Fixing the Knicks

[Crow]

Playing almost everyone in over a hundred different lineups has not worked for Fizdale.

Me, I'd do something like this:

Payton Barrett Morris Randle Portis 16 min
Payton Trier Morris Randle Robinson 12
Ntilikina Trier Knox Randle Portis 12
Ntilikina Trier Knox Morris Robinson 8

As you get data on these, make tweaks where it isn't working.
Lineups to date suggest more time for the first lineup. The rest is cobbled together from sub-lineup data and pretty speculative.

[Mike G]

It would greatly help if some of their new players were as good as they were last season.

Code: Select all

. new         2019-20                           2018-19      
. nix    Min   TS%    PER   ws/48   bpm       TS%    PER  ws/48   bpm
Morris   343  .562   15.2   .087   -1.9      .568   14.2  .104   -1.4
Randle   334  .493   13.0  -.015   -2.9      .600   21.0  .131    1.4
Portis   243  .443   14.3   .045   -2.8      .530   15.3  .058   -2.8
Ell'ton  137  .429    3.7  -.070   -7.2      .569   11.8  .097    0.2
Gibson   116  .506   10.8   .034   -3.2      .612   17.8  .144    1.0
Payton   102  .506   14.0   .072   -0.9      .502   14.0  .058   -0.9

totals  1275  .497   12.7   .029   -2.9      .568   16.2  .102   -0.5

Current and last season's rates * this year's minutes on bottom line.
Marcus Morris looks about as good this year, and Elfrid Payton (for 4 games); but the dropoff by others has been ghastly.
In total, they were starting quality last year, and now close to replacement level.

Possible reasons for such extinction of productivity:
- Lack of point guards: Payton's out, and D Smith just disintegrated. Now it's Ntiki or nothing.
- Too many playing the same position: PF mostly

[Crow]

Regression by players and regression of environments.


Trier 62% efg%, 67% ts% coming into tonight. Hey, let's play him 5 minutes. 15 minutes / gm for season. That looks odd. Gotta play Barrett big, gotta play 11 guys again.

[Crow]

5 of 6 most used lineups negative and 4 are horrible.

[Crow]

Too much Barrett, not enough Robinson. And other stuff.

[Dr Positivity]

- Stop being obsessed with raw PPG. They drafted an inefficient volume scorer (Barrett) and then signed a bunch of PPG guys like Randle and Morris.

- Don't even answer the Spurs phone calls this season. They have multiple overrated volume PPG players they need to trade.

- Stop chasing UFAs they're not going to get. If China issues leads to cap going down, teams are going to need to dump salary so get draft picks in return for cap space instead of spending it on overrated scorers

- Look for guys who can play defense but are inconsistent shooting 3 yet and hope they become 3/D players. Frank is a candidate so hold onto him.

- Being a younger prospect doesn't make you a better prospect. Avoid drafting guys who were underperforming statistically at lower levels like Knox and Ntilikina.

[Crow]

The coach and front office are both goners. Coach probably in month but almost certainly by summer. Talk all you want, but you have to deliver something. Executives gone in 6-18 months. Mark Jackson seems likely if Coach is fired before Executives. If they all go at once, it will probably be someone else.

[Crow]

10 of 13 most used lineups really bad to horrendous. Has a decent starting lineup now though. Probably should play it even bigger minutes. 20 minutes or more per game. Plus 13 in 14 minutes last game. May have been fluke but chase that for now. Little else works. 19 of 20 most used player pairs negative. Many badly.

[Crow]

By lineup and sub-lineup data, play the starters a lot and better yet play the starters without one of Barrett or Morris. And with Payton over Ntilikina. And almost nothing else. A tiny bit of Robinson or Portis and some Trier or Knox as needed to fill out those 6-8 lineups. Done with playing with 199 and growing lineups.

Or fire the coach and / or starting trading and waiving guys. And start over.

[Dr Positivity]

Stop playing Dennis Smith

[Crow]

Coaches always rally around a fired coach and to them the firing is never justified. Fizdale won under 35% of his games. His W-L got worse every year he was a Head Coach. Should he ever get another NBA Head Coach job? I don't think so.

