With Jamal out, it looks like this team is lacking some offense. After a while Marbury will get burnt out trying to be the only scorer. We need another go to guy with Jamal out. Houston looks like he is a different player and many of the other players on our team are not scorers.
Our defense will not get much better than it is. We need a better coach for sure. Mike Malone should take over. Some sort of production from our small forward spot would be nice too.
<div class="quote_poster">Quoting mrj18:</div><div class="quote_post">What we really need is a better coach, better GM, and most importantly better <u>defense</u>.</div> A GM who didn't ruin our future by trading for Marbury and giving max contracts to Nazr and Tim Thomas, yeah.
Why do you guys say that the coaches are bad. Last year Phoenix were playin bad and their coach was Mike D'Antoni. This year the Steve Nash came and the Suns are playing incredible and they have the same coach as last year. coachs are not the problem usually. It's usually team chemistry. Knicks aren't losing because of their coach but because of their team chemistry. When they get the righit players you will see that the coach wasn't the problem. EDIT: Please use better grammar. - Knicks Analyst
<div class="quote_poster">Quoting NbaBaller:</div><div class="quote_post">Why do you guys say that the coaches are bad. Last year Phoenix were playin bad and their coach was Mike D'Antoni. This year the Steve Nash came and the Suns are playing incredible and they have the same coach as last year. coachs are not the problem usually. It's usually team chemistry. Knicks aren't losing because of their coach but because of their team chemistry. When they get the righit players you will see that the coach wasn't the problem. </div> This is the kind of thing that bothers me. How many Knicks games have you watched this year? The coaching has been horrible, I've said it, mrj18 has said it, Tribute To H20 has said it, the media has put it out there once or twice. His coaching has been terrible, and it is a big part of the problem for New York now. I don't think we'd be saying this had we hired Fratello in the first place, but rather Isiah had to go with his safe pick in Wilkens which we see now as very stupid. And then you say it's a matter of team chemistry, well sorry to tell you this but a coach's job is to help to build or create a thing called 'chemistry'. Granted the Knicks coaching spot is not an easy assignment, Lenny is failing.
I agree with MJ18, the Knicks Defense has been awful. They cant stop anybody in the transition game. It is almost to the point you can easily predict which teams will garner an abundance of points in the opencourt against this Knick defense. And that is a problem the Knicks are going to continue to struggle with all season. A Crawford return will help the offense pickup. But the Knicks still will stink on the defensive side. The Knicks dont really have the parts to be successful on the team defense aspect. Marbury tries sometimes, but he really isnt that good, McInnis got into the lane against him easily yesterday. Allan Houston has always been a liabity on D and running around on injured legs makes him even worst. He got beat up the floor by every wing player on the Cavs, consistently. The Knicks best defensive perimeter player maybe Trevor Ariza & even he isnt that good in on the ball defense. The frontcourt tries to be solid in all the vall defense with Kurt Thomas & Jerome Williams. But those guys arent really help defenders & definately dont block any shots to prevent teams from penetrating the lanes all day. So the Knicks are going to continue to struggle on the defensive end. And it really hurts right now cause it seems like with no defense & Crawford not there to provide offensive help,if Marbury doesnt go for 35-40 the Knicks wont win. And I dont think the Knicks want to get Marbury back into the mode where he feels he needs to score 50 every night cause once Crawford comes back it will hurt. Marbury sometimes when he gets into that mind frame doesnt know when to revert back into the playmaker, even when he has more offensive options available to him, he still ties to carry all of the scoring load. I think the thing that made him successful early this season, is because he was starting to find the happy medium bettween scoring & making others better. So you want him to continue in that mindset, making him go back to being the dominate scorer again inorder to win, is setting him as well as the Knicks back imo.
Yes the Knicks arent a good defensive team but we all knew that they would have a hard time playing defense this season. This is nothing new. What can we do to impove the defense? Make some trades? Get a new coach? We dont have any pieces to trade until the next season. But we can get a new coach that will teach this team to play defense. The real problem for the recent slide is injuries. We dont have all of our offensive players. The injuries and lack of offense is exposing how bad our defense really is. But our defense has never been good on a consistent basis this entire season. The problem is that we dont have the offense to offset our weak defense. Teams dont usually score alot of transition points because we're able to score and limit their chances to get fast break points. The few times they do get out in the open court were able to stop them. Since we're having trouble scoring were giving up more opportunities to score in the open court. Teams dont usually shoot poorly against us but since we're able to score as well we can keep up with them it didnt matter that our defense was bad. Our bad defense isnt a recent development. It's not something that just started happening. It's always been there but because of our offense it wasnt something that was readily apparent. The best moves we can make are to fire Lenny and bring in Jeff Byzdelic, wait for all of our guys to be healthy, think really hard about that Wally deal and sit tight. Those are the best options we have.
