good there’s pretty much no way they’ll wind up as a second option anytime soon, but i don’t see them being assholes about it if it happened.

i think one big positive in the modern game is how heavily players are encouraged to be good teammates and unselfish players for the sake of the team. players aren’t glorified for being assholes or ballhogs like they used to be.

Yeah I agree, was just saying for that pairing I don’t know if you could put a better 3 guys around them in the starting lineup.

Also GSW won a title playing Curry and Poole together

Man I remember defense being KATs strongest trait coming out of college. I actually thought he’d be a really good defender and mediocre offensive player. Guess that’s why I’m not a scout.

And getting an actual bigman instead of an injured and washed Tingus Pingus.

That’s on Trae though. He recruited Murray, whilst Brunson teams up and gets on well with his Nova teammates. 

Brunson was also willing to sign a contract for under $40 mil and has better shot selection. 

They have similar games but different mentality, and it turns out that matters a lot. 

Except Trae completely fell off from his 2021-22 self. His efficiency went down like crazy

And a much worse passer.

Which is why we’re sorely missing Josh Hart who can do everything. If we can get another swiss army knife type player that’ll be great, but we literally are 150k under the 2nd apron.

We’re not going anywhere without a trade.

Agreed. We really need another ball handler /creator on the team

Actually every Knicks fan would agree with you. The problem was Mitchell Robinsons injury + CBA rules not letting us pay iHart more than 18m vs the 30m OKC offered him. We had no center and Leon went and got KAT. Every Knicks fan is chasing that 2023 season like it was the girl they lost in college.

They play in the east, so most of the best teams will eliminate each other in the West. They would not be title contenders in the West.

Gonna respond to these point by point.

First point:

I understand what you mean but I think it has been “not likely” that any team wins a chip in a given year. Even the odds on favorite like Boston crumbled multiple times before 2024 and were probably quite lucky to run into multiple extremely injured teams. I mean boy how many times did they have to come back in the 4th against the hospital Pacers that series?

I think now perhaps more than ever (and to your point about variance), the healthiest teams go the furthest in the playoffs. There is a ton of parity in the league, particularly with how talented starting lineups are, and if a team ends up missing one key guy that can be a wrap for them in the first round – even if they’re the #1 seed. This is a major reason why there have been no teams have had back-to-back Finals appearances since 2019.

Even OKC, as great as they were last year with + defenders at every position up and down the rotation got taken to seven games twice. It is not unreasonable to suggest that had MPJ not had the severe shoulder injury that entire series, or Aaron Gordon not get hurt at the end of game 6, that they would have lost to the Nuggets. They certainly could have if even one of those things didn’t happen.

Then again in the Finals had Haliburton not torn his ankle apart in game 7 they absolutely could have lost. It was a tie game at that point and Haliburton had just hit back-to-back-to-back threes.

I don’t think Brunson is so much of a negative postseason player that a little positive injury luck for his team and some negative injury luck for his opponents would make the Knicks any less likely to win this year than any other team not named OKC. I think just about every playoff team right now is capable of beating their first round match up without divine intervention type luck. Could a healthy Orlando beat the Pistons? I don’t think it’s insane. Could the Suns or Rockets beat San Antonio? Also not crazy - shoot the Rockets would probably be favored even.

Sub point about Pacers:

To your point of the Pacers not being a “serious contender”, I really disagree. I think that roster in conjunction with how Carlisle had them playing is absolutely a contender. If you look at them on paper perhaps you can come to a different conclusion but how each of those players were used and the ability to keep guys fresh enough to continue to push the pace over and over deep into the postseason was extremely innovative and the real deal.

They also had the length, defenders, and energy to close out hard and/or contest on the perimeter a lot which is part of the reason OKC didn’t just run them over. That being said, it shouldn’t be too surprising that SGA and Jdub shot sub 30% from three that series anyway. SGA shot 25% from three in round 1, 33% in round 2, 32% in round 3, and 24% in the Finals. He didn’t shoot well all playoffs from deep. Same with JWeill who outside of the Wolves series didn’t shoot higher than 29% in any series.

If we look at the team stats from that series neither team shot all that well and OKC really won the series in the turnover differential. Not shooting luck, or random heroics, or whatever else. If the Pacers were keeping pace (no pun intended) with OKC despite not shooting 40% from three like their previous series and we get to a tie game in game 7 before it implodes, I think that indicates a clear contender. I think if Nesmith was healthy all year they probably could have pushed for the two or one seed anyway, at least if we’re trying to weigh things like variance and how running that regular season over and over probably doesn’t end up with the Cavs winning 64 games too many times.

