|
|
|
|
Hot Stove New York - 5 new articles
Joakim Noah playing like an All-Star
Joakim Noah leads the NBA in rebounds and is no where to be found on the 2010 All-Star ballot.His teammate Brad Miller is on the ballot considering he is averaging 9 points and 4 rebounds. Noah leads the league with 12.6 rebounds and second with 4.6 offensive rebounds per game. He is tied for seventh in blocks per game (2.0) and is averaging a career high 12.1 points per game The third year player has posted eight double-doubles and five straight while shooting 55% from the field. Noah is up against Dwight Howard, Brook Lopez, Andrea Bargnani and Al Horford in the East but his scrappy play should keep him in the mix. Noah attributes his improvement to bulking up and league experience. On November 7th and 10th he recorded career highs in points (21) and rebounds (21). The New York Week That Was (11/20/09)
That takes care of the Knicks; now let’s look at the other local teams and we’ll put fun, convenient labels on them to boot: An Efficient Machine Devils: Their nine-game road winning streak (one short of tying the NHL record) and eight-game overall winning streak both ended on Monday night in Philly on Dave Schultz Night, as he was inducted into the Flyers Hall of Fame. Is there any significance or special meaning to that? Schultz was the personification of the brawling 1970s, and holds the all-time single-season record for penalty minutes, with 472 in 1974-’75. Isn’t it about time that somebody started a Hockey Goon Hall of Fame? (Trivia: Schultz’s brother appeared in Slap Shot as an opposing player.) Jacques Lemaire and the Devils are the epitome of defensive hockey. They rank 21st in goals per game, at 2.56, but their league-leading 2.07 goals against average has them in first place in the Atlantic Division (despite two losses in a row). Lemaire spent much of his playing days learning how to play defense by centering a line with Guy Lafleur and Steve Shutt, as he had to backcheck his way through many a game, while those two sharp shooters poured in goal after goal. Surprise Team Islanders: After getting off to a rocky start, the Islanders are one of the surprise teams of the NHL. That’s what hard work will do for you. John Tavares is living up to his billing (19 points), while Matt Moulson is turning into the find of the century (18 points). They’re going in the opposite direction than the Rangers, who they’ve caught in the standings, both totaling 23 points. Sinking (But it’s a Long Season) Rangers: The good times (7-1 start) are over (4-8-1 since). They can’t score, they’re not tough enough, they’re too easy to play against, they take too many penalties, they have too many defensive breakdowns and they’re shorthanded at center with no replacements in sight. Can they recover or is the makeup of the roster too much to overcome? Maybe John Tortorella should start crying. That seems to be the coaching technique du jour. Sinking (But There’s Still Hope) Giants: They had their best week in over a month, with Dallas, Philly and even Atlanta (if you’re starting to keep track of the wild card race) all losing. The Giants haven’t looked this good since they defeated Oakland. The key to their success, of course, was not actually playing a game. Their best strategy from here on out may be to not take the field at all. Can you decline the rest of your schedule the way you can decline a penalty and take your chances on your present record? Sinking (And They’re Running Out of Time) Jets: The Jets players are making their coach cry. But poor clock management, wasted timeouts, a plethora of turnovers and a defense that can’t make the big stop are making Jet fans cry. The team has the swagger part down; it’s just the beating the opponent part that’s troubling them. Mark Sanchez has a prepared statement all set to go for his next postgame press conference on why he entered a hot dog eating contest at halftime of their Disaster Nets: The Nets are doing even worse than the Knicks, and are planning to jump back to the ABA before they have a chance to go 0-82. They’re hoping to put a schedule together and play against the Spirits of St, Louis, San Diego Conquistadors, Virginia Squires, Memphis Tams and Kentucky Colonels once again and regain their dominance in that defunct league. They play the Knicks on Saturday (if they can scrounge up enough players). Will the world explode if one of those teams actually wins the game? Free Agents Carrying Rangers
