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Porzingis is an all star
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CrushAlot
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1/23/2018  6:17 PM
I'm tired,I'm tired, I'm so tired right now......Kristaps Porzingis 1/3/18
AUTOADVERT
Knixkik
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1/23/2018  6:44 PM
We all know he has a lot to work on, but it's very well-deserved. He's an all star for sure.
BigDaddyG
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1/23/2018  7:02 PM
First the Skills Challenge, now the All-Star Game. Things looking up.
Always... always remember: Less is less. More is more. More is better and twice as much is good too. Not enough is bad, and too much is never enough except when it's just about right. - The Tick
Jmpasq
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1/23/2018  7:38 PM
Ehh I would rather he rest, I just hope he stays of an ALl NBA team because I don't want to Super Max him
Check out My NFL Draft Prospect Videos at Youtube User Pages Jmpasq,JPdraftjedi,Jmpasqdraftjedi. www.Draftbreakdown.com
HofstraBBall
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1/23/2018  7:50 PM
CrushAlot wrote:

Congrats to KP! Think this proves he has improved. But most of us already knew that.

'Knicks focus should be on players that have grown up playing soccer or cricket' - Triplethreat 8/28/2020
Vmart
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1/23/2018  7:56 PM
Our first home grown All- Star since Patrick Ewing. Congrats to KP, the sky is the limit.
Paris907
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1/23/2018  8:00 PM
A lot of Stars have swagger and are self motivated. What I like about KP is that he wants to start the all star game, to be an MVP one day, to win a championship. He doesn’t settle and that’s great. That’s why the next 2-3 moves by Mills/Perry are so crucial.
Welpee
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1/23/2018  8:07 PM
Waiting for Stephen A. Smith to report that Willie Cauley-Stein, Justice Winslow or Stanley Johnson made the all-star team.
meloshouldgo
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1/23/2018  8:14 PM
Welpee wrote:Waiting for Stephen A. Smith to report that Willie Cauley-Stein, Justice Winslow or Stanley Johnson made the all-star team.

Who cares? Hate Stephen A, but let's find a better way to show him up. Princess contest is not it.

I cannot teach anybody anything. I can only try to make them think - Socrates
Welpee
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1/23/2018  8:19 PM
meloshouldgo wrote:
Welpee wrote:Waiting for Stephen A. Smith to report that Willie Cauley-Stein, Justice Winslow or Stanley Johnson made the all-star team.

Who cares? Hate Stephen A, but let's find a better way to show him up. Princess contest is not it.

Not sure what the heck is a "princess contest" but if it means keeping his embarrassing rant alive so be it. You know if he were correct we'd never hear the end of it. I'm assuming you must be a SAS fan?
nyknickzingis
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1/23/2018  10:13 PM
Thank you Phil.
CrushAlot
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1/23/2018  10:24 PM
nyknickzingis wrote:Thank you Phil.
Thank you Mitch. Thank you Sam.
I'm tired,I'm tired, I'm so tired right now......Kristaps Porzingis 1/3/18
CrushAlot
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1/23/2018  10:24 PM
nyknickzingis wrote:Thank you Phil.
Thank you Mitch. Thank you Sam.
I'm tired,I'm tired, I'm so tired right now......Kristaps Porzingis 1/3/18
Uptown
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1/23/2018  11:07 PM
CrushAlot wrote:
nyknickzingis wrote:Thank you Phil.
Thank you Mitch. Thank you Sam.

technomaster
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1/24/2018  7:16 AM    LAST EDITED: 1/24/2018  9:14 AM
Congrats KP! You've made it to the big time! Great to have another all-star drafted with the Knicks (and an all-star with the Knicks) joining David Lee in the post-Ewing era!

Interestingly and retrospectively, how do the two compare?
KP, aka the Unicorn, - DPOTY-quality disruptor in the paint and an emerging premier scoring threat from everywhere on the floor. He just gained his 1st all-star berth. He's romantically linked to instagram/social media model Jen Selter.

David Lee was once known as "da White Howard" - a premier rebounding double-double machine who could score with either hand. He evolved into 2x all-star, earned a max-contract, helped break Steph Curry into the NBA, and albeit in an injury-plagued state, contributed important minutes en route to an NBA championship. And he's now engaged to tennis star Caroline Wozniacki.

Lee never gained long term traction with the Knicks, as he was jettisoned in parallel with the acquisition of Amare Stoudemire. Some Knick fans talk about KP that he's too brittle and isn't the long term answer.

“That was two, two from the heart.” - John Starks
Nalod
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1/24/2018  9:24 AM
We tend to focus on his short comings then he accomplishments.
Great news and a good sign of his ascension.
fishmike
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1/24/2018  9:40 AM
When your best player and highest pick in years makes the AS game in year 3 its a great sign. Hopefully we can add a couple more in the upcoming years.

