Knicks head coach Tom Thibodeau said earlier this week he didn’t want Kemba Walker to return to action until the point guard was confident he could play on a regular basis. Even though Walker returned on Tuesday and scored 19 points in 30 minutes against Minnesota, the veteran guard didn’t make any promises about his future availability, according to Peter Botte of the New York Post.
“We’ll see. We’ll see down the line,” Walker said. “It really just depends on how I feel.”
We have more on the Knicks:
- The team and star forward Julius Randle haven’t lived up to expectations and it’s unlikely that will change, ESPN’s Tim Bontemps writes. Randle hasn’t come close to reproducing the offensive efficiency he displayed last season, the defense has been subpar, and difference-maker Derrick Rose is out with an injury. As one Eastern Conference executive told Bontemps, “Everything fell into place for them last year, and they haven’t been able to repeat it.”
- Obi Toppin has seen his playing time plummet in recent games, Botte notes. Toppin, the team’s 2020 lottery pick, has averaged just 11.3 MPG over the past eight contests. He’s averaging 7.7 PPG and 3.7 RPG in 15.8 MPG during his second season.
- Quentin Grimes has earned more playing time even with several veterans returning to action recently, Steve Popper of Newsday writes. Grimes doesn’t put up big stats but Thibodeau has played Grimes a minimum of 17 minutes in all but one game this month. “Grimes has been playing great basketball,” Thibodeau said of the first-round rookie guard. “But it’s just step by step. You earn your minutes here. What you do in practice. You have to wait for your opportunity and when your opportunity comes, be ready to go.”
- Newly-acquired Cam Reddish is close to making his Knicks debut, Marc Berman of the New York Post tweets. Thibodeau said Reddish will be ready to return from an ankle sprain “any day now.”
Knicks feel like a mess. Seems they are trotting out new rotations all the time but not learning anything from it? What is Thibs plan?
This is what happens with Thibs. Make a surprising Playoff run and then team falls apart the next year and he gets fired soon after
We got no PG. Or did you miss that. We still got plenty of time.
I’d still like to see McBride get minutes at BUPG. He may not pan out and he may not have earned the minutes but I’d still want to give him the chance.
You don’t know if we have a PG and Thibs wouldn’t recognize a PG if he got a resume with Point Guard as the Friggin title.
Thibs plan? LOL
Can’t lose to TWolves, Hornets at home. No real PG is hurting them. When you count on frail players. This is what can happen. I’d rather see McBride play than see Burkes at PG. That to me is a panic move by Thibs.
Getting Cam could mean moving Burkes or Fournier. I Rather move Burkes.
With Turner hurt. I’d rather see Knicks go after Grant. I know they will make a trade by TD. Not really feeling what they will do. Fox to me is interesting. But what would it take.
Knicks are terrible and they are a .500 team. If that’s not a Classic ……..
“glass is half empty” . Scenario
I think the blame lies with the front office. They missed the mark this off-season although Thibs does not seem to have his handle on this years squad as well. Both Graham and Malik Monk were available. Cam Thomas was available,etc. Hoping they have a plan here, thinking Reddish is a smaller move that’s part of a bigger plan soon to be revealed?
Partially. I’d have rather rolled over the cap space than bring in Fournier. I think the Kemba thing, although a good deal on paper, did more harm than good, just because he threw a wrench into our defense – but the fact he’s Kemba makes it difficult to just bench him outright.
Most of this is just a Randle regression though. If he’s playing like a 2nd team All-NBA player like he was last year, a lot of these issues around the edges are muted.
Problem there is building a plan centered around a player who had 1 “magical” season – in the year he was likely going to be moved at the deadline ahead of the final year in his deal.
The FO blinked – and gave him an extension instead of letting him play out the last year & prove 20-21 was more progression than anomaly.
We got the answer to that now…and it’s walking around with 4/$117m attached to it.
Betting a franchise on a players free agency season is a major fail.
wasn’t his free agency season. But there were already rumblings about his fit here after the 19-20 season. He could have been moved at the deadline in 20-21 with 1 & a half years left for the other team to decide whether to extend or move him.