His teams were 28th, 28th, 30th and 30th on efg%. 29th, 30th, 20th and 27th on opponent FT/FGA. No real learning / improvement. Opponent efg% was good the first year but then bad the next 3. Bad on defensive rebounding the last 3 seasons.

Getting to line was generally better than average. A few other factors were occasionally near average. But in 4 years he had one decent offensive rating and all the other offensive and defensive ratings were bad to mostly horrible.

[Mike G]

Zach Lowe on ESPN site:

It is the perfect synthesis of why New York's summer spending spree yielded a team almost precisely as bad as last season's very bad one: The Knicks cannot effectively play their star free-agent acquisition with their second-most-important building block. That seems like a thing you would want to do.

Randle and Robinson share the court about 10 minutes per game. Opponents have humiliated New York by 18 points per 100 possessions in those minutes. The Knicks' offense has sputtered almost to a halt.

Robinson is a game-changing rim-runner, but he tiptoes through thickets of bodies with Randle and Frank Ntilikina also on the floor. New York's ball handlers have no actionable passing corridors:

Robinson knew this was coming -- that he would have to find other ways to contribute. He honed his jumper, and his passing from the elbows. Neither skill has yet translated to games. (Robinson has been massively impactful in non-Randle minutes.)

Randle is more versatile, but at heart he's a rim-runner too. He's at his best setting screens, rumbling into open space, and making plays in 4-on-3 situations -- a more selfish Draymond Green, basically. He cannot play that role next to Robinson.

That has left Randle to fling his body at the rim -- and into those same clusters of humans -- in hopeless one-on-one attacks. For long sequences, he resembles a video game protagonist running into a wall over and over because the human controlling him has abandoned the game ....

Dead man walking David Fizdale yanked Randle after 21 embarrassing, out-of-control minutes in yet another awful home loss against Denver on Thursday.

The Knicks can blame this on Fizdale if they want. Firing coaches in Year 2 is what the Knicks do. He hasn't nudged them toward any stylistic identity -- on either end. Guys are in the doghouse, and then they log 30 minutes.

But this roster never made sense.

It seems a few other guys are built for a similar role -- Marcus Morris, Bobby Portis, Taj Gibson -- a bunch of PF playing lots of SF and C.

[Crow]

Playing almost everyone in over a hundred different lineups has not worked for Fizdale.

Me, I'd do something like this:

Payton Barrett Morris Randle Portis 16 min
Payton Trier Morris Randle Robinson 12
Ntilikina Trier Knox Randle Portis 12
Ntilikina Trier Knox Morris Robinson 8

As you get data on these, make tweaks where it isn't working.
Lineups to date suggest more time for the first lineup. The rest is cobbled together from sub-lineup data and pretty speculative.

Payton Barrett Morris Randle Portis, plus 24 pts / 100 p in 33 minutes. Their best performing lineup used over 20 minutes.

More generally, R. Barrett | M. Morris | E. Payton | J. Randle, plus 8 pts /100 p in 115 minutes.

The 5 man lineup and quad variations could / should be tried more to see what happens. With Robinson and with Gibson over Portis both worked in last few games, With Ntilikina over Payton was terrible recently.

Trier with limited minutes and not as I suggested so can't evaluate those lineup suggestions.

[Crow]

Of Miller's 4 biggest lineups used, 2 are meh and 2 are terrible. The recommended Payton Barrett Morris Randle Portis lineup has been used just 8 minutes in 7 games. It did well, as did a few other tiny Ntilikina free lineups. For all the talk about his defensive ability or at least potential, it appears matchup opponents do quite well against him (according to 82games). Miller started Payton last night but in a 5 man lineup that sucks horribly in short testing. Need more changes. More disciplined testing of new ideas and less time on stuff so far bad to horrible.

[Crow]

3 of Miller's most used 5 lineups (with Barrett) are bad to awful. Costing them an average of 3 points per game. Breaking even on the rest of lineups. An improvement on what went before but perhaps could be better.

Barrett on court, Knicks lose by an average of 8.5 points per 100 possessions. RPM estimate is not too bad at -1.45, but that gets 100th place among SGs. 360th overall on RPM. 421th on LA-RAPM. Let see where he is in 1-2 years.