The More Things Change...

A look at the methods to Mike Brown's madness.

Good morning! The Knicks are off tonight, and then return to action tomorrow

The More Things Change...

Yesterday afternoon I had the pleasure of talking with the always delightful Fred Katz (available now on the KFS YouTube and wherever you get your pods).

We hit on a lot of topics during the hour-plus convo, but mainly focused on why it is that the Knicks, as Josh Hart and Karl-Anthony Towns both said after the Cavs game, are still “trying to figure it out.” Fred agreed with their assessment that this is the genesis of New York’s inconsistency, which then got us to talking about how Mike Brown has gone about solving this problem.

If we time-traveled back to the summer, I can safely say that the biggest reason for excitement about the Brown hire was that he’d experiment in all the ways Thibs played it safe. If Tom wasn’t convinced something would work, he wouldn’t try it unless his back was firmly against the wall. Brown is quite different. As Fred said on the pod, New York broke out a zone defense early on in the season without even having practiced it. We can also look to the offense, where New York has a highly diverse playbook, as opposed to the more tried and true staples of last season.

In terms of personnel, the biggest difference between this year and last year can be seen in the starting five. New York’s starters easily led the league with 940 minutes played last season while averaging 19.6 minutes per game. That average towered over the next highest most heavily used lineup (Denver’s starters, at 16.4 minutes per game). This season, in part due to injury, the starting five is sixth in the league at 278 minutes. More notably, they’re averaging just 11.6 minutes of court time.

There’s a few different ways to look at this.