mpharris36 wrote:in a development year Fiz seems to be pretty clueless in terms of communicating to his players. If he was planning on using Burke (which he clearly was). Why in the world wouldn't he communicate that to his players?
Seems like he has literally no direction or idea what he is doing going by a game by game basis instead of looking at the totality of what he is doing...
I don't know that the Frank back-and-forth is very productive for anyone - I mean its a bunch of Knicks fans trying to talk about what would be a
good pro basketball team's moves based on the experience of watching every twitch the Knicks GMs have made over the last 20 years. So everyone's supremely underqualified to have the least idea .. as is Mills. So I really haven't wanted to put my oar in as well in this thread.
However ... I have a much shorter leash for Fizdale than nearly every other (even semi-) regular poster, and while I think mph is need not necessarily be "right" in the quoted post, he is imo groping towards something that possibly may well be real.
I was amazed by Fizdale's explanation of his use of Frank for a minute at the end of the penultimate game. (And here I have to apologize to whoever asked in the game thread why Frank had been so quickly yanked again when Fizdale pulled him - in that thread I waived it off as to off/def subs but that clearly - by Fiz's comments afterwards - wasn't the case.) He said he tried Frank - essentially to stench the flood of pts for the opponents, but then paused and said that probably it would have been better to have played Burke. Ok, so Burke had gone 3-16 in 2 games and then sat the next 92 minutes of basketball, so throwing him on cold to try to lead a win there would make absolutely no sense. And indeed in the 25 Dec game he went 1/7 (giving him 4/25 in 50 minutes of court time since he came back from injury).
But it was something to say. I have no idea whether that was an internal debate he was having on the bench before putting Frank in - in which case wtf - or snake oil he made up in the press conference. However vocalizing it, either way, I think pretty much made up his mind that he was going to play Burke the next game in place of Ntilikina's minutes. That is, once he had said it would probably have been better to play Burke (at that juncture) he couldn't back away from the idea that it was better to play Burke .. and Burke should get the backup PG minutes in the next game. And then came this incoherent rubbish about players struggling and .. yeah .. we all see that's made up of whole cloth regardless of view about Ntilikina since .. box score stats ... as ex post facto justification.
Long story short .. I think flat is fos and has no plan.
Other flat news: it was pretty tellling to see that flat put out a statement praising KP for being generally "a good egg". He's trying to shore up his relationship with KP. If the Knicks recruit KD or KL then imo 100% KP signs. Otherwise, I'm really starting to wonder, even though I dare say KP is enthusiastic/supportive
for now, and has some of the young Knicks as under his wing.
