Whirlwind Weekend
The Knicks won their third in a row in the strangest game of the year, losing a key member of their team but also sitting in lofty territory after the deadline.
Game 46: Knicks 102, Bucks 96 - “Wha-wha….what just happened?”
⌚️ TL;DW: What a strange, sad, and ultimately bittersweet evening.
It started when the Knicks found out that the three Milwuakee stars - Giannis, Khris Middleton and Jrue Holiday - plus several other Bucks rotation players were going to miss the game. But then we learned that Julius Randle and Reggie Bullock would also be absent, soooo….New York still had the leg up, right? I think?
It didn’t look like it early, when the Bucks were hitting everything from downtown and the Knicks were just meh. Then disaster struck, with Mitchell Robinson landing awkwardly on a rebound attempt midway through the first. It immediately looked bad. To his credit, he tried to swat a 3-pointer on the next Bucks possession:
The rest of the game was played with a pall over it. New York looked like it was going to pull away at one point in the fourth quarter, with an 11-point-lead at the eight-and-a-half-minute mark, but the Bucks battled back with some more rainbow threes and more than a few unproductive offensive possessions from the Knicks.
Ultimately though, it was too much RJ Barrett (21 points on 22 shots, plus 7 boards and 7 dimes) and Alec Burks (21, 10 & 5, including 6-of-12 from deep). Burks was New York’s best player on the night, but credit to RJ for taking on the leading man role and looking the part, even if his efficiency suffered. His best play emerged from his worst, after he followed up a turnover with a heady steal to prevent a transition bucket:
In the end, this was not one of the Knicks best games, but it’s hard to blame a team that was missing its offensive hub from looking out of sorts, even against a skeleton crew.
And hey, three in a row is three in a row. We’ll take it.
🤔 Rotation Reflections: With both Julius Randle and Reggie Bullock out, Tom Thibodeau went with a double-barreled center look featuring Mitchell Robinson and Taj Gibson. Along with Elfrid Payton, this gave the Knicks three non-shooters alongside RJ Barrett and Alec Burks in the starting lineup, and wouldn’t you know it, the Bucks opened in a zone defense that they stayed in for most of the game:
To New York’s credit, they did what you’re supposed to do when confronted with a zone, which is shoot your way out of it. The Knicks fired away 44 times from deep - their season high and tied for their second-highest total ever for a regulation game - and made a respectable 16.
Did having so many non-shooters on the floor at once help matters? Not particularly, which Thibs seemed to acknowledge by playing Payton just 15 minutes total.
He also replaced Obi Toppin with Kevin Knox in the second half. This was both unsurprising (as Toppin hadn’t hit a 3-pointer in over 60 minutes of action going back over eight games) but also unfortunate, as the kid had a few nice moments on offense in the first half, starting with his first made bucket in two weeks:
It goes without saying that Thibs wasn’t about to simply go with the “next man up” philosophy and promote Toppin to starter with Randle out. That Julius was on the bench and Obi still only played seven minutes against a glorified G-League squad speaks to just how little confidence the coaching staff has in him at the moment.
One other note: Despite two and eventually three starters being lost to injury, Frank Ntilikina didn’t get off the bench. It seems like as long as both Payton and Rose are healthy, Frank is back to riding the pine. Once again: you can’t convince me that once Bullock is back, this team isn’t better off with Rose starting and Frank coming off the bench alongside Quickley and Burks, with Elf passing out cups of Gatorade.
Heartbreaker of the Weekend:
Rose seems like a real one.
Much more on the Mitch situation below.
Standings Check In
Giddy. The Eff. Up.
Soak it in, baby. This is what dreams are made of.
Quite a busy weekend on the news front…
🏀 The Knicks waived Terrance Ferguson and Vincent Poirie, the two players they acquired via Thursday’s trade that sent out Iggy Brazdeikis and Austin Rivers. Essentially, they paid $700,000 to do right by Rivers (who has since been waived by OKC and is signing with the Bucks) and acquire what will be a very late second round pick in the 2021 draft, plus a top-55 protected 2024 second rounder via Miami.
