Posted by BlueSeats:

Okay, the good with the bad. The Knicks have been playing somewhere around .500 ball the last few weeks. That's not awful.

But the fact that we are only two losses off pace from last year is absurd!

How can it be that close if Brown was so much the wrong coach, with the wrong approach and the wrong system, playing the wrong players against their strengths while disempowering, breaking them down and un-motivating them?

Meanwhile, Isiah is the perfect coach for these guys with the perfect system who'll play the right guys, and play them to their strengths while empowering and motivating them.

How can all that add up to, regardless of what happens next, to what amounts now to a two game difference? Weren't we led to expect, but the coaches, players and fans, a night and day difference?

Posted by bigbeast:

Posted by BlueSeats:

Okay, the good with the bad. The Knicks have been playing somewhere around .500 ball the last few weeks. That's not awful.

But the fact that we are only two losses off pace from last year is absurd!

How can it be that close if Brown was so much the wrong coach, with the wrong approach and the wrong system, playing the wrong players against their strengths while disempowering, breaking them down and un-motivating them?

Meanwhile, Isiah is the perfect coach for these guys with the perfect system who'll play the right guys, and play them to their strengths while empowering and motivating them.

How can all that add up to, regardless of what happens next, to what amounts now to a two game difference? Weren't we led to expect, but the coaches, players and fans, a night and day difference?

Blue, the end justifys the means. If at the end of the season our record is similar to last yr, if the tension in the locker-room mounts as if did last yr, and complete apathy and confusion from both players and coaches run amuk as the calandar flips through Feb, March and April, then your arguments are valid.

Right now its still early. Remember, the infamous win-streak of last yr is what enabled last yrs team to pull them selves up to where we are right now. It was all down hill afterwards. So lets wait and see.

Posted by gunsnewing:

its simple. start lee and we will win a lot more games than we did last year. don't start Lee and Isiah gets shown the door

[Edited by - gunsnewing on 12-30-2006 11:44 AM]

i agree somewhat that the team didn't galvanize after some injuries and lb has to take some blame there but come on...decided to go away from what was working?

this is what was working: marbury, nate, lee, AD, curry

and then both marbury AND ad were done. marbury's injury made him 1/2 the player he was and AD was suspended for 6 games. that's 2 starters so how in the world could he go back to what WAS working when 2 of the players weren't even available?

Posted by oohah:

i agree somewhat that the team didn't galvanize after some injuries and lb has to take some blame there but come on...decided to go away from what was working?

this is what was working: marbury, nate, lee, AD, curry

and then both marbury AND ad were done. marbury's injury made him 1/2 the player he was and AD was suspended for 6 games. that's 2 starters so how in the world could he go back to what WAS working when 2 of the players weren't even available?

What was working was the style of play. As I recall AD got very few minutes during most of the streak. It was Marbury and the young' uns.

Perhaps with Marbury's injury (Forget AD) the Knicks would have been a lot worse, or maybe LB would have been able to slide in the players he begged for (M. Rose and Francis) but I don't think that was what prompted brown to go back to exactly what wasn't working, Marbury or no Marbury.

oohah

lb's style of play is heavily reliant on the point guard. if no marbury, then who was playing point for us? crawford had the worst part of his year after marbury went down. francis didn't come till much later.

brown made his power play and he failed. he tried to outfox isiah and lost. but that's not saying lb totally f'd up this team b/c the team was f'd before he got here, and was f'd up until the recent surge.

in games leading up to the utah win, isiah played 10-12 players with 9-10 of them getting double digit minutes. his lineups may have been in tact but his subs/rotations were all over the place as many times he himself said he was just searching for something to work. it wasn't until he was HANDCUFFED by the suspensions did the rotation tighten and the team started playing better.

so now everybody's talking about confidence and how this team is coming together...well we DID come together for 6 games last year and we DID click UNTIL 2 major events where we lose our starting pg, who was playing WAY better than he's been this past few weeks, and our starting pf. so now, slowly, players are coming back into the fold. so we'll see where it goes from here.

we've played 6 games since the fight. 4 at home, which we all won. 2 took triple overtime, 1 took one overtime. then we put up a stinker on the road in philly (chalked up to exhaustion) and then another one on the road in pheonix.

this team has to win at least 2 games on the rest of this trip if it really has turned the perverbial corner.

clippers can be had as can sacratomato. and the blazers and sonics are just awful teams that we should beat regardless. so 2-3 should be the minimum record we come back with.

