robillionaire wrote:HopelessKnick wrote:robillionaire wrote:
The top problem by estimate is that we have had too many close games and don’t have the talent level to blow teams out regularly. And rarely get blown out either. Our margin for error to win games has been painfully slim.
Bad teams can play all their rookies. Good teams that play in a lot of blowouts have a lot of opportunities. But we are in that tight spot where we want to be contender, we are likely winning 50 games again. Yet, we aren’t talented enough as the top shelf teams to have teams blown out by the 3rd quarter so we can have a whole 4th for a development chance. We even let the wizards back into it.
But that’s ok. We have had guys come through here and play limited in year one and then mold into decent players. We have also had guys we played a ton in year 1 who never amounted to anything. So one way or another I’m a believer that the cream rises to the top and the real talent will find a way to shine through and I trust our system will separate the wheat from the chaff. And the good pieces will get there when ready and become rotation players like McBride or valuable trade chips like IQ
I would be willing to lend more credence to that argument if there was at least some attempt early on in the season to establish a sensible rotation. Early on when Precious, Mitch and Shamet were out longterm, we were playing essentially a 7 man rotation where like all our starters were among the league leaders in minutes. Literally, almost no matter how good your starters may be, this is not a winning formula and one does not have to be Greg Popovich to see that. Even if you are not convinced as a coach that your guys from 9-15 on the roster are good, for the sake of the starters you have to give it at least a solid try. Just going to a 7 man rotation basically from the get go is a blatant mistake---in the modern NBA that type of **** is not going to bring you late season success.
And then the other problem with the argument is this: At one point the Knicks were like 4th or 5th in point differential at like +6....so literally if your argument was valid then every team from +6 to like -5 or so would have had a similar problem. Only the top 3 teams and bottom 8 teams would have had grounds to play their rookies by your argument but in reality many in between teams regularly play 9-10 guys....most coaches know you can't get away with that short of a rotation in November. And really, this is nothing new...it is something Thibs has been criticized for on every team he was employed as a HC.
I didn’t like that either but my only argument in favor of it is that we had a lot of turnover in the offseason and are fielding essentially a new team with towns and mikal(plus OG barely even got a quarter of a season) and a different strategy with 5 out so it may be good to get starters a lot of minutes used to playing together in year 1 in that instance. Well that and a chunk of the already putrid depth that we had got itself injured in the preseason. Usually he does play a 10 man rotation the first part of the year and then shortens the rotation. But we didn’t really get that this year
BTW I looked up our rotation of early last season:
JB-Grimes-Barrett-Randle-Mitch
with Hartenstein, DD, Quickley, Hart off the bench. Deuce was not even part of the rotation at all.
He essentially played a 9man rotation early on. Now keep in mind, looking at that bench....essentially all of them are starters right now (except DD who could start though). So if Thibs needs like 9 starter quality players to play a 9 man rotation then again we won't go very far. That bench last season was insanely good, probably a top 3 bench in the league. That won't be the norm....heck neither OKC, Boston or Cleveland have anything close to that.
Note in regards to Leon: Looking at above 9-10 players it is kind of even more difficult to justify all of the trading. We essentially traded Grimes + RJ + Randle + DD + Quickley + lost Hartenstein + traded 7 FRPs for our current team. Looking back it looks like we barely made any progress to be honest. I still like the OG trade a lot and am in favor of the KAT trade overall but am less enthusiastic about all of it than previously...considering the overall picture.
@robillionaire: What strikes me as highly problematic at this point is the overall strategic approach: we are currently 7 man deep (7 guys that Thibs trusts). We have no really good tradable picks or contracts left. We need 2 high quality bench players. We have only that one exception at around 6mill. in the summer where you can usually sign a 10th man at best. Trading Mitch is problematic because his value is low and his contract is not really big.
So what is the strategy going forward? LITERALLY, really quite literally the only or at least most realistic way for us to gain two high quality bench players is through developing them on our own. And Thibs took every step this season to prevent that.