Gaborik, Prospal and Kotalik have scored a combined 26 goals. The Rangers have a total of 62, which means those three free-agent pickups have contributed 42% of the team’s scoring. Prospal’s the bargain of the century, with his one-million-dollar contract (I’m so old I remember when a million dollars was a lot of money). Kotalik gives the Rangers the point man on the power play they’ve been missing the last few years. And Gaborik is having his best season, which says a lot. We surely haven’t been able to say that very often: A New York Ranger free-agent acquisition is having his best season ever. So where the heck has everybody else gone? Let’s run through the rogues’ gallery of underperformers. Christopher Higgins: 2 goals; Chris Drury: 2 goals; Sean Avery: 2 goals; Ryan Callahan: 3 goals; Brandon Dubinsky: 3 goals; Enver Lisin: 3 goals. That’s 15 goals by six of your top nine forwards, and a pace of 8 or 12 goals for the season for all of them. Artem Anisimov has probably played better than all those guys. Callahan hits everybody in sight, but he’s got to start scoring more than he is. And the rest of those guys aren’t doing much of anything to go along with not scoring. The power play, which helped carry the team during their 7-1 start, is now in a slump. Nobody besides Gaborik, Prospal, Kotalik and Michael Del Zotto are producing any offense. And combine those scoring woes with a mistake-filled defense, and the result is a not-too-surprising 4-8-1 record in their last 13 games. The Rangers’ big off-season purchases are carrying the team. But they’re only carrying them to mediocrity because nobody else wants to come along for the ride. The Mets Need More Than Matt Holliday
In 2006, the Mets were one game away from the World Series. And that’s been their biggest problem the last three years. They still think they’re one game away from the World Series. But they’re not. And they’re not even close. 2006 was their year. It was their chance. Their opportunity. And they blew it. And they’ve been a step behind, plugging holes, sticking their finger in the dike, fixing last year’s problems, or even the problems from the year before that, ever since. Unfortunately, the big problems who go by the names of Omar Minaya and Jerry Manuel (is Wally Backman waiting in the wings now that he’s been hired to manage Brooklyn? God, I hope so) are still here, so we’ll have to live with them at least through the beginning of the 2010 season. The Mets’ failings are more than the bullpen issues of ’07 and ’08, and more than the power outage and injuries of ’09. The team needs more than Matt Holliday and John Lackey (though they definitely need them). The Mets have shown a glaring lack of hustle, effort, competence, intensity and anything that remotely resembles solid fundamentals on the baseball field. They need a wholesale change of culture. They’ve been much too blasé about winning over the last few years. What they need is a more powerful will to win. All too often we saw them shrug t The Omar Minaya Mets don’t have any grit and toughness. No team is going to win with nine David Ecksteins or nine Jeff Francouers; you need more talent than that to be a successful team. But, no, grit and toughness don’t have to be “intangibles.” If you barrel over the catcher, instead of gently sliding around him, Mets-style (or not even sliding at all), and knock the ball out of his glove to score a run, that’s tangible. That shows up on the stat sheet. Francouer’s the only Met I could even imagine knocking over a catcher. If you block a base preventing an easy path for an opposing team’s base runner and tag him out, that’s tangible. If a fielder sacrifices his body to get in front of a hard-hit ball (Carlos Delgado could barely put in the effort to move his body at all to field a grounder, let alone get in front of a ball, and Wright’s come up with a bad case of the olés the past year) and record an out, that’s tangible. And just running out pop-ups and ground balls can do wonders for a team. There are rumors the Mets are looking to trade Luis Castillo, with names like Orlando Hudson, Chone Figgins and Brandon Phillips popping up as possible replacements. Good. The Mets need to cut ties with guys like Castillo, and Delgado and Fernando Tatis as well. And their starting rotation is in a shambles. Would you trust Mike Pelfrey, John Maine and Oliver Perez to be three-fifths of your rotation? I can propose some cockamamie trades and signings, but like many Internet/blog proposals, they’d never happen and I’m not smart enough to come up with realistic trade proposals or think I can be a GM. So I’ll just say the Mets need to do more than add a couple of free agents. You can’t keep bringing the same players back and expect different results. Beltran recently stated that he wants to see Delgado back for another year. I surely wouldn’t expect him to publicly say that he doesn’t want the first baseman to return, but I don’t think the players realize the team has bigger problems than last year’s injuries. The Mets are more than one free agent signing away from being a World Series contender. They need to reshuffle their roster, and import a different brand of player. The Mets look at themselves in the mirror and think all they have to do is comb their hair and straighten their tie and they’ll be all right, when, in fact, they’re not even wearing any pants. They need to stop looking to fix the past and instead find a plan and identity for the future. Week 3 observations