[Edited by - djsunyc on 12-30-2006 12:20 PM]

lb's style of play is heavily reliant on the point guard. if no marbury, then who was playing point for us? crawford had the worst part of his year after marbury went down. francis didn't come till much later.

Posted by oohah:

Last year, they played 28 games up to this day. This year they played 32. 2 more games to reach the same number of losses.

Dude I am little confused about what you are saying here. I am aware we have played more games to the same date, but I don't see the significance.

It says right here that the Knicks were 13/21 after 34 games last season: http://basketball-reference.com/teams/NYK/2006_games.html

The Knicks are currently 13/19: http://sports.yahoo.com/nba/teams/nyk;_ylt=AiKoiigAYdK28T8U0zdO.9K8vLYF

2 more losses (Without a win) and the Knicks will have an identical record to last season after 34 games.

I don't see where the date comes into it. Its not the date that counts when tallying wins and losses, its the number of games.

oohah



[Edited by - oohah on 30-12-2006 10:54 AM]

Posted by oohah:
My answer is lets wait until the end of the season to pronounce Isiah's job better or worse than LB's. At this point of the evaluation I would give Isiah a slightly better grade than Brown. But we are not even at the halfway point yet. Brown could have rescued himself last year too. It was after the streak that Brown really went nuts. Let see how it develops.

oohah

Posted by oohah:

Posted by BlueSeats:

Posted by oohah:

Well I still expect us to end up with a better record than last year, as I always have.

But this certainly acknowledges the issues that Brown was up against. I mean lets level the playing field here and for the rest of the season. Lets give Isiah an out of condition Curry; an injured Marbury; lets suspend and then trade his starting PF; let's give him a regressed Lee, Frye, and Nate; lets lose Jeffries and Cato; lets add back in Jalen and Mo... Oh, and lets also find a way for Grunwald to pit Marbury against Brown and undermine Isiah's authority with the players and with Dolan.

I mean in the context of comparisons...

Blue, looking at what this team has had to face to this point this season and it possibly is worse than what Brown had to. As Joe pointed out we have played 6 more games to the same date, often short-handed. The November Schedule was brutal and this team has had numerous injuries and suspensions.

I don't know that Lee would be considered regressed, Brown gave him so many DNP-Cd's so who is to say? Lee played great last year when he got the minutes. Frye had an incredibly bad stretch to start the season, so if anything, he is regressed from last year when looking at his averages.

Suspensions! Did I mention suspensions?!?!

I think it all evens out to as bad or a little worse for this squad. But as bigbeast said, we will see as the season wears on. Brown had the chance to rescue last season but he decided to go away from what was working. Lets see if Isiah does the same.

oohah

Ohh, I could pick this apart line by line about the difficulty of shedule and the like, but it's not worth it. But are you really trying to tell me that this year compares to last in terms of the health and conditioning of guys like Curry and Q? And wehn I spoke of the Nate, Frye and Lee being regressed, I mean just from sophomores back to rookies. Experience has to count for something.

But the larger issue is this: the conditions were so bad last year from so many angles. Some have referred to Brown's coaching job as "the worst ever in the history of sports." Lets say we even accept that premise. So what is this year so close? If everything was so bad, and so wrong last year why is there any basis of comparison to this year?

In some ways isiah has had such opportunity to shine relative to his predecessors. As executive he followed Layden, the "worst GM ever," and as coach he follows Brown, who turned in "the worst coaching performance ever," and still Isiah's struggled mightily to better either of them.

Why is it even close?

My answer is lets wait until the end of the season to pronounce Isiah's job better or worse than LB's. At this point of the evaluation I would give Isiah a slightly better grade than Brown. But we are not even at the halfway point yet. Brown could have rescued himself last year too. It was after the streak that Brown really went nuts. Let see how it develops.

oohah

fair enough. definitely give IT his year. but at that point injuries are just a lame excuse. especially since we've played some of our best ball shorthanded. and suspensions? we can't really blame anyone but ourselves for that. it's like getting artest or sheed on your team and complaining that you would have won a game where they got ejected down the stretch. losing players is a roll of the dice, only worse when you end up with damaged goods.

in any case, give IT his year. picking an arbitrary date before or after LB's best stretches last year is pretty lame. if this team saves IT's job it will be by finishing strong (instead of unraveling late), something we maybe should have been expecting all year.