FanPost

Potential bench nickname: Linsanity

D'Antoni's got the luxury of 11 guys who could get minutes, but he does not have the luxury of being patient with combinations which are not clicking right away. How quickly he finds those right combinations, and correspondingly the Knicks' record over the last ~30 games, will determine whether or not this team has a realistic chance to get out of the first round.

The Knicks need to start winning right now, and to do that Baron Davis and JR Smith have to start and play the bulk of their minutes with Melo, Amare, and Tyson. Reuniting Jeremy with his Linsanity supporting cast of Jeffries, Landry, Shumpert, and Steve Novak* will better balance the first and second units and gives D'Antoni a proven group for his bench to prop up his work-in-progress veteran starters with the higher ceiling (for this season).

What say you, p&t, am I a dolt? A genius? Somewhere in between? What's YOUR great idea for how to arrange the ten D'Antoni plays, and why?

* While we are on the topic of nicknames, there are a number for Steve Novak floating around, but allow me here and now to humbly submit a unified theory for nicknaming Steve Novak, and perhaps you've already guessed it: never separate his first and last names. Not only does "Steve Novak" have a pleasant three-syllable construction, he just looks like a Steve Novak. He is not merely "Steve" or "Novak"; it is in their combination that his essential plainness is so magnificently captured. If a thousand people who'd never seen one were asked to draw a Steve Novak they would 1,000 times come up with this:

Steve-novak-23-nba_medium

via cdn.sportsoverdose.com