That means the Knicks now have two open roster spots. Marc Berman again mentioned big man Norvelle Pelle as a possibility, who has had cups of coffee with both the Nets and Kings this season. I’d also keep an eye on Otto Porter, who is still under contract with Orlando after the Vooch trade but could be bought out at some point. Jeff Teague, another player acquired by the Magic in their series of moves, was also waived, if that’s your cup of tea.
🏀 Other names that we were keeping an eye on that have signed elsewhere: Andre Drummond with the Lakers and Gorgui Dieng with San Antonio. The Knicks pursued both, although the reporting on how in (or not in) they ever really were on Drummond is all over the place.
My gut feeling: they approached signing him like this front office has approached every other possible move since Leon Rose took over - if the value was too good to pass up, they’d have made the move. It wasn’t. I’m not broken up about it and neither should you.
🏀 Per Woj, assistant coach Mike Woodson is finalizing a six-year contract to become the coach at his alma mater Indiana. Good for Woody. He’ll be missed, obviously, but this seems like too good an opportunity to mess up.
Meanwhile, Johnny Bryant and Kenny Payne were candidates for the Utah and DePaul jobs, respectively, but reports emerged this weekend that both were turning them down. Don Leon is not one to be trifled with.
🏀 Al Horford’s name come up Saturday. He’ll be sitting out the rest of the season in Oklahoma City as the Thunder look to find him a new home. It does not appear that this will come via buyout, but instead through a trade, which doesn’t leave many suitors given the remaining two years and $53 million (only $14 million guaranteed in 2022-23) on Horford’s contract.
I’d already be beating the drum for New York to make him the most overpaid backup 4/5 in the league if I thought that Sam Presti would give anything for the Knicks to take him on, but I’d be surprised that’s the case. I could also see Dallas and Charlotte kicking the tires, so I doubt this winds up being a situation where the Knicks are the only partner left on the dance floor for Presti. That said, Steve Popper reported hearing Horford’s name as a possibility for the Knicks last week, and Berman has noted that Thibs is a fan.
Next Game: Miami at New York
⌚️ When: Tonight, 7:30 pm
⏱ Halftime Zoom: Click here to enter.
📍 Where: The World’s Most Famous Arena
🤕 Who’s Out: Julius Randle (thigh) and Reggie Bullock (ankle) are both questionable for the Knicks, while Victor Oladipo (illness) and Nunn (ankle) are out for the Heat.
Mitch, Please (Get Well Soon)
Before we get to the questions raised by Mitchell Robinson’s second fractured appendage of the season (and the logistics behind answering those questions), let’s take a moment to appreciate the human side of this injury: it sucks.
A lot.
Two years ago, before I took over this newsletter from JB, when I was finishing up my first full season of doing live postgame recaps, Mitchell Robinson was often the only bright spot I had to talk about after games. Recall that 2018-19 was the season of Mudiay and Kanter and 26 losses in 27 games and more brown liquor than my liver permits me to recall. Times were so desperate that we allowed ourselves to engage in genuine anticipatory excitement over the likes of John Jenkins and Billy Garrett and one Ronald Delaine Baker. Forget being born into the darkness; we were rendered blind at birth.
And then there was Mitch, this baby giraffe of a basketball player, figuring it out in real time. His fouling was prolific, and it’s part of the reason he only averaged 20 minutes per game despite his clear talent. But he was also gifted with special hands and agility on offense, which is why if he’d been able to play a few more minutes, he’d have qualified to lead the league in field goal percentage as a rookie just like he ended up doing as a sophomore.
The blocks, though…that was the special sauce for our shoe leather in 2018-19. It really kicked off with the nine-block game against the Magic, and then hit its crescendo when he had double digit blocks in 29 consecutive games. He averaged 4.3 blocks per 36 minutes, the highest for an NBA rookie who played at least 500 minutes since Manut Bol three and a half decades earlier.
After that rookie year and following the disappointment of June 30, perhaps because we had so little else to wonder about, Robinson represented something almost holier than thou - a lone bright spot that we needed to retain at all costs, especially after trading away that other seven-footer and not getting the immediate payoff we anticipated.
