Back on Tuesday, Knicks head coach Tom Thibodeau seemed to discard the idea of Julius Randle and Obi Toppin playing together in the frontcourt in what would be a small-ball lineup option for New York this season.
“It's based on performance, who fits best together,” Thibodeau said. “It's not fantasy basketball, it's what makes the group work best.”
Asked again about the subject on Thursday, while being told that Toppin and Randle had positive numbers while sharing the floor together, Thibodeau had a retort for that as well.
“It's not only the numbers,” Thibodeau said. “I actually watch the games.
“When you look at the games themselves, and then you look at the numbers, the games that were meaningful - and I went game by game - I watched the games and looked at the numbers of each game. If you took out the games that were blowouts, there were one or two in particular that probably threw those numbers off.”
Randle and Toppin posted a Net rating of +3.7 last season, while the starting frontcourt pairing of Randle and Mitchell Robinson posted a Net rating of -3.6.
“I want to be careful, because it was a very small sample size,” Thibodeau said. “When you look at it, what do your eyes tell you in close, meaningful games? That’s part of it.”
The Randle/Toppin pairing was certainly a smaller sample size than Randle/Robinson, but as Tommy Beer of the What’s on Tap podcast noted, the Randle/Toppin duo had the highest Net rating among players who played alongside Randle in at least 10 games last season. So, the sample size certainly isn’t microscopic, but Thibodeau clearly hasn’t seen what he wants to when it comes to justifying the two as an on-court pair.
“I’m hopeful there’s improvement and we can do that,” Thibodeau said. “But I think there were one or two games that were blowouts, so it really wasn’t meaningful.”
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