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Rookie
Posts: 27108 Alba Posts: 28 Joined: 10/15/2008 Member: #2274 |
10/30/2025 9:45 AM
Definition of Insanity
We're in year 10, and the same questions persist. JONATHAN MACRI OCT 29, 2025 ∙ PAID Good morning. We have the next two days off, so I’ll get into some of the nuts and bolts of last night and of the Knicks’ 2-2 start during the next two newsletters. Please get mailbag questions into Macri@knicksfilmschool.com. For today though, we have to talk about… Game 4: Bucks 121, Knicks 111 I’m old enough to remember the last week of the 2014-15 season, which to this day is the only time in modern franchise history I can recall fans being furious at winning games. With the 15-win Knicks shaping up to have the most lottery balls in the 2015 NBA Draft, late wins against the Magic and Hawks catapulted them up to second in the lottery order, one victory ahead of the Minnesota Timberwolves. When the Wolves won the draft lottery and the Knicks fell to fourth, fans were apoplectic. This wasn’t a normal lottery, after all. It was a chance to draft a big man who couldn’t even be called “once in a generation” because no previous generation ever had a guy with his specific combination of talents and abilities. And on that day, the Karl-Anthony Towns Paradox was born. Gifted with guard skills in a 7-foot, 250-pound frame, there was nothing on a basketball court that KAT couldn’t do. He could shoot. He could handle. He could move with the ball. He had touch. He was too quick for bigs and, in theory, too big for smalls. That last part never got tested much early on, because back in the beginning of his career, NBA defenses weren’t yet audacious enough to guard Towns with far smaller players. Gradually though, that began to change, and with it, so did the conversation. The talk was no longer about surrounding Towns with a championship caliber roster, but was instead about finding a coach and a system that could fully unearth his potential. In 2019, his increased outside shooting was supposed to unlock his game, but by 2021, the Wolves were still searching for the key. The search continued in 2022 and 2023 until they decided that it was the Knicks turn to figure out the solution. Now a season later, another coach is giving it a shot. Five coaches in nine years (I’m counting Thibs twice) tried and failed to fully “unlock” a guy whose mere presence was supposed to unlock easy offense for all of those around him, or at least that was the hope when he came into the league. Touted multiple times by rival GM’s as the player they’d most want to build their franchise around, Towns was supposed to be the skeleton key, not the guy who required one. And yet here we are, now on coach number six, in year no. 10, and we’re still having the same conversations we’ve been having for the better part of a decade. I do not have paid access for the rest of the article https://knicksfilmschool.substack.com/p/definition-of-insanity |
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LivingLegend
Posts: 25881 Alba Posts: 2 Joined: 8/13/2007 Member: #1645 |
10/30/2025 11:25 AM
Rookie wrote:Definition of Insanity IMO Macri is WAY OFF here - he makes point that Browns job was to fully unlock Kat. Unlock what? Kat put up 25/12 on high efficiency last year and put those #s up while often being ignored and an afterthought in Thibs offense. He's just an elite talent that puts up #s every year. Even now this year - Kat has had plenty of wide open 3s he's missed (not Browns fault) and his offensive game (3's, drives from perimeter, put backs, some post ups) looks exactly the same to me. What's missing - Kat's missing shots (that's the difference). His shot attempts are down a couple of shots off normal but he's shooting 35% from 2 and 33% from 3. Last year those #s were 53% and 42% (along his career norms). Kat's just missing shots and making dumb decisions with the ball. |