I remember fretting over his future as a Knick on a regular basis then, something that continued into and throughout last season - another disappointing one on the whole but also another important one for Mitch, as he was by far the most important player on the team, at least where on/off metrics are concerned. He was inconsistent but also seemed to be a part of anything good that happened on the court.
It raised an interesting question heading into this season: Should the Knicks extend Mitchell Robinson ahead of time, before he (potentially) cemented his market value as one of the best defensive centers in the NBA, or let him play out the year, after which the team may have been faced with the prospect of paying a player who had significantly raised asking price?
The little reporting we got on the situation indicated that any extension discussions Leon Rose and the new Knicks regime may have had with Robinson didn’t go very far. Clearly, they were willing to let this season play out, and take their chances that Mitch would have an All-Defense sort of campaign that might have put them in a tight spot.
Now, for as gut-wrenching as this injury is both for Robinson individually and the present day team that continues to ice-skate uphill towards a top-six seed, it seems like their bet paid off.
The reason is simple: even if Mitchell Robinson returns before the play-in/playoffs, his 2020-21 season more or less is what it is at this point, and it isn’t likely to force New York’s hand when it comes to impending contract negotiations. Before we get there though, a quick encapsulation of who we’re dealing with…
Mitchell Robinson, the player
On one hand, defensively, the Knicks are a different team when Robinson plays.
In large part, this is because aptly defending the pick and roll is the staple of a Thibs defense, and no other center has the length, footwork and agility to guard it quite like he does. While the overall on/off differential on the defensive end suggests a muted positive impact of just 0.8 fewer points per 100 possessions allowed, there’s some noisiness to the non-Mitch minutes that distort these numbers.
More accurately, if we look at Robinson’s on court defensive rating with New York’s two core pieces, Julius and RJ (105.8, via Cleaning the Glass) versus that of Nerlens Noel with the same two guys (112.5), we see a more stark discrepancy. The difference on defense between Robinson with all four normal starters vs Noel with the same four is even larger.
On the other hand, this is another season that has come and gone without so much as a pinch of offensive variety to Mitch’s game. No jump shots. No baby hooks. Virtually no playmaking on the short roll. Just 17 assists in 31 games. His value on offense is prodigious in two key areas - catching lobs and and offensive rebounding, both of which he is arguably as good as any center in the game - but that’s basically it. He’s shown some progress as a screen-setter, but still lags in comparison to even above average big men in this part of his game.
In short, whether the sum total of what he’s shown makes him the 8th or 15th or 20th best starting center in basketball is almost irrelevant. The fact is that he exists outside the king quartet of Embiid, Jokic, Towns and Gobert, with Bam and Vooch knocking on that door.
Mitch is in the driveway, like most other NBA bigs at the moment, who occupy the same place in the game today as running backs in the NFL. In other words: are any of them worth paying, or is it just better to draft a new one every four years rather than take up an appreciable portion of the salary cap to retain one on a second contract?
If this seems curt, take a look at the years being had by the likes of first-year players Isaiah Stewart, Precious Achiuwa and Xavier Tillman, all of whom will make less on their entire rookie deals than guys like Clint Capela, Jonas Valančiūnas and Myles Turner earn in a single season. Is the former group able to approximate 75 percent of the value of the latter? 80 percent? Even more, especially when you consider how the role of the big man has changed in the game today?
Before this season, it was possible that Mitch was headed for the sort of payday that Myles Turner received.
But now? That’s less clear…
Mitchell Robinson, the contract
If the Knicks choose, they can have Mitchell Robinson under contract next season for $1.8 million, an absolute bargain by any metric.
However, there has been a lot of attention paid to giving Mitch a new deal this summer, and that’s because if they let him play out that final year without a new contract, he can become an unrestricted free agent, and then go to whichever team his pleases in the summer of 2022, when the league will be flush with cap space.
Nobody wants that.