Instead, the Knicks kept him (because of the magical season) & extended him (no clue why).
Either way, it was a bad bet by the Knicks. Deal is not as attractive on the trade market now (movable, but not quite the same with 4 years instead of 1 & half)
Agreed, but the Randle deal isn’t horrible. He’s still putting up decent numbers, he’s just not the guy they need to build around. RJ needs to be the focal point until/if they land a top tier star.
Thibs, while no one can argue is very much a coach that’s invested, isn’t flexible enough to be successful with the team he’s currently running.
Walker and Fournier, especially Fournier, we’re the wrong signings/deals. Their defense is horrible and offense is streaky, which seems to have impacted the rest of the team. Seems that last years team, when on the floor doesn’t seem to know what to do with them.
Now that Knox has been runned out of town, time is running out for the Knicks to salvage whatever it can on its other draft disaster in Toppin. Sorry but its to be or not Obi…
Randle/Toppin-the first is too angry the other doesn’t seem serious. They should have drafted Jose Alvarado…Walt Perrin?
I’m not seeing Perrin’s fingerprints on this roster. Unless his impact in Utah was overstated.
I’ve not seen anyone on the team do anything except what Thibs tells them to do.
If you remember Quickleys first spring training, when Thibs finally let him play, he was a fun PG who was very interested in running a fun offense.
Thibs didn’t let him play until that was “practiced” out of his system & he learned to play thibs ball and only thibs ball.
Even with as much that’s “gone wrong” for the Knicks, they’re still a very respectable team with a fighting record.
They need to find a way to be part of some 3 team deal where they’re able to trade Toppin and a first, etc. for D.Fox.
A solid PG could solve alot of the Knicks issues, and then with Fox and Reddish revitalizing this team’s spirit, and Rose getting healthy they’d be primed to make a real run come playoff time..
Just my two cents..
Toppin, a first, etc, for Fox would get the Knicks hung up on immediately. I imagine Obi’s value around the league is nearly that high as an older player with significant defensive limitations who may or may not shoot enough to be a viable starter to begin with. He’s probably worth close to what the team paid for Cam.
But the Knicks should definitely be in the market for PG help. Brunson would be ideal but he’s going to have a ton of suitors come FA and who knows if the Mavs would keep him anyway.
Didn’t look good tonight. The Garden is not happy with this effort. It’s a shame they play bad at Garden. Almost like the pressure gets to them. Randle is not handling it well.
It’s Thibs team. As much as I like him. Time for him to make this right or start taking the blame.
The starting unit has issues. Seems like they are not on same page to me. Definitely heading towards a major shakeup. It’s like they are taking two steps back this yr. It’s on Thibs now.
So you do agree with my comment then? Different rotations every night, starting unit not on the same page. Only took you a couple hours.
You and me have more in common than you think, Alberto.
Al, has an average of 7.8 posts on every Knicks thread – all of them with competing ideological positions.
So he’s usually simultaneously both agree and disagreeing with himself and others. It’s very postmodern, IMO.
I wonder if he’s a politician.
Kemba’s first game back after an extended absence and an extensive injury history…and Thibs plays him 30 mins. Smh
I’m almost embarrassed for Thibs by how resistant he is to the most obvious changes. There’s simply no hope for him as anything other than a high-floor, low-ceiling coach.
Julius Randle in January:
9gms
35.9 mpg
16.8pp/10.2rpg/5.6ast
TS: .467
.389/.229/.700
This is getting to a point where Randle’s role in the offense just needs to be re-assessed. He played great last year – but he’s falling apart before our eyes attempting to replicate it this year.
Giving him a more secondary role would help both the Knicks’ offense and Randle’s percentages.
Thibs thinking that playing more minutes allows you to play harder has been sad, funny and consistent at the same time.
Thibs has to go now before he does permanent damage. I don’t know WTF is going on but it’s ugly, it’s starting to cause real damage to the culture we waiting so long to develop and is now at the point where we’re going to start to cause real damage to the roster and players careers.
