 What's the word y'all? My favorite time of the day is sitting down here after a full slate of games to talk about things I saw. I wanna say I appreciate y'all for the amount of love y'all showed on these videos since we've come back into the NBA season. I wanna remind you to leave a like and if you're new around here subscribe and we talking about basketball a lot. I don't wanna say daily, but it is a lot. I wanna open up today's episode by talking about the New York Knicks. Today they played against the Philadelphia 76ers on national television and the final score makes it seem like it was kinda close but in reality it was nowhere near close. They blew them boys out of the water. There was memes going around and said that Ben Simmons had never lost to the New York Knicks in his entire career and then the one game Ben Simmons doesn't play the 76ers get dominated by the Knicks. There's this thing that people believe that Bulls fans and Knicks fans must hate each other. If one is doing good the other must gotta talk trash and vice versa. I am not a part of that camp. I'm not gonna be mad at the Knicks for something that happened before I was even born. I'm not holding my father's grudges as an NBA fan. What are we in the medieval times? I don't care. And it's hard for me not to like the Knicks because they got their roles, Tom Thibodeau and Todd Gibson and those dudes are responsible for some of my best years as an NBA fan. So it's hard to watch them and be like, ah, I hate that they're successful. But I wanna talk about them because they're better this year than they were last year. Now I don't know if they're gonna have a better record because a lot of teams in the Eastern Conference are better like my Chicago Bulls, like the Charlotte Hornets, teams that were below them last year, but they are a better equipped team to do more noise when it comes to the playoffs. So let's talk about that. So y'all know the story. Last year, Tom Thibodeau gets the keys to the car and he turns the New York Knicks around. The New York Knicks had been one of the laughing stocks in the NBA and Julius Randall had to blossom. They had a bunch of these role players that were playing above contract and above value and they went on to be one of the four, five seats in the Eastern Conference. Boom, Tom Thibodeau coached it a year and people really questioned whether or not that year was a fluke because let's be honest, a lot of stuff happened last year for the Knicks to do with what they did. Not taken away from them, but there are some circumstances. The Raptors were playing in Tampa. The Hornets lost Gordon Hayward and did Lamello ball. At one point they were a four, five seat in the conference. The Pacers completely hated their coach and the Celtics had a lot of virus stuff going on last year. Now all of those combined and then you add the Knicks being an elite level defense and a decent offense, they were able to steal the number four seat. And then we got to the playoffs and you saw everything that happened. Trey Youngs and Madison Square Garden said, it's quiet in here, just in a crowd and a lot of people were questioning whether or not last year was a fluke because all four of those teams that I just mentioned had some type of, well I guess the Raptors aren't good right now, but three of the four teams that had something happen to tank their season are back and they're better than they were last year. But I believe that this New York Knicks team is more equipped because of some of the things they did this off season and the way they're playing offensively this year is a lot different. Now I know we're only a week into the season and we shouldn't be overreacting to some of the statistics, but I think this is a good base level to kind of see where the New York Knicks season is about to go. Last year, the New York Knicks offense was not great. They had one of the best offensive teams in the league and they had a guy that was blossoming to a star in Jules Randall closed out a lot of games, but they were 24th in the league when it came to like three point attempts and they were a bottom 10 offensive team when it comes to offensive rating. A lot of that last year has changed. One of the big things we saw when we got to the playoffs is that the Atlanta Hawks in the maze and job are focusing in on Jules Randall and daring anybody else on the team to do anything. And then that's when we saw Derrick Rose have a big time moment or two, but for the most part they didn't have a lot of shot creation, a lot of shot makers outside of Jules Randall and he had been strung thin at that point. This off season hits and well, they fixed some of those things. Evan48 got signed on the first day of free A&C and I recommend y'all go look at the replies of the tweets from woes when it was announced and see the sheer amount of people that saw their signing and was like, oh my God, overpay, Evan48 was just in Boston needin' to a damn thing and what are the nicks doing? They got all this money and they just brought everybody back and Evan48, yeah, and I immediately knew when they signed him that that was a good signing as far as pieces go on the team. But one thing I do understand is that in the year 2021 some of the contracts you see people sign