Congrats KP... well done

"winning is more fun... then fun is fun" -Thibs
GustavBahler
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1/24/2018  11:05 AM
Nice article on KP...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/sports/wp/2018/01/23/kristaps-porzingis-thinks-like-a-new-yorker-and-its-turning-him-into-the-citys-next-sports-legend/?hpid=hp_hp-cards_hp-card-sports%3Ahomepage%2Fcard&utm_term=.5eec98f823e0

fishmike
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1/24/2018  12:27 PM
GustavBahler wrote:Nice article on KP...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/sports/wp/2018/01/23/kristaps-porzingis-thinks-like-a-new-yorker-and-its-turning-him-into-the-citys-next-sports-legend/?hpid=hp_hp-cards_hp-card-sports%3Ahomepage%2Fcard&utm_term=.5eec98f823e0

I hit a pay wall... any chance you can post the article?
"winning is more fun... then fun is fun" -Thibs
GustavBahler
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1/24/2018  12:33 PM
fishmike wrote:
GustavBahler wrote:Nice article on KP...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/sports/wp/2018/01/23/kristaps-porzingis-thinks-like-a-new-yorker-and-its-turning-him-into-the-citys-next-sports-legend/?hpid=hp_hp-cards_hp-card-sports%3Ahomepage%2Fcard&utm_term=.5eec98f823e0

I hit a pay wall... any chance you can post the article?

Kristaps Porzingis still finds New York ‘breathtaking.’ For Knicks fans, the feeling is mutual.

Kristaps Porzingis has emerged as the star New York City needed, but didn’t know it wanted. (Adam

Hunger/USA TODAY Sports)

NEW YORK — Of all the unforeseeable marriages on an inexplicable planet, here’s the one between that great-big loudmouth, New York, and the chill dude from the third-largest city in unobtrusive Latvia, a country with almost two million people, fewer than Brooklyn. Here they are at 31 months, and here any streaming electronic graphic would show them on uptick.

Three seasons of this marriage between skyscraper and skyscrapers, and he’s still looking out his skyborne window and saying, “It’s breathtaking every time I look.” He’s reeling off the list of sights that once appeared only on screens and saying, “As a kid, you’re dreaming of how it is in person, but now it’s like living in a dream, almost.” Here the city will drive him to crave tranquility sometimes, and then when he’s away in, say, Latvia, he’ll start missing the city.

That sounds suspiciously like, you know, a New Yorker.

That’s even if Kristaps Porzingis does carry around the inconvenience of 7 feet and 3-inches, which means he can’t really take much of a walk because, as his older brother Janis puts it, “You can’t put on a hat and hide.” And that’s even if it was only early June 2015 when he first set eyes upon this impossible human construction, and: “I remember the first thing, like, that kind of blew my mind, but I was surprised to see was, the yellow taxis that you see in the movies. That was the first thing. I was like, ‘They’re the same.’ It’s kind of funny. I remember [thinking], ‘That’s how it is, actually.’ ”

So as Porzingis, the New York Knicks’ centerpiece, became a first-time NBA all-star on Tuesday evening, and as his fellow players actually already voted him a starter (though he was edged out by the fan vote — “Players know,” Porzingis told New York reporters matter-of-factly) and as he has the evolutionary game and the 23 points per and the mere 22 years of age, he said on Saturday after practice in Los Angeles, “Actually, I have a really good story.”


By all means, proceed.

“When I was about 13 or something, my brother saved up some money because he always wanted to go to New York City,” a reference to Janis Porzingis, 35, who played professional basketball in at least — inhale, here — Latvia, Lithuania, Austria, Sweden, Hungary, Italy, Spain and Croatia, and who helps Kristaps these days as his agent.

Continuing: “Maybe he told you this story already.”

He did, but by all means, proceed.

“He saved up some money to go to New York City. And he’d just bought a camera, too, actually, at that point. He took thousands of pictures, and he put it all in my computer, I think it was on my computer, or it was in a flash drive, or something like that. I can’t remember, exactly. And we had to exchange files or whatever, and accidentally, I deleted all of the pictures. And I felt terrible. I felt so bad. I was at a camp at that moment, and he called me. He was like, ‘Where’s the pictures?’ I was like, ‘Oh.’ I just felt so horrible. So when I got back home after that camp, I was like, ‘I’m gonna make it up to you, and once I make some money, I’m gonna get you a new trip, so you can go to New York City.’ And now it all happened this way, and now we’re living in New York City.”


Porzingis, shown at summer league in 2015, was not instantly embraced by Knicks fans. His selection was famously booed at that June’s NBA draft. (Ronda Churchill/AP)
So he makes it all this way from Liepaja, a windy city on the Baltic Sea, to life on his own in Spain at 15, to the fourth overall pick in the 2015 NBA draft which famously took some of that glum tribe, Knicks fans, and made them glummer, on past some hints at a trade last spring which scared those same fans, toward next month’s NBA All-Star Game, all because he accidentally deleted thousands of New York photos?

