Posted by RemBee76:

Posted by Bippity10:
It's so weird to me. An analyst predicts we will win 33 games and half the website throws a fit. Intense anger abounds. Yet when that team comes in and wins 33 games those same people blast others for being upset with the 33 wins. They preach patience and tell people to stop expecting so much at this point. It's such a weird dynamic to me. No one has accurately explained this situation to me.

Maybe that is because your grasp of the situation isn't so accurate.

But to sum up my thoughts on this quickly...Nothing said on this board makes me "angry" because I don't think anything people toss casually into the cybersphere is worth getting upset about. I guess that includes predictions from so-called "experts."

I do disagree with people who continuously cite the 33 wins as proof of lack of progress. I just don't think that is fair considering the circumstances the last two months of the season. Not to mention, of course, that 33 wins after a 23 win season (when some “experts” had predicted as low as 19 last year) is by any impartial measure “progress.”

I find it odd that supposed "fans" twist themselves all into knots in attempts to deny the progress we saw over the course of the season last year. They say the schedule over two months was the "easiest you will ever see". You point out that they are wrong, they come back with a retort that suggests the statistical anomaly of the 6 game win streak we had under Brown is somehow equivalent to that of 35 games over more than a two month period. Well, that isn't right, is it.

I don't think a desire to point to these inaccuracies has to be "explained", but please take that as a start. I have reasons to be skeptical of this team this season, as I've explained to you before, but I also don't see any reason to abandon hope that we will continue to see progress. Teams do improve and its not only because they trade all of their vets away for draft picks and cap space. Sometimes they just get better.

Not once did I mention your name in my post and yet for some reason you think I'm talking about you and your opinion. You weren't even on this thread until now. I made no mention of people citing lack of progress etc. I made no mention of Rembee getting upset about things in cyberspace. I made no mention of 33 wins vs. 23 wins. I made no mention or even alluded to anything you are talking about in your post. I simply made an observation based on what I've seen over the past two years. People get mad as he-ll and call ESPN and all these cites that predict us to win 35 games etc. They call them haters. Then when the team wins 23 and 33 wins they get mad at those on the board that expected more. They tell them that Rome wasn't built in a day etc. I just find this inconsistency odd. NOw if you aren't one of these people I'm talking about, why get upset?

And FYI: you may have read one "expert" that predicted 19 wins during the LB year, but the vast majority of fans on this site and across the globe thought LB would make us Phoenix East. I know because I was fried on this very site for telling fans to slow down. The lovers have excommunicated me from the group since those days.

Posted by Bippity10:
NOw if you aren't one of these people I'm talking about, why get upset?

Posted by RemBee76:

Posted by islesfan:
35 games, where they were barely over .500, against competition that average wise would not have made the playoffs in a very weak Eastern Conference, is not progress.

See, to hear you spin it, it sounds like you are saying the schedule was weak again. You could average the teams every team in the league played and it would be somewhere between “would not have made the playoffs” and “barely made the playoffs.”

To explain, the teams we played over that roughly 35 game period had a record (current at the time we played them) that averaged out to something like 39 wins. I don’t have the numbers in front of me, but I remember that was something like a few decimal points better than the Eastern Conference average.

Now, you take an entire season as a sample size the average of every team playing in the L is going to be .500, 41 wins. The Western Conference average then would logically be about 42 wins. As teams in the Eastern Conference play each other more often, though, it follows that if you did that for a team in that conference (the Knicks, for example), that number would be a bit lower, somewhere around 40 wins. So while playing teams that average 39 wins is indeed an ever so slightly easier schedule, it is patently wrong to suggest that the schedule was significantly easier than that of an average season. And of course, going into that analysis should be other factors, like Home Games played (for the Knicks, only 4 in the month of February last year).

No one is saying the Knicks were world beaters, and I don’t personally feel there is anything wrong with pointing out the areas of weakness of the team. But they were improving. They had a terrible habit (one that seems to have somehow held over from the later days of JVG’s tenure) of playing down to their competition and they lost a lot of games they shouldn’t have. But I think it was Blueseats who, when comparing Layden’s teams to Isiah’s, said that he would take the overachievers over the underachievers any day. I would disagree. If a less than mediocre team is overachieving they have little to no chance of improving. Our team now is underachieving, we all agree on that, the only question is can they turn it around.

I hold out hope that they still can. There are, of course, all kinds of fans but I think there is a fundamentally difference from someone who not only doesn’t, but hopes they don’t.

Posted by RemBee76:

In the few years that I've been posting on Forums, I've never known anyone to get so offended that someone took the time to reply to their post as Bippity.

Then you have Isles comparing my attitude toward the Knicks to that of an abused wife.

You guys need to get a grip.

No, Isles, when you average the records of the teams played for an entire season and get around 40 wins, I don't think the fact that the schedule had us playing teams that averaged 39 wins can be cited as a primary factor for improvement.

But rock on with your denial.

Posted by RemBee76:


Some days I'm glad I had a job in high school reading children's books to 5 year olds. It has really come in handy in helping me relate, and stay patient with, some posters here.

Posted by Solace:

Posted by TrueBlue:

Posted by RemBee76:


Some days I'm glad I had a job in high school reading children's books to 5 year olds. It has really come in handy in helping me relate, and stay patient with, some posters here.

It's not patience you're trying to make an example and IMO not doing such good a job.

Understatement of the week.

Posted by BasketballJones:

Posted by Bippity10:

Posted by RemBee76:

Posted by Bippity10:
NOw if you aren't one of these people I'm talking about, why get upset?

Like I said, I don't get upset, not by anything written here.

A wise man once said if you are going to refer to other posts/posters, why not quote those posts/posters in your reply. Makes things a lot easier. I didn't see anything wrong with jumping in on a thread and giving my opinion. If you couldn't do that on a forum, then how would it operate?

And fyi, the 19 game prediction coming from an espn guy was before Isiah's season, not Brown's. And there were plenty of other "experts" who thought the team was headed toward further disaster. Instead we saw some dim signs of hope.

Nothing to get upset over.

You did get upset and you did reply as if I spoke to you.

Yes, I re-read your post and you did say before Isiah's seasons. And I agree with you that those "experts" were ridiculous. But that's my point. Why even call them "experts". They aren't experts. They are guessing just like you and I. But again, that has nothing to do with the point I was making.

There are plenty of people that do exactly what I'm talking about. 15-30 people. I'm not going to call them out one by one when I'm speaking in general terms. Very time consuming don't you think? Probably a tactic that you and everyone on this board has done a thousand times as well. IF one responds to this post I will be happy to address them at that point in time. If you can't tell by now, not afraid to do that my friend.

But as for you, if I don't call you out, and you aren't doing what I said, then I'm probably not talking about you. And FYI: based on the tone of most of our inane conversations there is a near 100% chance that I am not addressing you.

I think it's unfortunate when some posters make generalizations about other posters without citing them by name.