Top 5 Rest-of-the-Season Questions

Let's look at some of the big picture topics hovering over the final 20 games of the regular season.

Good morning! How much of an unrelenting grind has this season been? Other than the All-Star break and the In-Season Tournament, this is the first weekday newsletter that doesn’t feature either a Game Recap or a Game Preview since Thanksgiving week. Might as well take the opportunity to catch our breath…

20 to Go

My, how time flies.

It seems like yesterday the team was 2-4 and we were all clutching our proverbial pearls about this thing going off the rails before it ever got out of the station.

Fast forward to now, and with just 20 games left in the season, there’s been so many ups, downs, twists and turns that it’s hard to know which direction is up.

So, in the spirit of grounding us a bit before we head into the home stretch, I’m closing the week out with a two-part mailbag. In Part 1 (today), I’m going longer on a few macro topics, courtesy of two recent questions that have come across my desk. In Part 2 (tomorrow), I’ll try to hone in on some of the more micro issues facing the team at the moment. As always, I’ll make a call for questions in the morning via the Substack chat, but if you’d like to submit a question beforehand, feel free to email KnicksFilmSchool@gmail.com.

Without further ado…

Danny asks… It feels like there have been 4 different versions of this team:

1. The team pre-Mitch injury

2. The team post-Mitch injury & pre-OG trade

3. The team post-OG trade

4. The team post-OG & Randle injuries 

The crazy part is we haven’t even seen the ultimate version of this team (which would be its 5th version). My question is: what can we use to truly judge this team? When looking at season long metrics, it’s very difficult to get a sense for where the Knicks really are because of the various versions of this team that I noted above. Obviously they had the insane stretch post OG trade, but that also coincided with the weakest part of their schedule (not discrediting what they did, simply adding context). 

What do you think is the best way to judge us, and better yet, how high do you think the ceiling for this team is?

I’ll say up front that I don’t have a great answer here, because how can anyone possibly judge something we haven’t seen?

That said, I think it’s a great question. If nothing else, it highlights that there have been far more “versions” of the Knicks than of any other remotely serious team in the league this season. That, combined with the fact that they are still in the mix for a top 10 offense and a top 10 defense, points to a rock solid foundation.

That foundation: Jalen Brunson + defense = wins. If there’s one umbrella covering every version of the team (including the one we haven’t seen yet), it’s that.

Brunson by himself is a walking top-10 offense, and maybe even a top-five one. If that sounds blasphemous, consider that according to Basketball Reference, just six players - SGA, Jokic, Giannis, Luka, Sabonis and Haliburton - have more offensive win shares than Brunson this season. Cleaning the Glass gives the Knicks 11.9 more points scored per 100 possessions with JB on the court versus when he sits, which trails only Jokic and SGA among high usage players (aka, the two frontrunners for MVP).

There’s more.