The Knicks (excluding tonight) since February 1st are 17th in offensive rating and 17th in defensive rating!

As the season has progressed the Knicks have STEADILY fallen down the leaderboard of best performing offenses in the league while maintaining an inconsistently average defense throughout the entire season.

What's changed? Where do we go from here? What does it mean?

I'm going to keep the stats to a minimum for everything except team stats as you all probably saw my post about the efficacy of each grouping of players and how they affect the lineups that they're a part of.

Earlier on this year, KAT was used primarily as a high post initiator taking advantage and leveraging his spacing into open cuts for guys like OG and Josh. As the season has dragged on, alignments have shifted slightly to make Josh the guy who needs to beat you from three. This has hamstrung KAT quite a bit as there's years of evidence of his struggles to reliably self create offense when guarded by opposing forwards.

We have 87 possessions on the season across just a shade under 55 games playing a full 5 out lineup with Deuce replacing Josh with the usual starters. The lack of creativity and ingenuity on offense has made us very one dimensional and locked into "Jalen score on someone or we get blown out."

Luckily for us, Jalen Brunson is a phenomenal basketball player and normally scores the ball a whole lot. On the flip side of this occasion we go through extended lulls where we don't have any ability to reliably generate open looks from three.

That high powered starting lineup that propelled us to a league best offense at the start of the year has fallen down to 63rd percentile on that end at 119.4 offensive rating.

On the defensive side of the ball they're a horrendous 55th percentile allowing 115 points per 100 possessions. Opposing teams are shooting a 34th percentile 56.3 EFG against the lineup.

At what point do you expect to see a change? In the 7 games since Jalen got hurt, the Deuce starting lineup has overtaken all other 5 man lineups we have in total possessions completely inexplicably. The over reliance on a lineup that's gotten progressively worse as the year has progressed is problematic for a multitude of reasons.

The biggest of these reasons might be the under reliance on the three point ball. The Knicks are 28th in three point attempt rate this season. They simply cannot generate enough quality looks for their best shooters so cutting and driving lanes progressively closing up as teams sell out more and more for Josh to beat them grind our offense to a halt entirely.

I'm not even going to get into the thousand of issues we have on the defensive side of the ball, you guys watch the games.

Whenever I make these sorta posts people just assume I'm talking about the game directly in front of us. Personally I don't really even care if they end up winning this game in San Antonio. The trends and overreliance on lineups that are fundamentally just not great will be hugely problematic in a playoff setting! As I type this, the auto generated 2k character hits another 3 threes, go figure.

TLDR: Whether or not you think this is the correct coach of the team, you need to be worried about the same trends rearing their heads reliably over 75% of a season with no sign of slowing down.