1. Brandon Jennings is the real deal: In two games last week Jennings has scored 87 points with 14 assists. So far this season he is averaging 25 points (8th in the NBA), 5 assists, 4 rebounds and 1 steal. He also is shooting 49% from the field, 83% from the foul line and has 17 three-pointers. In a 8-cat league his fantasy value equals the 10th overall player. 2. Marc Gasol has been playing like his brother: Gasol pulled down 16 rebounds last Saturday for the second time this season. He is averaging 14.8 points, 11.4 rebounds and 1.7 blocks per game. Also he is shooting 56% from the field and 78% from the line. He is looking like one of the biggest steals in the draft. 3. Danny Granger is showing why he was a top 4th pick: The Pacers upset the Celtics last Friday and Granger was a big part of that with 29 points, 6 rebounds, 4 assists, 3 steals and 6 three-pointers. His rebounding has increase with Troy Murphy sidelined. 4. Chris Bosh is outscoring Lebron James and Dirk Nowitzki and out rebounding Dwight Howard: Bosh is 4th in the NBA with 27.7 points per game. He is third in the NBA with 11.8 rebounds per game. 5 .Charlie Villanueva is heating up: Charlie V has has scored 25 or more points in three of his past five games. It looks like his hamstring injury is over with and he should increase his 17 points per game. Honorable mention: Chris Paul out with injury, Byron Scott fired, Knicks 1-8, Nets winless, Joakim Noah leads in the NBA with 12.2 rebounds per game, Kobe Bryant leads the NBA with 30.1 points per game. More Recent Articles |
The Knicks won a game this week! And The Answer may be coming to New York (so the question must be: Will a desperate team do anything to keep their fans interested?). But with last Friday’s loss, the Knicks established the worst 10-game start in franchise history. Things could be a lot worse, though; here are some other bad starts throughout history that may help them feel better about themselves: The Hindenburg blew up over New Jersey on the first of its 10 scheduled round-trips between Europe and the United States, killing 36 people; the Titanic hit an iceberg and sunk four days into its maiden voyage; William Henry Harrison died of a cold one month into his presidency in 1841; Wally Backman lasted four days as manager of the Arizona Diamondbacks before he was unceremoniously shown the door; Gilligan’s three-hour tour got off to an inauspicious start, getting stranded on a deserted island for 15 years, until the castaways were miraculously rescued, followed by them buying the island but almost losing it in an evil scam until they we
re helped out of the jam by the Harlem Globetrotters; Richie Cunningham’s brother Chuck on Happy Days appeared in only two episodes in the first season and was never heard from again; the Seattle Pilots existed for one measly year before moving to Milwaukee; and my career selling rodeo tickets over the phone lasted two days before I woke up and came to my senses. The lesson in all this for the Knicks is that they could explode in a fireball over New Jersey at any moment, sink to the bottom of the ocean taking Leonardo DiCaprio with them or be written out of the NBA altogether like Chuck Cunningham was. The best case scenario for the team: The Harlem Globetrotters come to the Garden and save their ass.
game up in New England on Sunday.
The usual state of affairs when the Rangers sign a free agent goes something like this: Free agent is past his prime with his best days well behind him, he signs an outrageously sized contract and then plays like crap while laughing all the way to the bank (see Redden, Wade or Fleury, Theo). But the Blueshirts have hit the jackpot this year, with Marian Gaborik, Vinny Prospal and Ales Kotalik (well, three out of four ain’t bad – Donald Brashear and the word “jackpot” don’t go together – except to his agent). Unfortunately, it’s the rest of the roster that’s dragging the team down.
heir shoulders when losing started piling up, with the attitude that they’d start winning sometime in the vague, nebulous future. “You can’t win ’em all,” was the phrase they seemed to so easily embrace. When the Mets traded for Jeff Francouer, my first reaction was, “Now I have to root for that guy?” He was the last player I thought I would like, but he’s shown more intensity with a will to win than any other player on the team. We all know about his shortcomings at the plate and he’s probably not as good a fielder as his defensive reputation makes him out to be, but he’s the kind of complementary player the Mets need. If he’s batting sixth or seventh, fine. Not every player in the lineup can have a .400 OBP. He’s got that football player mentality that no one else on the roster possesses (well, except Johan Santana). There’s no need to trade Carlos Beltran, David Wright or Jose Reyes, but they need a new breed of sidekicks in order for the Mets to change their ways on the field.