[Merged] Kristaps Porzingis is Going to Become a Perennial All-Star

[Laborant]

You know he's 22 and first option on offense and plays decent defense?! This is the thing about big sports in US: if you tell the truth and it doesn't show you in good light, then you get responses like "soft mother pucker"! You would rather hear him say anything else but the truth. What is so bad about telling the truth? It's not like he's not giving all he can?! He's doing his best! Ok, we can dispute if in those circumstances his best is 90-100% effort, but no less than 90 imho.

[spree#8]

Nothing wrong with KP telling the truth. Nothing wrong with motivating your best player to work until he is able to give you 36 minutes every night for 80 nights a regular season either. That is where I want to get him to.

[Ari_Ingus]

Nothing wrong with KP telling the truth. Nothing wrong with motivating your best player to work until he is able to give you 36 minutes every night for 80 nights a regular season either. That is where I want to get him to.

i`m sure he knows it without our help and also he is not that kind of person who needs motivation from outside

[spree#8]

i`m sure he knows it without our help and also he is not that kind of person who needs motivation from outside

Obviously I'm not talking about us. The Knicks player development coaches have to get him to be able to be our best player for 36 minutes or more every game. This thread is about what KP does well and what he has to improve upon.

[taowave]

He's not a soft mother pucker because he tells the truth..

Guy can't post up Patty Mills,gets manhandled by G Nob and hits the deck when the wind blows his way...

And FWIW, I never heard any superstar tell the world how dam tired his legs are.

You know he's 22 and first option on offense and plays decent defense?! This is the thing about big sports in US: if you tell the truth and it doesn't show you in good light, then you get responses like "soft mother pucker"! You would rather hear him say anything else but the truth. What is so bad about telling the truth? It's not like he's not giving all he can?! He's doing his best! Ok, we can dispute if in those circumstances his best is 90-100% effort, but no less than 90 imho.

[H20Knick]

Enough is enough. A whopping whole week into the season, certain people were already ready to call me out. "Still think KP isn't the best player on a championship team" "Kristaps Porzingis is an ALPHA"... and AGAIN, 2 months into the season, KP is already "tired" and "mentally drained". Now he's supposed to the man and he's complaining that Tim Hardaway Jr isn't around to help him. Kristaps Porzingis is a good player. Worth keeping and a find second fiddle. The Bradley Beal to your John Wall if you will. But the dude isn't the best player on a championship team. He rebounds like shit. He doesn't pass. He shies away from contact and/or just flops.

So to make this easier for you, I decided to go ahead and pull together some year 3 stats, now that KP has nearly half a season under his belt. I took minutes per game, usage %, effective FG%, PPG, rebounds per game, assists per game, player efficiency rating, defensive win shares, defensive box plus minus, and value over replacement player for KP as well as 6 other guys who were the best player on a championship team (highlighted in bold). These guys span different eras and different positions but they were all THAT guy who brought a title home. To add to this, I threw in some guys that shared KP's position who were studs. Amare, Bosh, Love. I threw in some of his best contemporaries as well. Davis. Towns. Giannis. And I also threw in the guy who he learned from. The guy who i've always said he plays just like. The guy you all said was never good enough to lead a championship because he didnt shoot as good of a percentage as his peers (see KP's percentage compared to his peers...), who didn't pass like his peers (see KP's usage% compared to his assists per game), who didn't defend like his peers (blocking shots aint defense ya know), who didn't lead like his peers (who blames a loss on fatigue and not having his inferior sidekick around?).



