Thursday Mailbag

Plus, Steph Curry comes to town.

Good morning! The Knicks are back in action tonight, hopefully with Jalen Brunson in uniform. We’ll talk about that game, plus take a lot of your questions, today.

Game Night

TONIGHT: Warriors at Knicks, 7:30 pm, TNT

Injury Report: I-Hart isn’t on the injury report but Jalen Brunson still is, listed as questionable once again. For Golden State, Andrew Wiggins is out for personal reasons.

Halftime: No Zoom tonight…I’m on kid duty. Back on Sunday though.

What to watch for: Tough question to answer without knowing if Brunson plays, but even if Jalen is good to go and looks like himself, this should be an uphill battle.

Since January 24, the Warriors are 12-5 with the fourth best net rating in the league, although looking at their recent wins, they haven’t exactly faced a murderer’s row. Still, they’ve been the third best offense in the league over this stretch.

On the bright side, New York should have a significant rebounding edge over a small Golden State starting five. Maybe the game becomes a slog and comes down to offensive rebounding. I wouldn’t hate it.

Standings Check

The Bulls won a double overtime affair against the Cavs, but the Pacers beat the Pelicans in Indy. Here’s where we stand:

Thursday Mailbag

You asked, I answered.

I went a little long on the first handful of these, so apologies to anyone who got shortchanged, either because I gave you a quick answer or wasn’t able to get to your question.

Let’s get started…

Jonas P asks… Why can’t we have nice things? Why do the basketball gods hate us?

We’re still paying for the frozen envelope, what can I tell ya.

MB asks… How much have the goalposts moved on this season because of the injuries? At the beginning, we probably thought getting to the 2nd round might be enough, then after the OG trade, there were pretty lofty expectations of ECF and beyond. Where are we now, and what should we consider as a “successful” season?

I few people chimed in that they wanted to hear the answer to this, so I put it up top.

For me, right now, I can’t say for sure that losing in the first round would make the season feel like a failure (although based on what Fred Katz had to say to me at the end of today’s KFS pod, I doubt the organization agrees with me).

I’ll explain my thought process by way of a few examples:

• In 2021, Denver made it’s final big move, trading for Aaron Gordon before the deadline. Shortly thereafter, Jammal Murray tore his ACL, and after beating a Portland team that absolutely caved in on itself in the first round, got smoked by Golden State in round two despite having the league’s MVP. The next year, still without Murray but with Nikola Jokic coming off his second MVP, they again lost to the Warriors, this time in five games in the first round. We know what happened in 2023.

• Speaking of Golden State, one year after Steph Curry’s breakout performance in the 2013 playoffs, a Warriors’ team with higher expectations lost to the Clippers even though their entire organization was consumed by the Donald Sterling fiasco. Golden State won it all the next season.

• In 2007, LeBron James shocked the world by carrying an undermanned Cavaliers squad to the NBA Finals. The following season, Cleveland was beset by injuries, fell to the fourth seed, and lost to the revamped, eventual champion Celtics in round two.

• In 2013, the 60-win Thunder team ran roughshod over the league but lost Russell Westbrook in the first round against the eighth seeded Rockets. Despite having KD in his prime, they lost in five games to the Grizzlies in the West semis.

• Following his first All-NBA regular season in 2017, Giannis got eliminated in the first round, and then did so again the following year. That occasional lack of playoff success continued to follow him, with a disappointing bubble loss to the Heat, and then last year’s first round disaster against Miami yet again.

My point: if the five defining NBA players of the last 15-20 years have all had disappointing playoff runs as they were beginning to find their footing as perpetual contenders, the 2023-24 Knicks are certainly not above reproach - not in an Eastern conference with eight teams on pace to win at least 46 games for what would be the first time ever, as far as I can tell.

Just like development with players isn’t always linear, neither is development with teams. Injuries happen, and before you know it, you can end up on the wrong side of a bad matchup.

So what counts as a successful season? Here’s a few boxes I’d like checked:

• They keep battling until the end of the regular season and stay out of the play-in. We can fret about some recent losses, but at no point have we ever had to question the effort or commitment to winning.

• Jalen Brunson further affirms his status as a guy.

• If Julius is clearly healthy, he has to have a strong postseason (or at least not a bad one).

• OG shows that he can be a game-changing defensive presence in the playoffs.

• DiVincenzo’s shooting gravity translates.

The reason why this is a somewhat silly exercise is that if all of the above boxes get checked, there’s virtually no chance the Knicks get eliminated in round one, so one way or another, I’m probably going to be disappointed if they lose in the first round.

Even so, in a stacked East, calling such a result a failure without knowing the additional context seems like an overstatement at this point.