Best Foot Forward
With a little more than a week to go until the deadline, do we have enough evidence to know which version of the Knicks is best?
Good morning! The Knicks welcome the Kings into MSG for a 7:30 tip tonight. If they lose for a second time to this decrepit basketball team, it might be time to fold up shop. Malik Monk and Zach LaVine are both questionable. Mitch isn’t on the injury report on the first night of a back to back.
Best Foot Forward
For a team on pace to win 50 games1, I would argue that there’s more uncertainty surrounding the Knicks than most teams in their position.
For starters, there’s a 2-time MVP who may have played his last game for his current team and had eyes for the Big Apple not long ago. Under the Giannis umbrella are smaller questions, including when (would be the ideal time to trade for him), how (much could they afford to give up and still field a contending team), who (are his ideal running mates), what (the Knicks know about this whole situation), and of course, where (Antetokounmpo wants to play).
And then there are the tentacles of Giannis-gate, starting with whether certain moves at the deadline would help or harm their ability to put together a viable trade package this summer (if the pursuit lasts that long) and whether his looming presence has impacted the (under) performance of certain player(s) this season.
Of course this would all be so much easier if the Knicks had a better idea of what’s going on under their own roof, but that might be where the most uncertainty lies. Are New York’s two best players a good match on the court (to say nothing of the locker room)? What are the ideal lineups for Jalen? For Karl? And do we have enough evidence to suggest that any single formula is an unquestioned path towards future success?
I thought of all this after reading the comments to yesterday’s newsletter, several of which had me wondering (in a good way). One in particular that got to me, and provided the jumping off point for today’s newsletter, was from Lee:
Don’t we have enough evidence that “Brunson plus four defenders” is our best combination of players?
Great question Lee. To try and provide an answer, I went to Cleaning the Glass and filtered for lineups with Jalen Brunson and without any of New York’s poor defenders and/or young players (who are generally inconsistent defensively). That ruled out KAT, Clarkson, Yabu, and all of the first or second year players and two-way guys with the exception of Tyler Kolek, who I deemed a plus defender this season for this exercise.
That left us with 352 possessions - not a huge sample size but not statistically irrelevant either - and the results were as follows:
+23.8 net rating (100th percentile league-wide)
132.7 offensive rating (100th percentile)
108.8 defensive rating (91st percentile)
Getting into the details, these lineups are making shots at a prolific rate (59.7 eFG%), grabbing their own misses like crazy (39.5 OREB rate), forcing a ton of turnovers (17.4 TOV rate) and are causing a lot of misses (49.7 opp eFG%). Interestingly enough, they are terrible when it comes to free throws, both fouling a bunch and never getting to the line themselves.
Other than that though, it’s two-way perfection.