Next, I performed a simple principal component analysis. For those of you who don't regularly work with stats, basically you analyze the variance between samples. In this case our samples are players. Each statistical category is analyzed against each other statistical category to determine covariance (which stats trend together or trend oppositely in a reproducible fashion). The output is a list of uncorrelated variables. Not the individual stats you started with, but vectoral representations of the variance within the data set. We describe this variance in terms of principal component. Principal component 1 describes the majority of the variance. In many cases, people exclude principal component 1 because it usually carries most of the "noise" within a dataset. In this case, PC1 is going to bear the brunt of using players from different positions and different eras. We can plot the principal components against each other. Simply. Points that are nearby are similar. Points that are far apart are the same . I highlighted KP in blue. The champions in green. The nonchampions in black. I immediately noticed that the champions lined up quite nicely along principal component 2. If principal component 1 is noise, we can call principal component 2: The Champions Component. Guys who are champions cluster together on this axis. No matter what position you play, what era you played in, what the pace was, how good the competition was, you are very similar along pc2, whereas the guys who didn't win it all or haven't won it all yet are not near you. It's amazing how the data works out. Note: ALL i fed this analysis was the data you see above.



As you can see here, Kristaps Porzingis deviates from the champions component more than anyone else on this entire fucking plot. The closest person to him is MELO. (Shocker.). And Melo on year 3 was on the right trajectory, which is why we gave up the damn farm for him in the first place.

We can look at a 3D PCA to get a feel how the 3rd principal component contributes to the variance



So yes. Kristaps Porzingis is a fucking unicorn. He's unlike anyone on the list. He segregates from the dataset like a mythical creature never seen before. But that doesn't mean he's carrying us to a championship. It doesn't mean he's an alpha. And it indicates that he isn't like the best player on recent championship teams at the same point in their careers. So i'm not going to sit here and act like the knicks are even 30% of the way through a rebuild. It's going to take multiple big time draft picks and/or free agency moves (which historically have NEVER gone in the knicks favor) in order to win a title. If youd rather worship the unicorn than try to build a contender, so be it. But i'm not building my damn team around Kristaps Porzingis. If the BPA available is a 4, KP will learn to play the 5 or he can bring me back talent and picks.

[Koopa Troopa]

Jesus ****ing Christ.

If anyone tries to argue against that Cube with Dots on it, you better bring an Octahedron or at least a Pyramid with dots on it otherwise I dont wanna hear none of it.

[dcapodic]

Enough is enough. A whopping whole week into the season, certain people were already ready to call me out. "Still think KP isn't the best player on a championship team" "Kristaps Porzingis is an ALPHA"... and AGAIN, 2 months into the season, KP is already "tired" and "mentally drained". Now he's supposed to the man and he's complaining that Tim Hardaway Jr isn't around to help him. Kristaps Porzingis is a good player. Worth keeping and a find second fiddle. The Bradley Beal to your John Wall if you will. But the dude isn't the best player on a championship team. He rebounds like shit. He doesn't pass. He shies away from contact and/or just flops.

So to make this easier for you, I decided to go ahead and pull together some year 3 stats, now that KP has nearly half a season under his belt. I took minutes per game, usage %, effective FG%, PPG, rebounds per game, assists per game, player efficiency rating, defensive win shares, defensive box plus minus, and value over replacement player for KP as well as 6 other guys who were the best player on a championship team (highlighted in bold). These guys span different eras and different positions but they were all THAT guy who brought a title home. To add to this, I threw in some guys that shared KP's position who were studs. Amare, Bosh, Love. I threw in some of his best contemporaries as well. Davis. Towns. Giannis. And I also threw in the guy who he learned from. The guy who i've always said he plays just like. The guy you all said was never good enough to lead a championship because he didnt shoot as good of a percentage as his peers (see KP's percentage compared to his peers...), who didn't pass like his peers (see KP's usage% compared to his assists per game), who didn't defend like his peers (blocking shots aint defense ya know), who didn't lead like his peers (who blames a loss on fatigue and not having his inferior sidekick around?).