If the Knicks want to extend Robinson in the upcoming offseason, they have three choices about how to go about doing so:
Keep Team Option, Extend on Top of it. New York can keep Robinson on his team-friendly option for next year, and then extend him for up to four years after that, on an extension that would start in the 2022-23 season, starting at no more than $12 million annually with up to eight percent annual raises.
The reason for the $12 million cap is that the highest dollar amount you can extend a player for who is under contract is 120% of his current salary or 120% of the league’s average annual salary, whichever is higher. The league’s AAS for this season is $10 million, which is obviously higher than $1.8 million, so the max dollar amount on Robinson’s new extension would start at 120% of that, or $12 million annually, with the possibility of eight percent raises, for a total of approximately four years and $54 million.
The extension could also start at any amount between next year’s salary and that $12 million max, and it doesn’t need to be for a full four years. For example, the team could agree to a three-year, $25 million extension; aka, the figure Thomas Bryant got from the Washington Wizards prior to last season. Like Robinson, Bryant is a talented young center who excels far more at one end of the court than the other.
Given the season Robinson has had, with this latest injury, it might not be the worst approximation of his value.
Make Robinson Restricted. The Knicks can also choose to wipe away Robinson’s team option altogether, making him a restricted free agent, allowing them to match any other team’s offer this summer.
Before the season started, this was the route many of us figured that the Knicks would wind up going, for one simple reason: those of us who were high on Mitch’s game figured he would play himself out of the max number New York could offer him if they retained his team option (the aforementioned $12 million annually, or 4/54).
This was probably a bit presumptive on all of our parts. Yes, Clint Capela, who is often mentioned as Robinson’s most likely outcome with reasonable progression, got a deal from the Rockets in 2018 that averaged $18 million. But Houston was also in a very different cap situation than the Knicks are currently, and Capela had them by the basketballs as a restricted free agent. If he found just one other team willing to give him a crazy deal and the Rockets let him walk, they had no reasonable means to replace him. He was also completely healthy in the season before his negotiations.
Thanks in part to Mitch’s injury, it’s now reasonable to assume that Robinson’s market value is something under $12 million annually (or at least under $13.5 million, which is what a four-year extension starting at $12 million with eight percent raised would average out to over the life of the deal).
There is, of course, one final option…
Sign Robinson to a Declining Pact. Instead of tearing up the final year of Mitch’s current deal and make him restricted so the Knicks could exceed the max contract offer they’d be able to make him if the team option was still in place, they cold also tear it up so they can get away with paying him less money in future seasons.
Let’s go back to the Bryant-extension of three years and $25 million, which increased from $8 million to $8.3M to $8.7M over the length of the deal. This deal is good for Washington, but not as good as it could be because it rises with the cap.
If you factor in next season’s $1.8 million, Robinson would be earning $26.8 million over four seasons, for an average of just $6.7 million. An alternative would be to give Robinson a four-year deal worth slightly more - say, four years, $28 million - but on a declining year-to-year salary, starting at $7.7 million, then going down to $7.3M, then $6.7M, and then finally $6.3.
This last option is interesting only because it allows Robinson to not only secure more money in total, but to front load that money so he’s not playing another season on a dirt cheap deal. For the Knicks, they get a good player on a declining contract, which makes it more easily movable in a future deal.
Before this injury, it’s hard to imagine Robinson’s camp agreeing to something like this, but looking it at now, we have a player who has made under $5 million in his career that is now dealing with a potential long term foot issue that could scare off prospective suitors in the open market. Which brings it back to why New York would take the risk, and that’s where the medical side of this comes in, which is something we still don’t know.
Either way, all possibilities can and should be on the table. This injury sucks for all parties involved, but there is a chance that it opened the door ever wider to the possibility that New York retains Robinson’s services longer than they otherwise would have.
And given the sum total of his career, that is most certainly not a bad thing at all.
That’s it for today! Shout out to Ernie Parada for the sweet Mitch art, and feel free to check out more of his stuff. If you enjoy this newsletter and like the Mets, also don’t forget to subscribe for free to JB’s Metropolitan. See everyone soon! #BlackLivesMatter