crzymdups wrote:

nixluva wrote:

dk7th wrote:

nixluva wrote:

dk7th wrote:judging from fisher's comments, sounds like he had a chat with melo.

What did he say?

when your best players are moving the ball, rebounding, playing defense it inspires everyone else. teams have always won that way in the past and that's the way they are winning now.

Sounds just like what most of us have been saying for years.

that's kinda empty coach speak to me.

what if both teams move the ball, rebound, and play defense? who wins then?

no it isn't empty coach speak. it is germane given the way the knicks ended their road trip with melo playing hero ball. did he need to do that just to get a win? yes. did he need to continue to do that? evidently not. hence, it is clear from fisher's comments that he and melo had a chat, and did not want melo to continue to play that way, preferring that he focus on moving the ball, facilitating, playing defense.

melo had a GREAT game until, again, the last minutes. that has been a pattern this season. he entered the game with 8 minutes left and went 2-8 from the field. too many bad shots in a concentrated period of time. it helped that he got to the line and hit some free throws, but... had he maintained the style of play that he had exhibited earlier, the game need not have been so close.

herkyJerky wrote:I'm still laughing about Seraphin pulling the chair out from under Towns. That was pretty funny. But Towns looked really good, definitely living up to the hype of 1st pick overall, so far. Wiggins looked pretty damn good too. TWolves got some good things in their future. Glad to see KP doing other things, especially on D, even though his offense is still on a little bit of a minor slide. At this point it's starting to look like Melo really has a lot more confidence in the guys around him than he's had in the recent past. This COULD turn into a pretty damn good thing. Let's see how it plays out for the back to back this weekend. AA killed it tonight. LT had another quietly good game. Gallo looking like he's starting to come back around. Hoping jGrant finds his way back into the rotation at some point. Would really like to see him develop throughout the rest of the season.

Towns looked good against Lopez......But if our other bigs were guarding him the entire game, I'm not sure Towns would've looked that good.

I think every team in the NBA will have 1 or 2 players licking their chops to go up against Slow-Pez and Old-eron......Plus we have Melo, which is motivation to out score him. Towns and Rubio had their own motivation factors between Towns showing why he was picked first and Rubio showing out in front of his mentor. But with all that said, we had a chance to put our foots down on the necks of this team and we didn't. I'm still waiting for the day when we can go up by 20 at half.....and win for 20. Thats when you know we have improved.....Regardless how Fisher subs. If our roster holes are filled correctly, even Fisher couldn't mess that up, regardless of his substitution parterns.

bigbasketballs wrote:

blkexec wrote:I'm still waiting for the day when we can go up by 20 at half.....and win for 20. Thats when you know we have improved.....

Going from 17 wins to 13-15 before Christmas is a pretty airtight mathematical case.

That 17 win season is not a good measuring stick for success, because it doesn't represent our true value. Phil stripped the team from it's talents, and only used D league players as their replacement. If Phil kept the same players (JR, Shump, Tyson Chandler, etc....) we would've won more than 17 games. So don't except mediocre as a pass. When you have a 20 pt lead, only bad teams should be worried about losing.....And we almost lost that game yesterday. So right now, we are playing like an 11th place team. Hopefully a few trades or additions this year would help push us into the playoffs. But using 17 wins as a measuring stick is getting old. Now if we were Philly, and picked up OK4 in the draft, and only had 1 win, then thats a problem. And next year they can use that as a measuring stick, because nobody traded away their entire roster like Phil did with us. Thats who they really are.....A 1 and whatever team.....on their way to a 17 win or less season!

markvmc wrote:On the Sasha call in the first half, I know a lot of you were up in arms at no ejection, but I can't honestly say I saw contact on the slow-mo replays. And if the elbow had really connected at that pace from a guy that big, Sasha would have been a lot longer getting up, and been a lot more dazed.

You don't need contact for a flagrant foul 2 and ejection. Only need that an elbow or punch that was thrown over the shoulder

mreinman wrote:

wh4t wrote:play of the game

Dunks just don't do it for me. So 80/90's.

i thought you were Mr. High-efficiency-shot-selection?

bigbasketballs wrote:

blkexec wrote:

bigbasketballs wrote:

blkexec wrote:I'm still waiting for the day when we can go up by 20 at half.....and win for 20. Thats when you know we have improved.....

Going from 17 wins to 13-15 before Christmas is a pretty airtight mathematical case.

That 17 win season is not a good measuring stick for success, because it doesn't represent our true value. Phil stripped the team from it's talents, and only used D league players as their replacement. If Phil kept the same players (JR, Shump, Tyson Chandler, etc....) we would've won more than 17 games. So don't except mediocre as a pass. When you have a 20 pt lead, only bad teams should be worried about losing.....And we almost lost that game yesterday. So right now, we are playing like an 11th place team. Hopefully a few trades or additions this year would help push us into the playoffs. But using 17 wins as a measuring stick is getting old. Now if we were Philly, and picked up OK4 in the draft, and only had 1 win, then thats a problem. And next year they can use that as a measuring stick, because nobody traded away their entire roster like Phil did with us. Thats who they really are.....A 1 and whatever team.....on their way to a 17 win or less season!

The true ceiling of this team is an unknown. Trying to measure their current record against any but the empirical past is a purely subjective exercise.

This is a brand new team of unknown capacity playing their first 30 games. As note elsewhere, the 2014-15 Cavaliers were 19-20 once.

But that said, they may well be an 11th place team. Who is to say otherwise

And they didn't almost lose yesterday. They had no less than a 3 point lead with possession with the shot clock turned off.

On most nights, the team losing will be extremely fortunate to get to OT and that's rare.

i have thought from the beginning that, starting this year, jackson and fisher have a two-year arc of developing this team. he folds that notion in to many of his postgames. ordinarily, teams who have had a core together for a while look to 25 games to gel properly as a rotation.

the knicks have not had either, of course. so it stands to reason that if it's a two-year narrative (my take only) then you really have to look at game 50 (25x2) to get a good notion of what the team is and where it will trend.

the wild card remains, happily, kp6. but just as important, is which melo comes to play.

TeamBall wrote:I shouldn't be surprised. It's Ed Malloy.

tadaaaaaa