Are the Knicks deep enough? WITH ABE BEAME
The Knicks are looking good, but suffered two losses this past weekend. So, I went back and forth with Abe Beame, a fellow Knick sicko.
It was “just” a regular season game at the beginning of January, so the Knicks loss to the Oklahoma City Thunder on Friday night felt more painful than it ought to feel. The Knicks got off to a solid start, then caught lava in the second quarter, led by the surging Mikal Bridges. They’ve been hot for a while now: on a nine game win streak, including a win over the Spurs on Christmas Day. There’s a buzz surrounding this team. Karl-Anthony Towns is captivating, and because he’s been the antithesis of the Julius Randle Experience at its worst, fans have taken to him. He’s tied for the most double-doubles in the NBA right now. Would it be out of bounds to suggest that he is in line to maybe someday eventually become the new Patrick Ewing? (Abe Note: Yes. Yes it absolutely would be)
Jalen Brunson is showing his dwindling subset of detractors that he is not fugazi; rather, there are days where I can’t imagine anyone else leading the show on this team. His pitbull face and pitbull toughness is sometimes overshadowed by his crystalline footwork, fishing rod-like three point shot, and improved passing skills. Finally, Josh Hart, Mikal Bridges, and OG Anunoby are clever players who connect with their extraordinarily talented teammates with their selflessness and toughness. By the time I write this, Bridges’ average of 18 points per game might be up. It must be odd for skeptics such as myself to see this unassuming player become so beloved. At the beginning of the season, we wouldn’t have thrown him a breadstick if he was drowning. Now, we’re wondering where we would be without that infamous trade to pull Bridges across the East River. I fear this team and the disappointment they might bring me on a warm, spring day, because they’re actually for real, contention good.
That’s what made this loss to the Thunder so frustrating. With 24 minutes left to play, the Knicks ceded control over the Thunder in a slightly unrealistic, but still definitive way. Aaron Wiggins, a name that I barely knew existed before this night (seriously, if he was an answer to the trivia question, “Name a Wiggins in the NBA besides Andrew”, I would have gotten it wrong), scored 19 points with four three pointers, almost entirely in the fourth, helping the Thunder go on a run for the ages and wear the Knicks down until we had no choice but to wilt. Still, we went up against a juggernaut — Oklahoma City is widely considered the best team in this regular season — and almost had them. Saturday night’s loss to Chicago, while disappointing, was a back to back game against an opponent that was geared up for an emotional night. (The Bulls were honoring Derrick Rose at the United Center). All things considered, things are mostly superb in Knicks Nation right now. So, to discuss this, I asked Knick fan Abe Beame to join me on a Google Doc. Abe, how are you holding up after that devastating loss?
AB: Jay, as I stuff my intestines back into my stomach and stitch my torn garments back together, what an honor and a privilege it is to break into the sub, AND be the first to wish you a wildly premature happy birthday. Why not start positive? We’re coming off a nine game winning streak, a half step off Boston. Coming into this game I thought, maybe we rest our guys. We’re on a road back to back and Brunson is tender, we’re a +5 dog, I will take this loss with a reasonable degree of grace. We essentially run the best team in the NBA off the court by the end of the first half, the sky is cloudless, we’ll all live forever and I feel like I’m on a speedball of Utopian designer drugs I’ll never come down from, and then, of course, this team found a new and unique way to tear me apart.
Looking back, I wasn’t entirely comfortable with where our offense was coming from in the first half. I love and would potentially die for Mikal Bridges, but there was a live by the sword, homerun or strikeout quality to how we were amassing buckets with the release valve threes he poured in, along with God’s favorite child, OG Anunoby. The most thrilling stretch was when the game devolved to chaos ball and we had the talent and execution to frustrate the athletic, extremely dangerous young Thunder horses, but our offense needed some diversity, and by the end, when the game tightened after the Thunder got hot by virtue of Aaron fucking Wiggins fate, we looked like the same listless and plodding fourth quarter nut crunch team we once were when Julius Randle was our offensive lifeboat. The threes all fell short rim, we looked beaten and overmatched, missed rotations on defense and stopped running off ball motion on offense. We were without the bench to go band for band with a deeper and more prepared-for-battle team. So let’s get into it. His typical early trench war general regular season success aside, is there any doubt creeping into your mind with how Thibs is captaining the ship this season?
JB: Thank you for the birthday wishes. I hope we are not relitigating this loss at my party. Mostly, I would not blame Thibodeau for what happened in Friday night’s game. He has actually coached offense surprisingly well for the Knicks this season. They rank third in the NBA in offensive rating, six in points per game, and second in three point percentage. This is an excellent Knicks team. (I always say that in Julianne Moore’s voice in Boogie Nights). Although Bridges seemed confused at the defensive adjustments that Thibs tried to make, I would blame Brunson. You can say that he was gassed, but I felt he made several mistakes at the end of the game that felt uncharacteristic of an All-Star point guard and franchise player. I understand that he was attempting to make plays, but the passes felt rushed. Take your time, run some sets. A pick and pop is a good enough play at the end of a game like this.
On the other hand, Thibs just played the starters forty minutes in a weekend where we have a back to back. Saturday night they play against the Bulls — we’re writing about this at the end of Friday night’s game — and I wonder how the team will look for that game. Towns, Brunson, Hart, and Anunoby all played an intense amount of minutes. "You gotta read the game. We had an 8pt lead going into the 4th. Intensity of the 4th's different. We gotta be ready for that. We fell short…Our bench is more than capable…We win together, we lose together", is the quote that Thibs gave at the end of the game. Sure, perhaps he thought it was important to win this one. Still, this doesn’t bode well, despite the fact that these guys are the most finely tuned athletes in the world. We didn’t have Deuce tonight. Is that why Thibs went all out, do you see this as a larger problem, Abe?
