Monday White-Headed Ducks

Good evening! Bulls-Nets is just getting started and Grizzlies-Clippers is around the corner. Feel free to use this thread to comment on those games. First, a few links.

- I spent much of the afternoon hanging out with the ducks at the park, then I came home and read a lot about ducks. White-headed ducks are a weird-ass -looking kind of ducks I learned about. Look at their weird blue snouts. They're a kind of stiff-tailed duck. Those are the ducks with stiff tails, you know.

- Two things to file away until the offseason: 1. Mike Woodson insisting J.R. Smith will be back next season. 2. J.R. himself saying he'd like to retire in New York (of course, Kurt Thomas Marcus Camby might do that someday, and they left us for a while). I can't think about contract stuff while the playoffs are going, though. My brain only has so much room for hysteria.

- Meanwhile, Howard Megdal points out the part of J.R.'s Sixth Man award that's pretty silly to me: He played the most minutes of any Knick this year. I'm happy to see Knicks winning awards, but Sixth Man is a dumb award.

- The wonderful Will Leitch was kind enough to have me on his podcast and we talked all about the Knicks and this season and last season and being a fan of this team in general. I had a great time.

- I'm still waiting for my copy of Earl Monroe's book to arrive. In the meantime, here's a bit about why he ended up in New York instead of Indiana when he left the Bullets. Thanks, KKK!

- Acknowledgment that Chris Copeland was a bit nervous in Game 1, though the shoulder sounds like it's still bugging him as well.

- Dylan Murphy shows us why the Knicks might be better off picking and rolling farther from the basket against the Celtics. As long as they're picking and rolling, I'm happy. I've been watching tape of Game 1, and pretty much all New York's good outside looks came out of those sets.

- Hua Hsu gracefully addresses that fascinating moment before Game 1 in which we heard the MSG crowd torn between "hatred" for "Boston" and love for Boston.

- This is on point, but note that almost all of Carmelo Anthony's ugly isolation attempts came in the first half. Even some of the plays labeled as isolation later on were halfway decent looks late in the clock following pick-and-rolls.

- Something about Tyson Chandler and his wife producing a play?

- Some talk of the new defensive assignments on deck for Raymond Felton and Iman Shumpert.

Those are the links! Enjoy the Monday night beeball.