Short White Boy

This is part II of an extremely belated analysis of my fantasy draft which took place right before the season started.  Thus, it’s a split-personality thang where I first write what I think my thoughts were back then (but I have a notoriously awful memory), followed up by how unbelievably right or wrong I was.  As mentioned before, players with a (K) next to their name were Keepers and thus won’t be discussed for the most part since they should all be good picks.

Many of you Knick fans might not care about fantasy, so feel free to ignore this posting.  But my fantasy clan asked me several times to do my yearly analysis and I kept putting it off.  I was just gonna post it on our site, but the message board sucked.  And, yes, we’re already past the season’s halfway point, so it may be pretty freakin’ odd to analyze a fantasy draft several months later since, well, everyone’s got at least two buttloads of extra hindsight now. Thus, in an attempt to rectify that, much like a plastic surgery reality tv [...]

The penultimate All-Star results were announced today and Amar’e Stoudemire has leapfrogged past Kevin Garnett to snag the second starting forward spot on the Eastern Conference All-Star squad.   However, you know that the Bostonites are gonna rally and try to pack the polls with more votes so KG can regain his lead (one can, after all, vote again every day), so New Yorkers need to double their efforts to ensure that our MVP candidate doesn’t get beaten out by a guy who’s been injured and missed a chunk of the season already.

Last night ESPN.com posted an update on the Carmelo Anthony trade talks, and between that and an article yesterday stating that Donnie Walsh plans on resigning Wilson Chandler, Knick fans (and some writers) clearly don’t understand that due to the salary cap, we can’t keep Chandler, Gallo and others, PLUS add Melo.  The confusion lies in a misunderstanding of what’s known as “Bird Rights” (named after Larry Bird), which allows a team to go over the salary cap to sign their own free agents.  Many, including pathetically the New York Post, have stated that then the Knicks could just sign [...]

With the dawn of a new year, a new decade, and a new Knicks team that actually occasionally wins, I thought it’d be a nice time to rank all the teams in the league.  I last did it in the preseason, so those are the Previous Ranks that you see in parentheses next to the current rank.  So I’ll repeat my same explanation of the rankings from then:   This isn’t who will be strongest at the end of the season or who will have the best regular season.  This measures how strong each team is right NOW.  If a [...]

New York Knick Landry Fields may have been losing minutes lately, but he just won the NBA’s Eastern Conference Rookie Of The Month award for December. It’s unclear if his playing time has decreased because he’s having issues or if it’s just because the bench players (Toney Douglas, Shawne Williams & Bill Walker) have improved. ———- Speaking of awards, New Yorkers should be ashamed because the second round of All-Star votes have been tallied, and other cities are clearly voting more for their players than we’ve been doing. We may be chanting MVP every time Amar’e Stoudmire shoots free throws, [...]

In an up-and-down game Sunday afternoon, the New York Knicks finally pulled it together to beat the Indiana Pacers, 98-92.  While the Pacers haven’t been much of a defensive force the last few years, this year they keep their opponents shooting at the league’s fourth worst percentage.  So with the Knicks leading the NBA in scoring, it was a case of the unstoppable object hitting the immovable wall, and who would give. Oddly, since teams often start sluggishly in afternoon games (with the Knicks particularly egregious in this regard at home), they both came out firing.  Even odder, one would [...]

It seems like the New York Knicks and many writers feel like the team took a step forward by actually turning their rematch against the Miami Heat into a competitive game.  Yes, it’s better than being whupped by 437 points like they were in their first meeting in New York, but doesn’t everyone say how moral victories don’t count in sports?  Why then do the Knicks get a pass?  Particularly when, if they hadn’t stunk it up so poorly in the first half and got behind by 24 points, they might have actually won easily.  Although Josh Sage is usually [...]

Knicks’ center Timofey Mozgov apparently blogs, and via a translation we can see that he’s kept an amazingly positive attitude despite barely playing, all while spending extra time working on his game.  In other words, he’s the Anti-Darko.  It’s well worth a read in full because he talks about a lot of other things too, but here are some intriguing highlights: After the Cleveland game where I got another DNP – Coach’s decision, I have read – yet another time – that Mozgov is losing is losing the trust of the coach. I’ll say this: on my part there’s no [...]

With the news that Larry Brown has decided to leave the Charlotte Bobcats, it’s time to check out what other coaches could be ousted during the remainder of the season.  Back in mid-September we ran our views on which coaches were relatively safe and which were not.  Shortly after publishing it, one of our top picks to get fired, Don Nelson, unsurprisingly was let go.  While we put Larry Brown under 95% Bulletproof, we hadn’t thought of his very obvious past in which he always gets frustrated and leaves a job.  The ‘Cats have said that Brown’s departure was a [...]