AB: I mean this is always the fucking question with Thibs. He makes you interrogate the idea of what “good coaching” actually is on both a micro, and perhaps crucially, a macro level. It’s nearly impossible to take fault with any decision on a minute to minute basis, but you zoom out and the question is, “Why is there a recurring theme in every situation he finds himself in, almost to the season?” Look at the Thunder. They gave themselves years of cushion and development with Aaron Wiggins, a fourth year guy who played 50 games as a rookie, averaging 24 minutes a game, which is why he could come in and murder us in a fourth quarter when the rest of our talent was gassed with a season high 19 points. There was a moment when it appeared OG Anunoby was going to leave his elbow on the rim, without the rest of his body, after a thunderous dunk. A friend I was watching the game with, who I debate Thibs rotations with quite often started defensively screaming, “OH, I GUESS THIS IS THIBS’ FAULT?” ANTICIPATING the injury and ready to excuse and lay down for his general, and I guess the answer would be, “Kinda?” To make a usage comparison to the esteemed Aaron Wiggins, Tyler Kolek, a rookie guard we came off of some significant draft assets to move up to take, and who has only justified the faith we put in him between his limited minutes here and in the G-League, has played in 20 games through this point in the season, averaging 6.4 minutes per game. It’s hard to watch a game like tonight and wonder if an extra body in the rotation could help us compete with a deep bench of killers like OKC
JB: That’s a good segue. I want to talk about the bench. Despite my affection for the mystifying effectiveness of Precious Achiuwa, he felt slightly out of place in a game like Friday night’s game, where he is dealing with a team with a boatload of skill. Then, we are playing Shamet, who is the darling of NBA Twitter, but has always bounced around the league. Can we catch lightning with Shamet like we did with Donté last season? That’s ultimately Leon Rose’s goal, but I just don’t know if I see it. Deuce is the key, the player who can possibly make this point moot. But I’m still worried about his lack of point guard skills. He’s a scorer, but what’s stopping him from becoming Terry Rozier? For all of his ability to score, that can shoot us out of games if he isn’t distributing. Do we win tonight if Deuce plays? I am not so certain. Is the bench good enough? It’s the pandora’s box; I’m too scared to lift it. The starters, however, are some of the best in the league. I would put them up against Boston.
AB: Some more stats. The Knicks played eight Friday tonight. All of the starters played 40 minutes and up, eight players got minutes. None of the Thunder played above 40, and they played 10 guys, with the great Aaron Wiggins receiving the whopping 25 minutes he needed to bury the Knicks (Shamet played 14). None of this is simple or easy as, expand the bench and we win. It’s a question of we don’t actually know what a full powered Knicks squad, with Kolek, or Sims, or Hukporti might’ve looked like, not just in this game in a vacuum, but given the garbage minutes over the course of a season, the reps it takes to grow and learn a system and be folded into a team and adjust to a defined role. It feels like we’re constantly playing short and from behind against a well structured and managed team like the Thunder- and here’s the most frustrating part- by design. You know?
JB: It would surprise me if Jericho Sims came into a league and gave us positive minutes. He struggles with the speed of the game on defense, and it’s something that Towns also struggles with. He is like Anora in the middle of Anora, struggling to process the fact that this dream is over. Kolek, however, should be playing more, and if he was on OKC, he probably would be playing more. I suppose that would be the most frustrating thing about Thibs: he can’t stop seeing basketball as a single game pursuit. His desire to win that single game — to punch his clock and seize the shift to this maximal effect — can blind the patience you need to win a NBA championship. Yes, the goal is to win as many games as possible, but there isn’t a single championship game that has been won in January.
AB: I think Sims is like the second act in Anora in the sense that at times he seems unaware he’s suddenly stumbled into a ripped off Safdie movie. Championships can’t be won in January, but sometimes they’re lost here. I was thinking we’re near the anniversary of Randle breaking his shoulder on a drive to the basket against Jaime Jacquez in a meaningless mid-winter game we were up 20 in. What were we talking about? Last night it was more of the same. From the first minutes, even as the Knicks were competitive and in the lead for much of the second and early third, we were sloppy on offense and several steps slow on defense as Zach Lavine blew to the basket over and over again for uncontested finishes en route to 139 fucking points in regulation. The Bulls are scrappy now, it was a schedule loss, I get it, but we looked shot, and I don’t think it's a coincidence they ran away with the game in the third quarter, once the adrenaline wore off and the exhaustion crept in. The Knicks schedule is games every other day, with a few more back to backs, basically through the end of the month. Rather than continuing to cry about Thibs, what are some common sense remedies you’d prescribe to see the team try to survive this stretch?
JB: Look, the return of Mitchell Robinson might solve all of our problems. A lanky big man with record-setting offensive rebounding skills, Mitch is going to be able to get us extra offensive possession, he will allow us to relax defensively — particularly Towns who is not at his best on defense when he has to be a rim protector, and he’s simply an extra fucking body for Thibs to throw on the court. To see Mitch is to see someone who can alter an entire offensive game plan for the opposition. He’s just not able to stay on the court the way a contending team needs him to. So, if/when Mitch comes back, allegedly in March-ish, I look forward to all of this being outdated. However, as of right now, the problem with the team is that there are no secrets left, no other moves to go to when our regular shit isn’t working. Everyone knows exactly what this team is and what they’re trying to do. In the third quarter, I want to see OG try to be a little bit selfish; so Brunson and Towns don’t feel like they are carrying the load as much. OG, I can’t believe I’m saying this, but we need you to be less like Luol Deng and more like Julius Randle.