BlueSeats wrote:

nixluva wrote:

BlueSeats wrote:

nixluva wrote:

BlueSeats wrote:

nixluva wrote:

BlueSeats wrote:

nixluva wrote:Before the trade they held 2 opponents to under 100 points!

Wow, that's scary.

My point is that they played good D. Not great, but for this team that's good D and more than enough to win games with this offense. You have to be realistic. Our 2 best players aren't good defenders, so how great can we be on D? We have to get to the point where the D and rebounding is good enough to win games with our strength, which is offense.

I think your unintended point was stronger.

What FG % did the Cavs shoot? 42% and 28%! It's not like we just let them shoot. The big problem was rebounding. We had a horrible offensive 3rd qtr and we didn't get enough stops in the 4th qtr nor enough rebounds period. Among other things i'm pretty sure they're gonna focus on these points and get better.

Nix, our opponents shoot a higher % than we do.

We allow the same % that we make, which isn't good, but explains the .500 record. My point wasn't about all season, but that the D was doing part of it's job in limiting the shooting % in that game. They aren't consistent from game to game, but they do have games where they do a good job defensively. IF they defended well consistently they'd have a lot more wins.

Our .460 FG% is good for 16th in the league. Holding our opponents to .468 FG% ranks at 21st in the league.

All this running around is supposed to catch our opponents by surprise leading to greater offensive efficiency, yet we shoot a lower percentage than them. Can that really be said to be working? It has us playing small ball and popping threes which contributes to us also giving up the most rebounds in the league, and getting few in return. We rank 30th in opponents rebounds, and 28th in rebound differential. (IOW it might be okay if we gave up a lot if we also got a lot, but we don't.)

Maybe a lot running and popping is good to compensate for players who can't create for themselves, but with Melo and Stat that's no longer the case, and it might be time to consider more efficient methods.

If all this running and smalling has us scoring and rebounding with less efficiency than our opponents can upping the anti and doing more of it really be viable?

It reminds me of an old line in economics: the company takes a beating on each item sold but they want to make up for it in volume.

The offense is gonna come around. The thing is that this is an offensive team and if we aren't clicking offensively we are likely to lose.

Mike's teams were never this bad in PHX defensively. As much as people killed him for a lack of D. They were always at the league avg. Right in the middle defensively. This Knicks team has been at the bottom. We've got to fix the roster issues. People overstate things and make it sound like he never plays any bigs. What they should note is that we haven't really had any good bigs. Turiaf and Timo weren't strong rebounders and we all know Amar'e doesn't always go hard. AR just couldn't get his game going period. That's what Donnie is trying to fix. It's not like there are a ton of great bigs just floating around for us to grab. I'm sure Donnie can't wait for Tuesday, so he can try to get some help.

We all knew this team was gonna struggle on the boards, from the beginning of the season. While we addressed the issue of having 2 Stars, we still need to find a rebounder or 2 and who doesn't think that's high on the list of priorities for Donnie?

BlueSeats wrote:

nixluva wrote:

BlueSeats wrote:

nixluva wrote:

BlueSeats wrote:

nixluva wrote:

BlueSeats wrote:

nixluva wrote:Before the trade they held 2 opponents to under 100 points!

Wow, that's scary.

My point is that they played good D. Not great, but for this team that's good D and more than enough to win games with this offense. You have to be realistic. Our 2 best players aren't good defenders, so how great can we be on D? We have to get to the point where the D and rebounding is good enough to win games with our strength, which is offense.

I think your unintended point was stronger.

What FG % did the Cavs shoot? 42% and 28%! It's not like we just let them shoot. The big problem was rebounding. We had a horrible offensive 3rd qtr and we didn't get enough stops in the 4th qtr nor enough rebounds period. Among other things i'm pretty sure they're gonna focus on these points and get better.

Nix, our opponents shoot a higher % than we do.

We allow the same % that we make, which isn't good, but explains the .500 record. My point wasn't about all season, but that the D was doing part of it's job in limiting the shooting % in that game. They aren't consistent from game to game, but they do have games where they do a good job defensively. IF they defended well consistently they'd have a lot more wins.

Our .460 FG% is good for 16th in the league. Holding our opponents to .468 FG% ranks at 21st in the league.

All this running around is supposed to catch our opponents by surprise leading to greater offensive efficiency, yet we shoot a lower percentage than them. Can that really be said to be working? It has us playing small ball and popping threes which contributes to us also giving up the most rebounds in the league, and getting few in return. We rank 30th in opponents rebounds, and 28th in rebound differential. (IOW it might be okay if we gave up a lot if we also got a lot, but we don't.)

Maybe a lot running and popping is good to compensate for players who can't create for themselves, but with Melo and Stat that's no longer the case, and it might be time to consider more efficient methods.

If all this running and smalling has us scoring and rebounding with less efficiency than our opponents can upping the anti and doing more of it really be viable?

It reminds me of an old line in economics: the company takes a beating on each item sold but they want to make up for it in volume.

Acc to these guys we made the top 10 in offensive efficiency, and if we managed to grab a few more offensive rebounds we would be better still. There's no denying that. Guess which team topped the offensive efficiency chart?

http://www.teamrankings.com/nba/stat/offensive-efficiency

Something tells me it wasn't because of Kenyon Martin either. So we may be OK, when these guys mesh. Rebounding as many have said will remain a major weakness. I don't want JJ here, but not sure who we would get?

martin wrote:Blue, Nix, for good measure, it may be better to look at eFG% than straight FG%; same as considering effectiveness numbers which consider pace, eFG would take into consideration 3pointers, which Knicks do shoot a lot of.

http://hoopdata.com/teamff.aspx

if you sort on eFG% DIFF, Knicks are about mid-pack, which seems reasonable considering record.

Thanks for sharing some odd things popped out of that:

Nets lead the league in TO differential (And tey just tradedthere PG!!)
Boston is worse than NYK in ORR differential!
NYK and DEN are 10 and 11 in Efficiency Difference - I will be interested to see how that changes as the two teams assimilate their newbs