Next, I performed a simple principal component analysis. For those of you who don't regularly work with stats, basically you analyze the variance between samples. In this case our samples are players. Each statistical category is analyzed against each other statistical category to determine covariance (which stats trend together or trend oppositely in a reproducible fashion). The output is a list of uncorrelated variables. Not the individual stats you started with, but vectoral representations of the variance within the data set. We describe this variance in terms of principal component. Principal component 1 describes the majority of the variance. In many cases, people exclude principal component 1 because it usually carries most of the "noise" within a dataset. In this case, PC1 is going to bear the brunt of using players from different positions and different eras. We can plot the principal components against each other. Simply. Points that are nearby are similar. Points that are far apart are the same . I highlighted KP in blue. The champions in green. The nonchampions in black. I immediately noticed that the champions lined up quite nicely along principal component 2. If principal component 1 is noise, we can call principal component 2: The Champions Component. Guys who are champions cluster together on this axis. No matter what position you play, what era you played in, what the pace was, how good the competition was, you are very similar along pc2, whereas the guys who didn't win it all or haven't won it all yet are not near you. It's amazing how the data works out. Note: ALL i fed this analysis was the data you see above.



As you can see here, Kristaps Porzingis deviates from the champions component more than anyone else on this entire fucking plot. The closest person to him is MELO. (Shocker.). And Melo on year 3 was on the right trajectory, which is why we gave up the damn farm for him in the first place.

We can look at a 3D PCA to get a feel how the 3rd principal component contributes to the variance



So yes. Kristaps Porzingis is a fucking unicorn. He's unlike anyone on the list. He segregates from the dataset like a mythical creature never seen before. But that doesn't mean he's carrying us to a championship. It doesn't mean he's an alpha. And it indicates that he isn't like the best player on recent championship teams at the same point in their careers. So i'm not going to sit here and act like the knicks are even 30% of the way through a rebuild. It's going to take multiple big time draft picks and/or free agency moves (which historically have NEVER gone in the knicks favor) in order to win a title. If youd rather worship the unicorn than try to build a contender, so be it. But i'm not building my damn team around Kristaps Porzingis. If the BPA available is a 4, KP will learn to play the 5 or he can bring me back talent and picks.

....and this is why H2OKnick cannot take extended leaves from the board! This is the kind of stuff that baseball teams are now using to run their organizations. I am not sure how much of a dent "real" stats have made in the NBA but it probably is not nearly as much as they should.

We tend to comment about guys like KP, praising during a good stretch and killing during a bad one but it is all anecdotal type evidence. In other words, which way is the wind blowing at any particular time.

I like some hard facts when I can get them. I get that stats don't mean everything, but gather them over a period of time and take into account some variances as H2O has tried to do and they get interesting.

[dcapodic]

Do we not put enough importance on this (just one of many articles about his condition):

https://www.postingandtoasting.com/2016 ... ith-anemia

Depending upon how bad his varies, it can be a real game changer. They started chatting about the "I'm tired" comments on the Michael Kaye show today and Alan Hahn reminded them of his condition. I hope the Knicks remember.

I can't dog a guy, especially if he has something ailing him and there is nothing he can do about it but that should effect only his level of play, not his attitude or his comments. If he is a leader, he cannot say he is tired like that, just not a good thing to do no matter how you frame it. Also, this comment:

The mental part doesn’t help at all. When it’s mentally tough, you don’t have it in you.

I don't like dogging a guy for an off the cuff comment, especially when English is like his third language but he totally twisted this one around. Actually, when you are tired or fatigued for any reason, all you have in you is your mental approach and strength, not the other way around. It's that toughness that gets you through the difficult stretches.

[big_j_NY]

Enough is enough. A whopping whole week into the season, certain people were already ready to call me out. "Still think KP isn't the best player on a championship team" "Kristaps Porzingis is an ALPHA"... and AGAIN, 2 months into the season, KP is already "tired" and "mentally drained". Now he's supposed to the man and he's complaining that Tim Hardaway Jr isn't around to help him. Kristaps Porzingis is a good player. Worth keeping and a find second fiddle. The Bradley Beal to your John Wall if you will. But the dude isn't the best player on a championship team. He rebounds like shit. He doesn't pass. He shies away from contact and/or just flops.