Either way, whatever previous signals you take from the regular season are what they are, but how they were playing in the post-season was very good process (they were getting lots of good looks from 3, mind you) and more than a few crazy heroics moments which, lets be honest, every team who wins a championship ends up needing during a run unless they’re the 01 Lakers.

Haliburton vs. Brunson:

I think this is more of an issue with the metrics than it is proof of anything, especially their ability to measure defensive impact one way or another. I think they’re really close impacts wise, but exist in very different contexts. The lineups with Haliburton off the floor and how they play vs. the lineups with Brunson off the floor and how they play are quite different.

For instance, you’re going to get a pretty major defensive slant when Brunson has been off the floor and that’s going to give this huge swing in defensive signal. That isn’t just because he’s being swapped out and replaced with some remarkable, mystical +5 net defender. It’s because the Knicks have shelled up and flipped to a much more defensively oriented lineup and gameplay when he’s out to compensate for the fact that when Brunson does go off, the Knicks are 8 points worse on offense. In doing so they’ve been able to stay positive and only have a net ~3 point difference when he goes off.

In Indiana they’re still trying to run a whole lot, still trying to probe and find cutters, do their swing-swing stuff, and they don’t have this massive shift in how they play once Hali goes off. The offense does get quite a bit worse, but the defense doesn’t have such a major swing in the ²⁴⁄₂₅ seasons, and the defensive “fall-off” isn’t as drastic.

If we look at both players in their best team contexts, which I suppose is post-KAT trade Brunson and post-Siakam trade Brunson, the on/off for Brunson is a little bit better despite the defensive signal being quite a bit worse. I don’t mean to say this suggests Brunson is definitively better defensively or anything, as I said I think they’re pretty much equally poor defenders (though Hali has more tools at his disposal and I hope he uses them at some point), but more that looking at catch-all metrics for defense sort of just aligns with on/off data which is, you know, pretty bland without context.

In other words, I wouldn’t trust/cite defensive catch-all metrics as far as I could throw them. For anyone. Defense is a much harder thing to estimate than offense is and extraordinarily more team/context dependent than the offensive value counterpart, especially for ball dominant players.

Jokic:

I’m a Nuggets fan so you don’t have to sell me on the Jokic defensive impact stuff. That being said, I again encourage you to not put too much weight on defensive catch-alls. As you mentioned his defensive impact stuff is greatly boosted by defensive rebounding and his offensive prowess allowing the Nuggets to have more chances to set up in the half court, which is not defense, but the metrics will capture it as defensive impact. In a way it is but that is, of course, not what we’re talking about when we’re talking about defensive ability. Even Ben Taylor (who you linked) has noted that there are situations and series matchups where that neutral-to-plus may come down to a slightly-below-average to negative. Since we’re talking playoff runs here, styles making fights is pretty pertinent.

To that point and my original point, the anchor of your defense having some notable defensive shortcomings is harder to overcome than a guard. He’s naturally going to be involved in many more actions, has a higher chance to foul, etc. We had not really seen an “average+/-” center on defense win a chip before 2023, but the Nuggets did.

We’ve seen average or even below average defensive guards make it to the finals or win the finals however. I think that suggests Brunson’s defensive issues, much like Halliburton’s, are an obstacle to overcome but not a notably outlandish one that alone would make any team they’re on any more “unlikely” to win a championship at this point in time as long as they have a reasonably well constructed team to account for that. It does not need to be perfectly constructed. Though, I suppose if your opponent is OKC, maybe it does.

The bar for a lead guard’s defense being completely untenable is pretty much Trae Young, who despite what the shoddy defensive metrics say is clearly much, much worse than either of those two on that end. That being said, if Trae Young was as efficient of a scorer as either one of them, I think even he would be able to be the lead guard on a championship contending team due to his all-time playmaking capabilities.

Well said, couldn’t agree more.

Mitch is also made of paper and double AA batteries. I love the man but hes gassed after 10 minutes.

Hart needs to be a 6th man and you need a defensive anchor at the 5. Starting 5 should be Brunson-Mikal-OG-KAT-Robinson.

The Knicks could not keep Ihart because of the fucking cba. They could only offer him like $16 million annually or some shit like that

Yeah interesting enough, he looks really bad on some of the other defensive advanced all-in-one metrics. I think he has a lot of tools and strength defensively but struggles with getting through screens. That’s a low sample size observation though for sure.

He got fired for that specifically.

Are we really better with Mike brown.

That’s true. But the rest of the victories were what I described above

Our starting lineup was statistically terrible and everybody was begging Thibs to start Deuce

Hes been doing it for years too.

Lol dude’s a cornball

Yea he’s bad on D for sure. Worst 1 percent in the league I think probably not.