From before last night's game. Someone on Reddit posted the article.
rticle copied and pasted:NEW ORLEANS — Opening night was supposed to be a symbol for these Knicks. They were fun, they played fast, and they were buoyed by their young core. That they won was just an added benefit. That game was a validation of what David Fizdale had been preaching since he took over as the team’s coach. These Knicks might not be all that good but they would be enjoyable.
Wednesday night in Oklahoma City, that wide-eyed promise had disappeared. The Knicks were waxed, yes, but they were also difficult to watch. Feisty losing could be tolerated; bad and blah could not.
The Knicks are 4-11 now and that isn’t surprising. But the disappearance of the up-tempo, invigorating style Fizdale promised is. That has been a victim of a young team, a dilapidated roster, and a coach trying to maintain competency. Whatever identity Fizdale hoped to imbue in the Knicks has been lost, so far. That, more than anything, should be worth an inspection.
It is a left turn from the philosophy Fizdale said he’d take when he was hired and in the ensuing months. The Knicks would build a culture, while implementing his offensive and defensive systems. This was to be the season where the organization would set its path forward, using these 82 games to prune personnel as much as to elucidate its style of play.
Fizdale’s Knicks would play with pace, they would pass the ball, and defend. Positionless basketball became an unavoidable buzzword. What the Knicks have become 15 games in is something else altogether.
“Coaches gotta adjust to the roster and what you have at that time to give them the best chance to play good basketball,” Fizdale said. “It all sounds great when you come in, saying I want to do this and I want to do that but you gotta work with what you have right now.”
Fizdale has decided to play bigger and slower. He’s started Noah Vonleh and Mitchell Robinson, two non-spacing bigs. Their pace has suffered, he said, because the offense has struggled to get organized. Frank Ntilikina has been bothered by a balky shot. Kevin Knox is only a few games removed from an ankle injury. Trey Burke is now rarely playing. The effects of all that, and more, are visible.
The Knicks are 18th in the NBA in pace, but average the 26th longest offensive possessions, according to Inpredictable. They’re 15th league-wide in possession-length after turnovers, and own the second-longest possessions off defensive rebounds. They’re not moving the ball much either — 18th in passes and 29th in potential assists, according to NBA.com — and 20th in drives per game.
The Knicks’ defense remains a sieve, 26th in defensive rating, and giving up the second-most corner threes as a percentage of their opponent’s shots, according to Cleaning The Glass.
Those faults are symptomatic of a larger issue, of course, but Fizdale’s accommodation to the present has come at the cost of the bigger picture. He has chosen to focus on the short-term instead of hard-charging through with his systemic philosophies, all else be damned.
“It’s a balance,” Fizdale said. “Because as coaches you’re always stubborn about your style and what you envision and all of that stuff. But that ultimate vision is so far down the road. The most important thing is, are these guys getting better? I gotta put them in situations that allows them to get better and sometimes that might not be at the moment exactly how I want to play. My perfect vision is — we’re far from that. But it is trying to get them to play the way I want them to play, but not to our detriment and now a guy can’t do anything because he’s frozen. I still want to highlight what they’re good at but at the same time still be stubborn enough to get in my style of play at some point as we build it.
He is not the first coach to try to walk a fine line between building a program and organizing basic competency. There is a parallel for that in Brooklyn, where Kenny Atkinson took over the downtrodden Nets. He won 20 games his first year, 28 the next, and this year the Nets looked like contenders for a possible playoff spot before a gruesome injury to Caris LeVert. But the whole time they have earned plaudits for playing with a distinctive style and system. The Nets were not good, but you could tell what they were trying to do.
That was Fizdale’s plan too, and still is, though the last few weeks have looked liked like a retrenchment from that principle. There will be difficult stretches for any team during the course of a long season but the Knicks do not escape scrutiny just because the results can seem immaterial. Progress comes gradually, as a product of deliberate intent. Every game is another rep in Fizdale’s system, and in the inculcation of how he wants the Knicks to play. And in a losing season, especially one on the backs of youth and promise, avoiding ennui matters more so too.
In Oklahoma City, Fizdale saw something he hopes the Knicks can one day be. The Thunder did not have Russell Westbrook but pounded New York all the same, gashing them with pick-and-rolls and the metronomic excellence of a team steeped in continuity.
“They have a microcosm of how I’d like our guys to play — fast, athletic, disruptive,” Fizdale said. “So that is a good lesson for us. How to play against it and how we want to play.”
Today, though, the Knicks are mired in their quotidian demands. They have lost by 25-plus points in consecutive games and by double-digits in four of their last six. Competitiveness is the basic need, and it’s easy to see how the grand plan can get mucked up.
The Knicks rolled out a new lineup Wednesday, watched one get thrashed, and may use another one soon. Emmanuel Mudiay was chosen as the new starting point guard, with Fizdale hoping he could goose the team’s sluggish pace. But they still have defensive holes to plug and more playmakers to find and develop.
At some point, the Knicks hope they will get the players they need to play the way they want. For now, they must do with what they have, and lately it has not looked good.
“We’re not there yet,” Fizdale said. “We’re in the very beginning stages of building what we hope to become our team. And so a lot of it is identifying this year what guys can really move forward with us in the future and playing the NBA style of basketball and our style of defense. We’re trying to evaluate those pieces in a way to say at the end of the year that we can make sound decisions.”
AND ONES
— When Fizdale changed the starting lineup Wednesday, he went away from one of the few things that was objectively working for the Knicks. The Ntilikina-Hardaway-Dotson-Vonleh-Robinson lineup was tied for the fourth-best net rating among all NBA lineups that had played at least 90 minutes together. But Fizdale thought they didn’t play well enough in first quarters, so he made a change. That lineup has a -0.3 net rating in first quarters, but that was at +5.8 before Sunday’s loss to the Magic. So why did Fizdale go away from it?“Just to look,” he said. “We weren’t winning. It’s not like it was winning games for us. We started to hit a point where we weren’t starting off the game right. That lineup throughout the game was doing a good job overall but the first six minutes that lineup started to really dwindle. I just said let’s see something else. Until we can see all of these things together from a combinations standpoint I don’t want to necessarily say hey, this is it. Because we got a long season. This is going to be a long ride for us. I want to make sure that when we get close to saying hey we want to ride with this for a while that we’ve explored and exhausted everything. That’s why I said 20-25 games usually you kind of know your team, know your players, know who’s who and hopefully right about that time we can start saying, OK, this is where we’re going from here.”
— The Knicks are carrying around a literal axe with them. Fizdale got the idea after a team trainer told him about an old maxim: “If you give me six hours to chop a tree, I’m going to keep sharpening my axe.” So he thought the Knicks should have an axe, as a metaphor for the values he hoped to instill in them. He had them sign it about a week ago as a contract to follow through with their commitment. Importantly, he insists it’s safe, with a plastic cover on the tip.
“We signed a covenant as a group, every guy, I said, hey, let’s make a commitment that no matter what happens we stick together and we keep chopping this tree together,” he said. “The axe is just a symbol of us chopping this tree everyday, putting in the work with the right attitude, the right respect for what we’re trying to accomplish and not letting things linger but just keeping our eyes on the task of getting better.”
https://theathletic.com/657762/2018/11/16/the-knicks-are-bad-but-thats-expected-why-its-more-significant-that-the-knicks-arent-playing-the-fast-fun-style-david-fizdale-promised/