So to make this easier for you, I decided to go ahead and pull together some year 3 stats, now that KP has nearly half a season under his belt. I took minutes per game, usage %, effective FG%, PPG, rebounds per game, assists per game, player efficiency rating, defensive win shares, defensive box plus minus, and value over replacement player for KP as well as 6 other guys who were the best player on a championship team (highlighted in bold). These guys span different eras and different positions but they were all THAT guy who brought a title home. To add to this, I threw in some guys that shared KP's position who were studs. Amare, Bosh, Love. I threw in some of his best contemporaries as well. Davis. Towns. Giannis. And I also threw in the guy who he learned from. The guy who i've always said he plays just like. The guy you all said was never good enough to lead a championship because he didnt shoot as good of a percentage as his peers (see KP's percentage compared to his peers...), who didn't pass like his peers (see KP's usage% compared to his assists per game), who didn't defend like his peers (blocking shots aint defense ya know), who didn't lead like his peers (who blames a loss on fatigue and not having his inferior sidekick around?).



Next, I performed a simple principal component analysis. For those of you who don't regularly work with stats, basically you analyze the variance between samples. In this case our samples are players. Each statistical category is analyzed against each other statistical category to determine covariance (which stats trend together or trend oppositely in a reproducible fashion). The output is a list of uncorrelated variables. Not the individual stats you started with, but vectoral representations of the variance within the data set. We describe this variance in terms of principal component. Principal component 1 describes the majority of the variance. In many cases, people exclude principal component 1 because it usually carries most of the "noise" within a dataset. In this case, PC1 is going to bear the brunt of using players from different positions and different eras. We can plot the principal components against each other. Simply. Points that are nearby are similar. Points that are far apart are the same . I highlighted KP in blue. The champions in green. The nonchampions in black. I immediately noticed that the champions lined up quite nicely along principal component 2. If principal component 1 is noise, we can call principal component 2: The Champions Component. Guys who are champions cluster together on this axis. No matter what position you play, what era you played in, what the pace was, how good the competition was, you are very similar along pc2, whereas the guys who didn't win it all or haven't won it all yet are not near you. It's amazing how the data works out. Note: ALL i fed this analysis was the data you see above.



As you can see here, Kristaps Porzingis deviates from the champions component more than anyone else on this entire fucking plot. The closest person to him is MELO. (Shocker.). And Melo on year 3 was on the right trajectory, which is why we gave up the damn farm for him in the first place.

We can look at a 3D PCA to get a feel how the 3rd principal component contributes to the variance



So yes. Kristaps Porzingis is a fucking unicorn. He's unlike anyone on the list. He segregates from the dataset like a mythical creature never seen before. But that doesn't mean he's carrying us to a championship. It doesn't mean he's an alpha. And it indicates that he isn't like the best player on recent championship teams at the same point in their careers. So i'm not going to sit here and act like the knicks are even 30% of the way through a rebuild. It's going to take multiple big time draft picks and/or free agency moves (which historically have NEVER gone in the knicks favor) in order to win a title. If youd rather worship the unicorn than try to build a contender, so be it. But i'm not building my damn team around Kristaps Porzingis. If the BPA available is a 4, KP will learn to play the 5 or he can bring me back talent and picks.

[StevoStarks]

I think I know what you guys are getting at. Trade him for Dwight Howard and Marvin Williams, get Steve Francis out of retirement and max him out and then see if we can somehow get Pitino to coach and we're back in business.

[taowave]

So thats what H2o has been working on the last 2 months..

Excellent work my friend..

[PistolPete]

Tired? Tired of what? I don't think I've ever heard an NBA player complain about being tired before the All-Star break.


Only in New York.

[taowave]

Could you imagine MJ,Kobe,Ewing or Bird making those statements???
Soft..

That's not a number one option talking..He's no Batman..He's a Robin

Tired? Tired of what? I don't think I've ever heard an NBA player complain about being tired before the All-Star break.


Only in New York.

[H20Knick]

Can you imagine the backlash if Melo or Amare ever said that? Even Stephon Marbury?

and the dude is 22. How are you tired at 22. You arent a rookie. You know what to expect. Maybe you shouldn't have spent the summer playing for Latvia...