are gonna look ridiculous, outrageous because of the name, we talk about $80 million, but you really think about it in 2021, that's just the price of players. If you're gonna be an above average starter in the year 2021, you're gonna be making between 15 to 20 million and sometimes even more. The reason I say that, the New York mix signed Evan48 for a year 78, I think it was exactly and people immediately on Twitter was like, yo, what are the nicks doing? What are they, I understand it. Sure, it might be slightly above what you think Evan48 was worth, but I'm telling you, it's not that bad. I might do that more often, by the way, to show old clips of me being right about something. I'll never show clips of me being wrong, but me being right, count it, I might do it often. Because again, once we got to the playoffs, they didn't have people that can create their own shot or even hit the shot when they aren't creating and now they added that. They got a guy in Kimball Walker who again just a few years ago was an NBA All-Star Starter. Now the first couple of games of Kimball Walker's career in New York haven't been stellar, but it's like whatever you get from Kimball Walker is a plus because that was a spot that you had basically no production from offensively because it was freaking Elfer Payton and you got him at what, $6 million a year. Now I told y'all that the New York nicks were 24th and three point attempts last year. Do you wanna take a wild guess where they stand throughout the first week or so of the NBA season? Now when it comes to attempts, they are tied for third. That is a crazy jump from last year. And we're just talking about attempts like Julius Randall has a shot the ball amazingly well the first couple of games of the season, but when it comes to sheer amount of attempts, they are up there and when it comes to accuracy, they're seventh. They're taking a crazy more amount of threes and hitting them at a higher rate and guess what? The defense so far this year hasn't been top five like last year, but it's been top eight. So you got a better shooting team with the same offensive like identity and that's a scary team. It just is. And the defensive scheme is pretty much the same. We're gonna take away all the easy buckets and we're gonna dare you to shoot and if you can shoot, good job. But we're not letting you do anything inside. And I'm gonna give a lot of love to Mitchell Robinson for today because Joel and B was questionable because of injuries going into it. And Mitchell Robinson saw that and kind of took advantage of it. Joel and B was basically playing for the New York Knicks tonight. So shout out to him. I'm very curious to see what Mitchell Robinson's market is going to be. Cause I've seen some people speculate that Mitchell Robinson won't get to resign, but he'll have a performance like this and you got to look at him and be like, they got to resign him. He's been pretty good without getting into foul trouble so far this season. The New York Knicks basketball team is solid. And that is gonna be the Chicago Bulls' first test against the New York Knicks. Can't wait Thursday night. I think it's like joke him Noah Day in Chicago or something like that. And I really wished that the Bulls did joke him Noah Day or festivities when we were going against Cleveland for obvious reasons. All right, but that was just one game of today that I wanted to go on in a little mini-rent about. We shall see how the rest of the season is. We had the Warriors going to OKC in OKC. And for a good majority of this game, OKC was doing a thing. They were hitting shots. At one point they were like eight, four, or 10 from three or something like that. Everybody was getting in on the fun. And they were basically triple double and triple team and Steph Curry. And then the other people around Steph Curry were hitting shots and that was the game and that was the comeback. And it's so funny how fans overreacted. And I'm not saying, yo, I just mean as in general, I'm counting all of us in that because I'm overreacted too. I mean, half of this channel is overreacting. It's just what we do. Before the season started, there was clips going around about Shay Gildes Alexander in his changed shot. And NBA fans, I don't want to say OKC fans specifically because there were a lot of NBA fans weighed in on the fact that Shay Gildes Alexander's shot is a little bit differently. And then he started off the NBA season. He's like, what, terribly? The first two games of the season, he was like 14 points and just shooting it bad and bad. And people are going back to that video, like, ah, OKC broke Shay. And then in the last two games, putting up 30 each. Now, I know he got his bag, so I can't say I feel sorry for a dude that just signed a max contract. But the boy is probably going to win 12 games this season because even a game like this where a little like they handed on the wraps is just like that. And the Warriors were back in it and won the game. It can't be good for a young player to endure that many losses. He's going to be the modern day Zach Levy. But then again, Shay Gildes Alexander had already been in a playoff series when he was with the Clippers and he was a part, if I'm not mistaken, he was a part of that big old