I still think this is Dolan hiring Thibs to be a second power in the front office because he thinks conflicting interests is a positive.
That might work in some cases but it’s a monumental failure here and is probably the reason Dolan has been a failure as an owner.
Whatever anyone thinks Thibs did for the team last year there is no sign it’s a long term solution. We can run players in and out of town or blame anyone you want but Thibs has an idea of basketball in his mind that he simply will not adjust and it simply is not the reality of how basketball or people work.
You can argue with patterns of reality but you can’t win that argument. Thibs joins teams, burns them out mentally and physically and then is fired when ownership realizes grinding players into the ground only grinds them into the ground. It NEVER EVER turns a team into a championship team when you overwork them all season.
NEVER! That shouldn’t be something that anyone needs to learn after the age of 6.
Here’s another good one.
If you don’t have the best players, you’d better not do the same thing every time. If the other team knows what you’re doing they can simply go stand where you want to stand. If doing that ends the game for you we’re talking about a basketball IQ so low it may not even register.
I feel like in Thibs perfect dream game you could put a tracer on the ball and offensively it would follow the exact same line every time.
I think he’d even admit it and feel proud of it.
Unfortunately it’s defendable by anyone who knows where the lines are.
The bottom line is that I know all of these players are better than they look because I’ve watched them all play. Adding that to the fact that everyone seems confused and the absolutely moronic lineup decisions and it tells me one thing. We can’t assess any of our players because none of them are being put into a system that helps them look good or takes advantage of their style.
What that means is that we can’t trade anyone in addition to the fact that we’re not developing anyone.
How it’s gotten so bad guys like Quickley and Obi are shooting worse because they know any missed shot ends their night. How can anyone develop when you get yanked for any mistake regardless of your impact on the game or how the starter is impacting the game. Obi & quickley were both plus 10 last night. Everyone trashes their games, points out what they can’t do but the team outscored the other team by 10 points when they were playing. You can’t just say they were on the floor when someone else got hot orit was against the second team because they doesn’t matter at all. They didn’t hurt you because you built a lead. The lead is all that matters. They could go 0 for 100 and if they add to the lead it wouldn’t matter at all.
Randle could score 100 points but if he is a minus he didn’t help at all.
Winning isn’t about looking good, playing hard or hitting your shots. It’s about outscoring the other team. Until a coach figures that out he doesn’t even know WTF he’s trying to do and it’s now a proven fact that thibs doesn’t recognize plus minus as relevant.
Checkmate!
I bet there hasn’t been one game in 2 years where Randle has made few mistakes than Obi & I wouldn’t be shocked if he made then in fewer minutes than Obi.
I’ve watched every game for years, start to finish except for maybe half a dozen when I simply couldn’t stand to watch thibs dig that giant character building hold with the first unit and asking the bench to fill it in 10 minutes.
The problem has been that you can’t really watch the bench unless you watch the starters too. The last two games I turned it off a few minutes into the third. This is getting to the point where it’s not just insulting me but you’re asking me to watch an idiot abuse a bunch of kids who are trying to get their careers started.
I don’t watch basketball to watch my team ground into dust and treated like crap while we work on a game plan I can’t even pretend to explain let alone defend. I can go to a jail and watch the inmates if I want to watch people suffer.
I know everyone in the NBA loves watching the Knicks suffer and look like fools. I don’t and I’m not going to keep doing it.
Dolan needs to stop listening to the words coming out of thibs mouth or any reruns of last year. He needs to stop looking for people who think they’re reinventing basketball or that effort overcomes talent. Look at the friggin games, look at the patterns in those games and the fact that Thibs doesn’t even seem to notice and react to them.
Look at the f’in record and faces of the players.
Thibs is not smarter than everyone else on the planet and that shouldn’t even be a concept we consider.
Don’t trade any players while Thibs is making them all look like crap.
Get rid of him, promote Bryant GTF out of the decision making process and let the team you hired make decisions.
What he said
Seems Randle is bad for team chemistry and players are walking on eggshells, thumbs down meant I’m outta here.