“A hundred percent,” he said with a wink and his above-average wit.

At times this season, Madison Square Garden has seemed, in a word oft-foreign this century, fun. It has featured its share of “MVP” chants for Porzingis. Maybe you haven’t lived until you’ve seen couples in concessions lines, a woman wearing a Porzingis No. 6, her other half in a No. 3 J-J-J-John Starks.

The Knicks, with Carmelo Anthony’s star-shine gone to Oklahoma City after seven-plus seasons, have nudged to 10th in the Eastern Conference, following on 12th in 2016-17, 13th in 2015-16 and 15th (among 15 teams) in 2014-15. They nibbled a lot around .500 before a January fraught with road trips steered them to 21-27 as of Wednesday. Porzingis has progressed utterly, majored in third-season riddle-solving. Even after an audacious November yielded to the usual grinding NBA reality, his points per game average has hiked from 18.1 last season to 23.3 in this campaign. His three-point percentage, an evolutionary curiosity given his height, has gone from 35.7 to 38.5. He has handled bad games with aplomb, has piled good games atop his bad games and has advanced his understanding of when to make offense and when to let others do so.

As one astute opponent, Memphis Grizzlies center Marc Gasol, put it: “I don’t know how many guys you’ve seen that are 7-3 that can shoot the ball that way, right? And that can actually, you know, put it on the floor with the notion of where he’s going to. Like, he knows where he wants to get to [on the court], and he’s comfortable taking those shots. And you can see, at the same time, that he can still grow a lot, in a lot of positions, and make the game even more efficient for him, and easier. So by the time he figures all those things out — and, I think, watching him, especially through the summer, which the national team, you could see, you know, a lot of switches getting flipped on him, and what it is to carry a team.”

So in the city of Namath and Frazier and Jackson and L.T. and Ewing and Messier and Piazza and Jeter, yet a city kind of lean on giants in the 2010s, this chill giant has a chance to become a New York giant long-term. Hailing from his country overrun with wars and a Soviet Union in the 20th century, a healthy country whose most recent independence began in 1991, an impressive gumdrop of land with a reigning French Open champion, Jelena Ostapenko, he fits. He fits in part because, like New York, he works.

[Wizards’ Bradley Beal headed to his first NBA All-Star Game, John Wall makes fifth straight]

He’s the owner of “a big heart” and “very humble” and “a very chill person,” his teammate and friend Willy Hernangomez said, and he works. He’s described by new teammate Enes Kanter as, “There is not much guys in the NBA like that,” because “people are just, ‘He’s so good,’ whatever, but at the same time he’s making everybody else better around him,” and he works. He’s not an introvert per se, and he tries to quell his occasional hesitancy about approaching strangers with an understanding that they approach with support. He’s also witty enough to blow his nose before a group interview, then turn around and tell reporters it’s part of interview preparation.

Also, he works.


Porzingis has emerged as an evolutionary NBA player — a 7-foot-3 big man capable of protecting the rim who can also spread the floor beyond the three-point line. (Mark J. Terrill/AP)
“Yeah, I think he can do this because he is so calm and he is so sure of himself,” Janis Porzingis said. “And I think that comes a lot from his parents, were older, my parents, at the time. They were more calm. They had gone through me and Martins [now 32], and so on. So they treated him differently. Martins treated him horribly” — Janis grinned there — “which makes him stronger mentally. That is the reason why he is the way he is. So those things don’t shake him much — criticism, or whatever. This city, if you make some mistakes, they will let you know about it. Kris can do it. Kris can kind of withstand that.”

His life, for now, goes “do my job, back home, get some rest,” he said, and that does sound like many a New York life. A room in his apartment has turned into a sort of “therapy room,” Janis Porzingis said, because the leadership role has flung more fatigue and “because constantly there’s something swollen, something, [and] he takes care of all that.”

Routinely, he also gets to drive.

Fortunately, the Knicks’ practice facility is in the wilderness of Westchester County, above the city.

If that’s not optimal for some, it’s optimal for one 22-year-old with enough sense to remember to look out the windows in life.

“I love driving, so I love spending that half an hour in my car,” Kristaps Porzingis said. “It’s a weird thing, but I just love driving, and just thinking, whatever. I love those 30 minutes. Those are the special 30 minutes for me during the day, going here, and back, from the practice facility . . . I listen to music, but I usually just think. I think some things, and a lot of times I just remember stuff I haven’t thought about in a long time, and I just remember, ‘How did I forget this?’ I swear, it’s weird, but . . . ”

Of course, New York has never minded weird.

Porzingis is an all star

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