To read more thoughts from Jason on the Knicks, continue to check here or on his site, http://www.malajas.com/knicks.
As the Knicks wrapped up their series, losing 4-1 to the Miami Heat, I learned three things about myself this season.
First, despite what I say, I cannot be impartial with teams that I
have liked in my past. The Knicks are one of those teams and I went
through all the highs and lows of the season with them. I enjoyed the
team when they were at the peak of Linsanity and felt terrible when we
all knew D'Antoni was on his way out. It was fun watching a team I used
to like do well again, even if they were a quick out from the
playoffs. Now if only the Mets could advance to the World Series, I
would probably lift my three year ban.
Second, being an analyst is really hard. Not that I would ever call
myslf a basketball analyst, but putting your picks out there can be a
tough proposition. Unless you are the second coming of Nostradamus, you
are most likely going to be wrong a good percentage of the time. So
the real trick is fooling the reader into ignoring your previous
incorrect prediction with some kind of statistic or a few witty
comments. Did you know the Knicks set the consecutive playoff losses
record at 13 games, dating back to 2001? Also, Carmelo Anthony now has a
career playoff record of 16-36. That is a .308 win percentage, making
him the worst out of any player with at least 50 games played. I
certainly hope that there will be more wins next year, and less marks of
futility.
Lastly, it is a good time to be a Knicks fan. I am actually looking
forward to next year. There are a few things the Knicks need to work
on. Free throws is one area. They were 22nd in the league this year,
which is kind of amazing considering they seem like they should be a
good shooting team. In addition, they need to work on closing out the
first half and coming out strong in the 3rd quarter. For a fan, this
was the most agonizing part of watching them this season. This was
usually the time when teams would come back and even the score or pull
away if they were already leading, as Miami did in all four games they
won in this series. I think these are motivational and focus issues
which can be fixed. I will discuss the returning players in a later
post, but it seems like they will have a decent roster. Let us hope
management can fill some key holes.
BACK TO THE NBA:
Despite the Knicks being bounced out of the playoffs, I am excited to
see the rest of it and see who will come out on top. However, the
first round has not been as exciting as I had anticipated. Besides the
Memphis-Clippers match up, there has not been that many battles. One odd
thing I noticed is that no series went 2-2. There were two sweeps from
OKC and the Spurs, Miami and Indiana won 4-1, and all the losing teams
in had to win the last game to make the series 3-2. We could
potentially not have any game 7s in the first round of the playoffs this
year. I wonder if that has ever happened before. One thing that
always amazes me is the amount of weird stats that you will be shown
throughout any game you watch. I hope that if it does end up that there
no game 7s this first round, a statistic comes up to tell me if this is
the first time that has happened or the last time it happened. I
supposed it is not that hard to find it if I muster some initiative. We
only started having best of 7 series in the first round in 2003.
Whether or not there is a first round game 7, the rest of the playoffs
should be more interesting and I expect it to be more intense.
No comments:
Post a Comment