But he's anemic? Well we aren't going to cure that. So it doesnt exactly make me feel better about our prospects with him being the star attraction

[big_j_NY]

I'm waiting for shake's response to H20's post, primarily.............considering shake's the one that made the premature "KP is an alpha" statement at the beginning of the season that brought about "a cult following" within the site

[NYGM]

Let's see how KP finish the season..

[washingtonparkjones]

Jesus ****ing Christ.

If anyone tries to argue against that Cube with Dots on it, you better bring an Octahedron or at least a Pyramid with dots on it otherwise I dont wanna hear none of it.

lol. tears

[taowave]

If KP has anemia and suffers from it,I want to retract what I said and humbly apologise.

Kristaps Porzingis was diagnosed with anemia eight years ago when he was a Latvian teenager playing professionally in Spain. Porzingis, the 22-year-old Knicks star, reportedly takes iron pills to treat the condition now -- anemia is when an individual has decreased hemoglobin, the component of a red blood cell that transports oxygen -- but he admitted to being "tired" after Wednesday's loss to Washington, with three months still left in the regular season.

According to Dr. Lewis Maharam, a New York City sports medicine physician who has treated elite athletes in many sports, including basketball, depending upon how severe the anemia is with any one individual, if you're competing at an NBA level with that kind of condition, you could jeopardize your health further if you are consistently engaging in strenuous exercise and training.


"If your red blood cells are low enough, it can cause the heart to beat harder in order to get the muscles the amount of oxygen that they're demanding," said Maharam. "There's a chance for abnormal heart rhythm because your heart is working so hard. But it depends upon the degree of the anemia."

"Someone can be anemic because of a hereditary condition," said Maharam. "Or there can be a disease process or a reflection of disease process -- meaning you could have a problem in the marrow with the making red blood cells, or you could have an ulcer or colitis causing internal bleeding."

Maharam said the most common condition associated with anemia is exercise-induced asthma (EIA) -- a result of strenuous aerobic or cardio training and exercise. "Exercise causes sub-clinical asthma," says Maharam, who adds that EIA can be treated by using an inhaler.

Sometimes a change in diet can affect an individual who has anemia -- eating soy products, for example, prevents the absorption of iron into the bloodstream if you're taking iron pills. Or, someone taking iron pills may need to change the dosage to address the problem.

[nazrmohamed]

Well folks, we learned allot just there and so have I. In the past, I've read H20 post these things and then tell us that this is the reason we should trade KP for a lottery pick, glad he didn't go there this time.

Take that analysis for what it's worth but for me it said that we need more prospects. And I've been saying it all year. We need to be drafting in an area where KP might have to sweat his position as franchise player. And there are guys who can do it. Doesn't have to be a 4 that pages him to 5 like H20 said, could be any position but I do feel we need more than simply.......we're awesome, this is how we do things and this here draft pick just fits in seamlessly.

The guy I draft might change our system if it were up to me. Picture this. The 76rs have picked in the lottery for 6 consecutive years. We can do 3 folks, it won't kill you and if that makes KP upset then he should've led us away from that. What I will say in his defense is before anyone talks about what other stars would say......unless other stars are used to EXACTLY the same scenario we place on our stars then I don't really care. Ny fans seemingly enjoy this level of underdogism. It's like we want LeBron type players but we want them do win titles in a scenario like Lebrron had to do it the first time around. Always this dynamic of 1 superstar with role players.

I'm tired of overachieving
I'm tired of underachieving
I just want to achieve

I want to build a team who on paper should win and then goes out and does so. And when I look around, again it's multiple all-star caliber players.

Today KP is a soft bum, tomorrow he scores 28 and he's back, then he sucks, then he's back. You're doing it. Building a scapegoat. That built in sense that there alwways has to be one singular focal reason you win or lose. And I've stopped believing that. Believing that will make you settle for drafting a fit, rather than BPA. It'll have you sign role players because you believe that's all you need to add.

I believe H2O is hard on KP but I agree with his end result, which is basically that we're not done rebuilding.