Turning the Page

The Knicks have a chance to put the Boston game behind them tonight at home against Indiana. Can we draw any conclusions about their rotation based on Game 1?

Good morning! The Knicks make Stop No. 2 on their 82-game journey tonight, hopefully with a more pleasant reception than Tuesday. The Pacers are coming off a closer-than-it-should-have-been win in Detroit that required a final minute 3-pointer from Tyrese Haliburton to seal the deal. My guess is they will take this game just a tad more seriously.

On that note, my plan is to host another “Ask Macri” in the Substack chat for all full subscribers sometime before the game tonight. Be on the lookout for an email notification.

Let’s get to it.

Way-Too-Early Rotation Observations

Another day, another opportunity to overanalyze one 48-minute sample because it’s the only thing we have at the moment.

Yesterday, I dug into the film to go through all the ways New York’s defense faltered. It was priority No. 1, simply because of how poorly they played on that end of the court, but you could just as easily argue that it shouldn’t be nearly as large a topic of conversation.

As I’ve tried to point out a few times, there is (thankfully) only one Boston, and while the Knicks will likely need to figure out a way to beat those guys at some point, that’s not a given. More importantly, they have 78 games remaining against teams that don’t offer the Celtics’ unique array of matchup nightmares.

So let’s take today to talk about the major topic of conversation going into Opening Night: depth, and by extension, the rotation.

Courtesy of Cleaning the Glass, here are the possession totals for all of the non-garbage time lineups New York played on Tuesday along with their net & offensive ratings (I’ve avoided including the defensive ratings for fear of blinding my readers):

Digging in a little deeper…