Sportsfrog.com

…when they are one and the same. Just sayin’. Isiah the coach had this to say about his players on the Knicks after yet another beatdown:

“There are a lot of things that can be said about me and teams that I’ve coached and the way I played, but I’ve never been accused of not having heart or competing,” Thomas said. “Tonight was very discouraging to me because we didn’t collectively play with heart and compete like I know I did. . . .The one thing we prided ourselves on last year was, you know, we didn’t always play well, but I thought as a team we had heart and we had courage and we competed,” Thomas said. “I’m not getting that out of this group right now.”

So, where to begin? Is it a coach problem? “I’m not getting that out of this group right now? Is it a GM problem? The GM who accumulated players who allowed their coach to say “we didn’t collectively play with heart and compete like I know I did”? What is ownership to do to address this issue? Fire the coach? Or fire the GM? If only there were a simple way to kill two birds with one stone…

Joe Gergen in Newsday with a decent read this morning on reasons to go MSG to watch the trainwreck, among the reasons, this:

“A defensive effort that transformed Dunleavy into another Indiana legend, Larry Bird, without so much as the wave of a wand. In the third period alone, the lanky former Duke star with a career scoring average slightly better than 11 points per game was credited with 22.

Operating mostly against Renaldo Balkman, Dunleavy took control of the game after it was tied at 64, scoring the next nine points for a 73-64 Indiana lead. After his run was interrupted momentarily by Tyler Crawford’s two free throws, Dunleavy drained a long trey over Stephon Marbury. In all, he would score all but four of the Pacers’ last 20 points in the period.”

Wasn’t Balkman supposed to be a defensive specialist? Wasn’t that how Isiah the GM sold that particular reach? And if he has regressed or not developed under Isiah the coach, how in the world does either of them still have a job? Mind-boggling.