View From the Darkside

In what I hope becomes a regular piece of our wesbite I have enlisted the help of the lead blogger of our opponent. Today I sat down for a Q&A with Buckets Over Broadway blogger Short White Boy. By the way his site is a great site and definitely worth a visit.

DWW: Where do you think the Knicks have the biggest advantage in tonight’s game?

SWB: I don’t usually examine teams in a position-by-position analysis because the Knicks do a lot of switching, swarming and zoning, very rarely leaving one guy isolated to play D against another one. So for instance, we don’t have any good low-post defenders, meaning Big Al should kill us, but in the last game we double-teamed him whenever he got it. That said, I think the Wolves’ weakest spot is SF where they’ve rotated Gomes and Damien Wilkins and haven’t gotten the consistency they’d like. Earlier in the year I would’ve said SG ‘cuz Corey Brewer was defending great but was an offensive liability. Now he’s huge on both sides of the court.

DWW: Do the Wolves have an advantage at any spot? If so where?

SWB: As I mentioned, in single-coverage, we can’t contain Al Jefferson. Jonny Flynn also would be too much for Duhon to handle, but for the most part we’ll probably have Jared Jeffries on him instead. Jeffries kept backing off Flynn, daring him to shoot a jump shot. If Flynn doesn’t take at least a few of those to keep Jeffries honest, Jonny-Boy’ll have a tough night again.

DWW: I mentioned in my blog you guys are essentially playing a PF tweener type at shooting guard. Is this an advantage or a disadvantage?

SWB: Positions are almost irrelevant for the Knicks since they switch so much and use such unusual matches, like having Jeffries often cover the point guard. We tend to not post up normal sized SGs, so we don’t gain any advantage there, but if a team does choose to play like 2 PGs then we will post-up. Defensively, when going up against a Kobe-type, we just double, so again it don’t really matter that whoever is considered SG doesn’t have the lateral speed. The big general disadvantage is that besides Jeffries, we don’t have great individual defenders, which is why we have to resort to such a chaotic D (which can kill us if the other team has good outside shooters).

DWW: After the blowout win the Knicks had over the Wolves in the last game are you more or less confident they will win tonight?

SWB: The Knicks have played so poorly of late (except for that game), that if anything I’m less confident. Teams sometimes get more pumped for better teams, so if the Knicks even slightly think they can take the Wolves for granted… well, we ain’t playing well enough to do that and we’ll get shellacked.

DWW: What is your biggest concern in tonight’s game?

SWB: See above.

DWW: What is your prediction for the game?

SWB: The Wolves will get a decent 10-point lead early on. The Knicks will climb back up at some point. Will they have enough energy to then take the lead too? I dunno. But I gotta put my sunglasses on and say in the end it’ll be a beautiful sunshiney day & we’ll win.

A few question unrelated to the game
DWW: Was David Lee the biggest snub?

SWB: No, I think Josh Smith was. But Lee’s second.

DWW: Are both Lee and Nate Robinson gone after this season?

SWB: Sadly, I think so.

DWW: Scale of 1-10 how much do you miss Isiah Thomas?

SWB: On a scale of 1 to 10 I’d say I miss Mr. Thomas about a negative infinity. Plus or minus two.

DWW: Thank you Alex, I really appreciate it.

Thanks for the questions, this was fun!
-Alex
aka, Short White Boy