Tuesday Mailbag

18 questions to kick off the offseason.

Good morning! Another day, still no coach, although the Jason Kidd scuttlebutt refuses to go away. Let’s get to the mailbag.

Tuesday Mailbag

Howdy folks. Thanks for all the question submissions. I didn’t get to quite as many as I’d have liked, so I may do a Part II tomorrow, depending on what the next 24 hours looks like. We start with a question from Ty Moore:

Great article as always JMac! What I’m curious about is this statement…

“Whether Towns (or whoever New York turns Towns into) can have a Siakam-level impact remains to be seen.”

First, I would love to know how you evaluate/qualify a Siakam-level impact? Second, how would you compare that estimation with two game/series winning explosions against Detroit, several best-player-on-the-floor performances against Boston¹ and a sweep saving 20 point fourth quarter performance against the Pacers.

As I stepped back and analyzed all of our dear Knicks during this playoffs, the stats and eye test show that the best lineups we played were KAT-led with Brunson sitting on the bench.

Ty, it’s an incredibly fair question that I’ll answer in a few parts, starting with something that has been written before by people far smarter than I…

As NBA offenses have become so sophisticated and the skill level of your average player has gotten so high, the playoffs are less about the best thing you put on the table as they are about how many things you take off the table. I’ll call it the “we gotta get [Player X] off the floor” test (or its first cousin, the “how soon can we get [Player X] back in the game?” test).

Pascal Siakam passes both of these tests with flying colors in that you never want him off the floor, and when he isn’t in the game, you usually feel his absence pretty fast. Going even bigger picture, how often did you watch the Finals and see a player on the floor who you thought needed to go to the bench for the betterment of his team? It was pretty rare, which explains why those teams made it as far as they did.

To be clear, this is a super high bar, even for stars. Some of the very best players in the sport have massive holes in their games. Shit, the Mavericks traded Luka freaking Doncic because they thought he couldn’t play defense!

The thing is, there really are no perfect players in the league at the moment. SGA and Jokic finished 1-2 in a historically competitive MVP race because they had two of the 10 best offensive seasons in modern NBA history, and yet both guys get targeted on defense from time to time. Ditto for a bunch of other All-NBA guys this year. Giannis can’t shoot threes. Anthony Edwards can’t quite command an offense like a championship caliber lead ball-handler needs to. Jayson Tatum is probably the closest thing the league has to a “flawless” player at the moment, and even Boston’s offense can get stuck in the mud when he’s running the show, as we saw first hand.

For this reason, unless you’re Nico Harrison, you operate on a sliding scale. You weigh the good with the bad and decide whether the trade off is worth it. Typically, you make the most allowances for the best offensive player on a team and build around his strengths and weaknesses. The second best player gets fewer allowances, and everyone else better be rock solid if you hope to win big.

Getting pack to Siakam and KAT, Pascal will never display the sort of overall scoring ability that Towns shows simply by rolling out of bed in the morning, but he didn’t need to on a Pacer team that relied less on individual shot creation than any great offense in recent memory. For Indy, the fact that Siakam took quite literally nothing off the table was far more important.

The Knicks are a very different type of team, and because of that, they desperately needed the scoring outbursts you referred to in your question. Beyond that, KAT’s mere presence on the court is a boon to any offense, which is why his offensive on/off numbers are what they are.

The problem comes in two areas: defense (obviously) and those stretches when Towns is being actively detrimental to the offense, which we saw on several occasions in the postseason. I guess this is an incredibly longwinded way of saying that for me, a “Siakam-level impact” just means having fewer moments where we’re watching the game and thinking to ourselves “we gotta get KAT off the floor” (although to his credit, there were also many moments where the offense got so mucky that I found myself wondering how soon we could get him back in).

Is this realistic? I’m probably naive to think it is, but then you remember how well he held up in the 2024 playoffs for Minnesota, and the flashes he showed defensively in this postseason, and the thought that maybe a different coach can help smooth out some of those offensive rough spots, and you start to dream.

The last thing I’ll say regarding New York’s best lineups featuring KAT with JB on the bench is that those need to be taken with a grain of salt. All postseason long, we saw those lineups dominate second quarters, but those stretches almost always came against an opponents’ most bench-heavy units. Sure enough, in the playoffs Towns was a plus-22 in 162 second quarter minutes but a minus-3 in 478 non-second quarter minutes. Brunson, meanwhile, was a minus-32 in second quarters and a plus-34 in all other quarters. Clearly, the Knicks played some of their worst basketball when they tried to go from a KAT-centric offense back to something more in line with their norm.

Do the postseason results warrant a longer conversation about whether Towns, and not Brunson, should be the focal point of the offense, and thus the one for whom more concessions should be made? I say no, first because the roster isn’t really in a place where they can survive long stretches without Brunson’s shot creation, but more importantly, Jalen is simply a superior offensive player by a large enough degree that his own weak spots need to be catered to more than KAT’s.

Is that totally fair? Probably not, and it shouldn’t bury the lead, which is that Jalen Brunson simply wasn’t as good as the Knicks needed him to be as a defender or a passer in these playoffs.

Even if he does that though, unless New York gets a more consistent performance from Towns for as long as he’s here, they’ll never go all the way.

That’s as good a transition point as any to our next question courtesy of Pete Bondurant:

Is this “KAT may be traded” scuttlebutt based in reality or simply an offseason engagement tactic by content creators?