Quarter Season Report Card

Let's check in on the Knicks' progress.

Good morning! Game of the Season tonight? Certainly feels like it with a trip to the NBA Cup on the line. More than that, the Magic are a rabid bunch of junkyard dogs who live to make your life miserable even without Paolo Banchero and Gary Harris. A good test is incoming starting at 7:30 pm, and I’ll of course be on halftime to discuss.

News & Notes

🏀 Tom Thibodeau had a few interesting tidbits in his presser yesterday. Regarding Precious Achiuwa, the big man is taking contact and doing most of practice and could be around a week away from returning. Regarding the possibility of using Karl-Anthony Towns and Jericho Sims together, James Edwards III had the scoop:

🏀 Congrats to Jalen Brunson, who won the Eastern Conference Player of the Week award after leading the Knicks to a 3-1 record while averaging 26.8 points, 9.8 assists, 3.5 rebounds and 2.3 turnovers while shooting 54.7 percent overall, 52.4 percent from deep and 86.7 percent from the line. This is Brunson’s fifth Player of the Week award with the Knicks, which trails only Patrick Ewing and Carmelo Anthony in franchise history.

Quarter Season Report Card

Longtime readers of this newsletter know by now that I don’t really do report cards, which is kind of ironic, not only because it’s a very easy gimmick for these sorts of missives but because I’m a literal public school teacher who has been in classrooms for nearly a decade. I don’t have a great explanation for why I’ve never done them in the newsletter, other than that grading in real life is the bane of my existence, so maybe I’m subconsciously avoiding it here.

Whatever the reason, I decided to change my tune today. Here are the Quarter Season grades for the offense, the defense, the players, the head coach, and the front office.

Offense: A

NBA.com has New York’s offense as the top-ranked unit in the league at 121.8 points per 100 possessions, while Cleaning the Glass (which filters out garbage time) has the Knicks just trailing the Celtics, 123.6 to 123.9.

But these numbers are less impressive because every team is scoring a ton these days, right?

Yes and no. The league average offensive rating of 113.4 is the third highest in recorded history, but it trails the last two seasons, which ended up at 115.3 and 114.8. More importantly, New York is dominant regardless of era. This is from Jared Dubin’s excellent Last Night in Basketball from Saturday morning:

Cleveland, New York, and Boston are the top three in offensive rating by a mile. The Celtics, in third place, are 3.5 points per 100 possessions clear of the Mavericks in fourth. And those three teams are not just the top three offenses in the league. Cleveland is No. 2 all time in ORtg+, New York is No. 3, and Boston is No. 11. Three teams from one season, from one conference, in the top 11 out of the 1,350 team-seasons since the ABA-NBA merger prior to the 1976-77 season!

That’s pretty damn impressive, so why doesn’t the offense get an A+? Because there’s always room to improve, that’s why.

For one, they’re still struggling against switching defenses, although as Fred Katz put it yesterday, the Knicks’ troubles against switching are akin to the mole on Cindy Crawford’s cheek

I think I’m slightly more concerned with the fact that all of New York’s starters get at least a little gun shy from deep if the first few don’t go down. This was Donte’s superpower, and few players around the league have the ability to continue firing away with confidence regardless of how they start out.

But even this is a relatively minor concern. The Knicks have won three of the six games this season in which they’ve failed to make at least a third of their 3-pointers. Last year, they won just five of 22 such games.

It’s not hyperbole to say that no offense in the league can beat you in as many ways as the Knicks.