Hello everyone, nice board.
I was initially thinking 33 or so wins this year, probably miss the playoffs, but improving and gaining a little traction moving forward. However, though the offense will produce great stretches and cause trouble for opposing teams at times, the defense looks to be in the toilet. Like top 3 worst in the league. This will sabotage good offensive games that would be otherwise winnable. Our big guys are horrible on the defensive end, particularly Frye and Curry. Lee can rebound and has good energy but is not much of challenge in a one-on-one situation. And with our guards routinely being schooled on the perimeter, we are a defensive nightmare.

Balkman does look great, and has all the instincts, energy and nose for the ball that our bigs lack. How good is JJ? Will his return be enough to make us at least average on D? I am not familiar with his game, but his size and rep seem promising.

If we could be even a slightly above average defensive team along with the fairly potent offense I expect, we could sneak into the playoffs.

Are we going to be able to play any kind of D this year?

here's the best way to get defense out of this team:

C - Cato
PF - Lee
SF - Balkman
SG - Q Rich
PG - Nate

unfortunately that team won't score enough points to win many games either.

Posted by Bippity10:

I'm in agreement with you. This team is a 40 win team the moment they decide to play even mediocre defense. The problem is that most of these guys have 4-10 years of bad habits built up. 10 years of no defense is tough to fix in a few short months. And without stability in the front office, strong decisions, a philosophy and a plan it's difficult to get a sustained effort from these guys. Isiah has a lot of work cut out for him.

That's the key to the entire Isiah era here. We get effort for quarters, or streaks of minutes, but not games, weeks, months or seasons. That's what makes us so tantalizing (hi Clyde) and enigmatic. How many times do we have to say "if only the Knicks would play like that every night we could make some noise" to realize they wont play like that every night, and certainly wont make noise until they do.

I just don't want to hear any BS about needing a different system. for two years running the guys who play hard do well in any system and the guys who don't play hard don't do well in any system.

Change the effort.

Posted by misterearl:

Mardy Collins

Marbury

Balkman

Jeffries

Lee

Is this Jeopardy?

The question is, which is the "entitlement" player that does not belong with this group?

Isiah needs to leverage some of the player's coach capital he's got with the team and require playing hard on defense to get minutes. Period. Especially among the guards we will weed out who wants to work to make this team win games. We got plenty of guards so if one won't hustle, the other can play. We can't really hold that over Curry, he must be out there, but at least he has been showing much better effort this year. But for Frye, Lee, all other bigs and mediums, they need to know they must earn it every night or no PT.

I would also split up Marbury and Francis as many have suggested and let whichever's running hot close games. Why not throw out a starting five of:

Marbury
Q
JJ
Lee
Curry

with a second line of

Craw/Nate
Francis
Balkman
Lee/Frye
Frye/Rose/Cato

Toss in a little Collins and some crossover from 1st team at times.

But the stops have to be there. This team can win some games with just a bit of defensive pride.