6/27/2023 0 Comments Knicks rosterI found the previous approach to be imprecise and ignorant of context - is retaining a two-way player who played under five hundred minutes the same as retaining your starting point guard? What about a situation like Kevin Knox’s, who saw his minutes decreased by ten minutes per game, and after starting 57 of his 75 games played in his rookie season, started just four in his sophomore campaign? My analysis couldn’t account for these situations. So case closed, the Knicks’ player retention has been average, our assumptions were wrong, and their futility has little to do with the roster turnover, right? Not quite. Among the thirteen teams to average 41 wins or better over the past two seasons, average player retention was nine-and-a-half. NBA league average player retention during that span was nine players. Over those two seasons, the Knicks averaged nine retained players and just nineteen wins. That number fell to seven players from the 2018-19 roster to play for the 2019-20 team. In 2018-19, 11 Knicks that were on the 2017-18 roster returned to play minutes. I started with a very simple lens to analyze the Knicks roster turnover through - how many players were retained year over year, and how did the Knicks compare to the rest of the NBA? For simplicity, I decided to evaluate year over year roster turnover from the end of the 2017-18 season through the 2019-20 season - or two offseasons - in 20. None of this is a new or unique philosophy, but I think it colors the rest of the piece. An investigation using all the data available can help us reform those opinions, and in the future, hopefully come to correct conclusions more often. This often leads to us coming to the wrong conclusions. When watching a game, a season, or a team year over year, there’s too much data for us to take in, so our brains latch on to certain pieces of information and fill in things from there. I believe that analytics exist to, more often than not, disrupt the narratives and assumptions we construct when watching basketball. Since this is my first Strickland piece, I feel I should lay out the way that I think about basketball and analytics. Some have speculated how such high levels of roster turnover can be a source of struggle for the Knicks, and I wanted to investigate to see if this was true. Every other player has since departed the Knicks roster - most recently Damyean Dotson, who signed with the Cavaliers over this offseason. Case in point, there’s now just one Knick currently on the roster who played for the team in the 2017-18 season, the much-debated and bedeviled French point guard, Frank Ntilikina. This, logically, has caused a large amount of turnover for the roster and in the rotation. Since the end of the 2017-18 NBA season, the Knicks have had three different Presidents of Basketball Operations and four different head coaches.
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