bigbasketballs wrote:Knicks played badly and lost a game.

Won the four before it.

How about not playing the game where the wins were catching the other team off guard and the loses reveal who you really are?

Im not allowing the wins to hide what is wrong with our offense.

DWill needs to crash the boards at every opportunity. He is a high energy guy, but Williams can get real quiet when he doesn't have the ball in his hands. Rebounding, bringing up the ball (not to mention defense), will help him get his energy back.

GustavBahler wrote:The biggest problem I see with Grant is his reluctance to take a mid range jumper. Makes it easier to shut him down. He needs to mix up his offense. Disagree that he has slow foot speed, he can get to the rim quite easily, having trouble finishing as of late. Thats when a mid range jumper comes in handy.

DWill needs to crash the boards at every opportunity. He is a high energy guy, but Williams can get real quiet when he doesn't have the ball in his hands. Rebounding, bringing up the ball (not to mention defense), will help him get his energy back.

From what I have seen Thus far, Grant is a very capable shot maker. With time, the game will slow down for him and he will dominate the PG spot. As for Williams, he is a better version of THJ. He needs minutes to prove what he can do. I am so pissed at fisher for not using this dude to relieve Carmelo of the heavy minutes he has been logging. Fisher needs to go back to the rotation he had on the floor the first five games; he would have seen better success out of that rotation if Afflalo was healthy and if Calderon and Carmelo wer not struggling offensively.

Let's not forget that Riley has been coaching against Phil Jackson's system for 25-30 years.

Yes, Miami is gonna be hip to a lot of the Triangle plays. And they're going to do their best to disrupt shots to lower field goal %.

I agree with the overall topic - the offense looks clunky at times and a lot of times it can seem like the bench has absolutely nothing going on at all.

I'd like to see more posting of Seraphin and KOQ and using that to initiate things. Have Grant and DWill running off picks to create movement and have Galloway and maybe Lance Thomas be your outside shooters.

But, yeah, the bench is rough right now.

The offense of the starters looks pretty dang good. Melo and KP both had inefficient shooting nights last night, but they got their shots and just missed them - either because it was 3rd game on road in 4 nights or Miami just disrupted them enough.

Starters outscored Miami starters - big difference to me was that when Miami subbed players in, they kept their momentum and flow. Knicks fell off one cliff when KP sat down and then another when Melo sat. There's no continuity coming from the bench right now. Not sure how they get there. And I think it might be because the bench 5 plays almost an entirely differently style of offense than the starting 5.

WaltLongmire wrote:Beginning of the year I was thinking that you would need 40 games to really see where this team was-from my detailed analysis of our season on 11/24/15, I have determined that we have played 15 games.

Yes, Basketball Reference and NBA.com team tracking both corroborate it's been 15 games.

WaltLongmire wrote:We were 4/24 from 3...

Shooting them with the success rate of our previous games would have given us a chance to win yesterday.

They also had 15 more FTs than we did, and the refs were not exactly fair with us last night.

We also missed a number of easy shots.

Quite maddening to reevaluate the team's potential after each game, and change our respective opinions about this or that player and the coach after each game, too.

Snapshots are nice, but never tell the entire story...you look at the early threads during the season and compare them to now, and you would think that we are a different team, now.

Beginning of the year I was thinking that you would need 40 games to really see where this team was-from my detailed analysis of our season on 11/24/15, I have determined that we have played 15 games.

Would be nice to see some perspective when dealing with the highs and lows during the season, and even during each game, for goodness sake.

That's a fair assessment. KP outpacing all expectations has really changed the way everyone looks at this team after 15 games.

I think now one of the major struggles will be to remember KP is all of 20 years old and we have to be careful with his minutes.

That said, I do think Fisher's challenge now will be to figure out a way to make the bench more productive. Even with the win streak, it became obvious that the bench was often not pulling its weight. In Houston it was terrifying whenever the bench came in and KP went out. Same against Charlotte and OKC where the bench coughed up large leads. It's been an issue even in some of the wins. The bench needs a more reliable and effective offense.

I think the starter's offense, with the return of Afflalo and the resurgence of Calderon, has actually been quite good.

And the overall team defense has been fantastic, obviously.

I'm worried that there is a disturbing trend that is leading to more melo & Woodson-esque offense.

We seemed to have success playing a bunch of guys, and their roles have diminished. I don't know if that is them not playing as well or the coach trimming things back. I'm worried its the latter.

I do agree with Knicks1969:

There is a reason why we have been a bad forth quarter team so far this year; the group we started the year with as bench players has seen multiple changes and a drastic drop in their minutes. The coach claimed that he is still searching for an answer while it is staring at him. It is an easy fix in my opinion; our second squad early on used to push the tempo. As a result, the young dudes used to score in transition and sustain a lead. Fisher's insistence to have Lou and Seraphin on the floor forced the second unit to curtail the fast break and rely on a half court setting which is not their strong suit.
My solution:
Second unit needs to consist of the following players: Grant, Galloway, Williams, Lance, and KO (20 minutes)
At times, mixt it up with Calderon (SG) and Seraphin (center) with KP at PF

Fish has to get it together in terms of how he's working his rotations. It's not just about this loss, but overall. I don't completely fault him for experimenting early in the season but eventually it should sink in which rotation makes the most sense. IMO Seraphin and Sasha are of little value based on what they bring to the table verses playing Jerian, DWill and KOQ. Not that either KOQ or DWill have been perfect. Still I think if left alone and not jerked around these guys would settle into consistently good performances. It's time for Fish to settle on his top 9-10 rotation and give that priority.