comeback versus the Warriors when it was a 1A matchup. And I went to his bed that night and they woke up and they came back from like a 30 point deficit. So I guess he already has a little bit of playoff experience, but him being on really bad teams for the next four years or so people are going to start talking. Yeah, he can play, he can score, but he doesn't contribute to winning. Those are the type of things fans be doing, talking hands be doing. I didn't watch Rockets versus Maverick, sorry. But Lakers versus Spurs got very, very interesting. I want to start off on the Spurs because I do want to spend more time on the Lakers. I'm sorry Spurs fans, this is what it is. I made a vow to myself that I was going to watch more Spurs games and this was like one of my first sit down and completely watched. I keep my eyes open on a lot of different games every single night, but I kept my eyes dialled and on this one. And I've said this before, I don't know if it was necessarily on this channel on the podcast, how I really, really like Jakob Perto. And I believe he's one of the most underrated centers in the league. I even made a tweet while the game was going on, like him and Rashawn Holmes are battling for the most underrated. And people threw some names and had Robert Williams, Mitch Robinson after tonight, which are good names. The only reason I would say Jakob Hodel or Rashawn Holmes will be a little bit more underrated is they're playing for teams that don't get national TV time. So people legitimately just saw Mitch Robinson, D-Up, Joel and Bean. So more people have Mitch Robinson on the radar. The Celtics play a lot of nationally televised games. So they see that Mitch Robinson's abs in a double double with like four blocks or whatever it may be. Nobody, a casual NBA fan doesn't know the name, Jakob Perto. And I think they should man, defensively he has been good over the last couple of seasons like the advanced stats absolutely love him. And today you saw more of his offensive things so far this season. He's been better playing in like the negative space and he's been a better roller. And today he she had his career high 27 points. Now the biggest thing about Jakob Hodel has been his free throw shooting the entire season. And the team as a whole, I think Ms. Seven free throws in a row in the fourth quarter that would have won them this game. And I remember watching, it might've been their first to second game with a season I was listening to their broadcast and they were talking about how much of an improved free throw shooter Jakob Hodel was at the end of the last year they were saying he shot like 72% from the free throw line in the last X amount of games. And in the beginning of the season he was starting off on that same streak. And then today he got fouled a bunch it felt like in that fourth quarter and he only hit one in overtime. But a good game from him. Keldon Johnson had to get pretty much yanked because he didn't make a big enough impact for him to even be on the floor because he is an undersized four man and Doug McDermott had went out with an injury or whatever and his game revolves around getting to the basket. The Lakers are running big anyway. So Greg Popovich went with KdaBaseDop the goat if you don't know, then I can't fill you in. But then KdaBaseDop was doing stuff out of his character and I was like bro get a ball to somebody that's actually giving ball to Lonnie who's killing the game just anybody else other than you. I was super surprised to see that that is young was getting any PT because I kind of assume that he wouldn't play he was just gonna sit at home until he was eligible to be traded. He played three minutes, got two fouls and that was a wrap that was it from them. But does John take Murray? Oh my God. Listen, I have a friend and I say friend because we've talked to each other on the internet. His name is Foolish Bailey. He has a baseball channel that I completely recommend. Completely recommend for anybody that's trying to get back into baseball or just a baseball fan is Foolish Baseball than the second channel is Foolish Bailey. Before the baseball season started he created his own and I know this is gonna make sense in a second. He created his own advanced stat. And at the end of the year he went back to see if his advanced stats were accurate in the sense of trying to predict good hitters in baseball. Now the reason I'm saying that is because watching this game and watching John take Murray today I have decided to come up with my own advanced stat but I'm not actually gonna put the work here. I'm just gonna tell it to you. We need a field goal percentage or shooting percentage that subtracts the amount of misses that led to a second chance point. Does that make sense? So for today, Dejante Murray shot nine for 14. He's very rushed to Westbrook like tonight. Nine for, I'm sorry, 24. I wanna say like five of those, six of those misses ended up in Yacopoto's hands on the offensive glass and ended in a bucket. So should we count Dejante Murray as a miss? That's what my advanced stat is. Let's take away all the misses that led to second chance points. So now Dejante Murray's stat line looks a little bit better than the 37% from the field. He was really good tonight