Knicksfan1992 wrote:Just a quick note on the foul up 3 thing. I want to be clear I support fouling up 3 before the anti Thibs brigade jumps down my throat... The positives outweigh the negatives. However, there is some logic to not fouling and letting the cards fall where they may on a Celtics scramble attempt off an inbounds.
A) The Knicks were awful last night shooting FT's. You foul the Celtics and assume they make both. Now you open yourself up to straight up losing the game if you miss your FT. Worst they can do without fouling is tie the game and allow you to get the last shot which is what happened. That's literally the worst case scenario.
B) You also open yourself up to a situation where they try to miss a FT on purpose (I still have nightmares of the Luka game where ironically Thibs did foul up 3 lol)
C) If you mistime the foul there is a slim chance you cause a shooting foul to tie the game anyway.
Yes fouling up 3 makes sense but acting as if it's some foolproof plan is disingenuous. We've seen it backfire plenty of times.
So your defense of potentially not fouling is.
A) Brunson can miss a FT? I will live with that result
B) You can sub in Mitch and your best rebounders (since we had a timeout you can get the rebound and simultaneously call TO so mitch wouldn't be fouled if he got the rebound)
C) Tatum was walking the ball up the court for 3-4 seconds...he wasn't a threat to shoot at half court so there is no fear of him shooting to draw a foul from that far out. There was no urgency to pick him up full court and then just wrap him up while he was dribbling.
All this is "odds" based you play the best odds, that is why most teams foul (only dinosaurs don't foul in that situation). Your alternative scenarios rarely and I mean rarely come back to hurt a team. The most likely one is your team also missing FT's but at that point its on your players to make FT's and if they don't I can't blame the coach for that.
To allow a clean look from there best player down 3 with under 10 seconds is criminal. Its simply bad coaching.