though. He was everywhere on the defensive side of the ball, passing lanes, just getting, creating havoc. And I really enjoyed watching the Spurs team and this will not be the last time I watched him. Let's talk about the Lakers side of things. LeBron James laid scratch because he had the injury the other day and I tweeted when LeBron went down an injury I kind of have the same kind of tweet reaction to anybody going down when Yocas went down I said the same injury, Anthony, same tweet. Anthony Davis went down at the same tweet basically saying, oh no. I hope he's okay. And after all of that, a day later there were a ton of fans, NBA fans, they were going at that tweet and just talking about how X player be faking injuries, talking about LeBron once his team is down. And I'm just like, why does LeBron get out of any, just anybody, not just LeBron, why does player X get out of faking an injury that's gonna hold them out the next game? Now when Anthony Davis went down you can make an argument that he needed a breather because he had already played 38 minutes at that point or whatever it was and he's maybe not in the complete shape since the beginning of the season. So let me hold my knee for two minutes and sit on this floor. But an injury that's gonna hold you out, nobody is faking that injury. Anyway, we saw a sort of Anthony Davis today which was amazing. Before the season started Anthony Davis said in some pre-season interviews they're like, hey, Russ Westberg, LeBron, LeBron, these are all players telling me that this is my team now. And in the first game of the season he showcased, hey, I could still be the dude that a lot of people wanted to build their franchise around and then he wasn't as good. But he has for the entire season I would say for most part been good. And today he was super sort of not having a LeBron James. And this was Russell Westbrook's best game as a part of the LA Lakers. Huh. And what I am digging into, again, a king of overreactions because that's what NBA fans do. When him and LeBron are in the court together Russell Westbrook for the most part is a native. And the reason I say that is because for Russell Westbrook to do the things that Russell Westbrook can do he needs the ball in his hands. LeBron James has been a great three-point shooter the entire season so far. But he is also a player that needs the ball in his hands. So when the other player is trying to create or try to do whatever he needs to do the other one is not really doing anything. We're not seeing no backdoor cuts from LeBron from Russell Westbrook from anybody. And it doesn't help that they run in line-ups of DeAndre, Jordan or Dwight Howard being in the court. So if Russell Westbrook did want to create for himself all snap AD is down there and Dwight is down there. And what I did like is their previous win against the Memphis Grizzlies which I don't think we talked about in this channel was when we got to the late game Anthony Davis was at the five and Russell Westbrook was running a pick and roll with LeBron and that opened up to like a baseline jump shot for Anthony Davis and then a dunk for Anthony Davis the offense looked way more fluid when they allowed or made Russell Westbrook do anything when he doesn't have the ball in his hands. So today with no LeBron James and really no secondary ball handler we got to see Russell Westbrook do what Russell Westbrook could do and this is the exact reason you trade for Russell Westbrook. Now I'm not saying I love to trade still but I'm saying this is the type of these are the type of games that Russell Westbrook wins for you all snap one of our star players whether it be LeBron or Anthony Davis is out take us home Russ and he did that. Russell Westbrook is one of the greatest floor razors in the history of basketball where it don't really matter who's around him if you need a win in the regular season he can put it together and put together that win and that's what he did today. 33, oh he didn't get his triple double washed 33, 10 and eight. And big time moments and overtime a dunk, some rebounds when you needed them. Good game from Russ. We got a good Malik Munt game, Austin Reeves. Austin Reeves. Now he ain't gonna be no Alice Caruso as far as being a huge fan favorite in LA but they always need a dude to root for out of nowhere and that's Austin Reeves. Anyway, it looks like the Utah Jazz closed out this win. I can't say much about it. Listen, who did the thing? Yolkic in his 15 minutes had 24 points and was almost perfect from the field with just one turnover. So, things might have been differently if he was able to play in the second half. Rudy Gobera got his overall rebounds. It was at 15 and he ended up getting 16 so I'm into money on that one. Yeah, I can't say much about this one. I still believe Utah fans, man y'all got a whole video for me like last week, bro. Y'all cool without me talking about them today. That's it, as always, man. If you enjoyed the video, leave it a like. This, I of course enjoy making any kind of video and that's why I do this YouTube thing but this channel has a special place in my heart as far as just talking basketball. It's just what I love doing, man. So I can't wait to talk to y'all again tomorrow but until then, peace.