Nice win over the Wizards the other night to break (temporarily) a terrible slump that has been suffocating the life out of the team. The time of year right before the All-Star break is a drag on a lot of teams, but the Knicks really haven't managed the heavier load of games and the injuries very well. Even against other teams with inexperience (Minnesota), dysfunction (Washington) or simply being tired (Toronto at the end of 4 games in 5 days), it's been a struggle for the team. January ended as a squandered opportunity, as the Knicks just couldn't take advantage of a favorable schedule to position themselves more favorably for the playoff race.

The win over the Wizards looked very much like the loss to the Timberwolves over the weekend -- the home team punching and counterpunching and staying with a road team that had played a lot of games in a few days, until the road team ran out of gas.  (And yes, I know using a boxing metaphor to describe an 88 possession game with big stretches of listless play from both teams is pushing it). It was still nice to see the Knicks come to life, and while everyone is talking about Nate Robinson playing well enough to take over the starting role at point guard, Al Harrington's return was huge, and his 2 three pointers in the third quarter to give the Knicks the lead for good were probably the biggest shots of the game.

A few other notes:

*  Knicks made half of their three pointers, and got 37 shots at the rim. Though they could have done a better job of finishing close to the basket (59.5%), much of that was Jared Jeffries' overambitiousness with a few attempted folllow-baskets that he may have been better advised to tip to teammates. Nate had 4 of his 10 makes at the rim, an excellent ratio that I hope he carries over to his new starting role.

*  Fifteen combined free throws for the *game* from both teams, which doesn't exactly speak to the willingness of either team to be physical. (during the Wizards' win over the Knicks last Saturday, they didn't attempt their 3rd FT until the second half either)

*  One of Harrington's pet plays is a spinning dribble head on into traffic that elicits howls of anguish from a loud subset of Knick fans, probably because it's an all or nothing play that's just as likely to end in an ugly turnover as it is to produce a basket. (It is also such a heads down play that no matter how many opposing players collapse to stop the drive, the idea of open teammates receiving a pass is purely theoretical). Imagine this type of drive with Al's shaky knees, and it becomes a high wire act with lead boots. And yet. When he did get a layup toward the end of the 3rd quarter on one of these drives, I was inexplicably happy. Maybe because it signaled a willingness on the part of the Knicks to finally start taking it to the basket and not settle for jumpshots. You take what you can get and worry about the style points some other time.

*  Nate had a very good all-around game and had only 2 turnovers, but they were two of the louder turnovers in the game -- one an attempt to thread the needle on the fastbreak into a crowd of 3 defenders that Magic himself couldn't have pulled off, the other a lazy pass in a half court set that was stolen by Randy Foye. Give Nate credit for this, though -- on the second turnover, he hustled back to take the ball away from Foye on a driving layup, and managed to keep the ball inbounds and recover it. It was a fantastic display of athleticism on the part of Nate, except unlike the last time he pulled off something similar at home (his fastbreak block of Rondo in November), he didn't preen to the crowd. Just dribbled it down the court to reset the offense. Nice.

*  The Wizards have a lot of good players capable of making plays that make you wonder how the team can be struggling the way it is. Wednesday night it was Blatche and Haywood that took turns carving up the Knicks, until the team as a whole wilted in the face of the Knick second half run. The Knick run (or Wizard collapse depending on your inclination) is documented in full by Kyle at Truth About It, and he was none too happy about it. (A very similar sequence could have been constructed for the Knicks' collapse against the Wolves last Sunday, except it would have mainly consisted of Love and Jefferson putting up baskets against the Knick frontline).

Changing of the Point Guard: A Closer Look

The big news from an otherwise lackluster mid-season game between the Knicks and Wizards was the demotion of Chris Duhon, something many Knick fans have been clamoring for almost the entire season. Based on shooting alone (32 percent in the month of January), Chris has been digging a pretty deep hole for himself. Yet D'Antoni continued to defend him as the starting PG, which led to some gentle mocking in the press ("he does everything well but shoot!").

Upfront I can say that I've always felt Chris is a backup and not starter-level point guard in the league; however, for this team and the type of offense D'Antoni likes to run, maintaining him as a starter was a reasonable position, given the lack of alternatives. Nate has not had as good a season as last year (the odd 41 point game notwithstanding), and only recently has he shown signs of paying attention to all the details of the game necessary to earn major minutes.  Hughes has shown signs of getting worse after each injury and brings his own issues with his extremely ineffiicient shooting, and iike Nate is a volume shooter who can quickly shoot his team out of a game. And Toney Douglas still can't seem to use the limited minutes he's gotten so far to show that he can be even a reasonable backup playmaker.

The flip side of poor volume shooting is extreme timidity in shooting and playmaking when the first few shots don't fall, which has been Duhon's problem in his extended slump. Even though Duhon does other small things well (particularly on defense as part of the various zones and help defenses the Knicks run), many fans can't see past the lack of confidence Duhon projects, whether it's coming up short on his 3 point shots or being unable to finish at the rim. As a result, his demotion has been greeted with hosannas from people that felt a benching was overdue, including voices as sober and rational as Knickerblogger.

The only issue I would take with the angle taken on Duhon's demotion is that this isn't quite the sudden move it's been portrayed as -- D'Antoni has been gradually tinkering with Duhon's playing time, and coming to realize that the same player he played for an average of 38 to 40 minutes the first 3 months of last season doesn't always warrant extended PT. Last season, Duhon's games with limited minutes were almost exclusively injury related; this season, D'Antoni has kept Duhon's minutes in the 30 to 35 minute range when there are other alternatives (Hughes early in the season, Robinson more recently), because he realizes he can only get so much mileage from him.

Still, 30 + minutes from a 30% shooting guard is a lot of minutes, but as long as D'Antoni was committed to a tight rotation, he was willing to live with the shooting if Duhon's playmaking and other modest contributions were positive. I didn't have any issue with this because Duhon generally didn't do anything to *hurt* the team as part of the starting unit; the team's recent troubles were more related to how poorly the second unit played, and how poorly the team finished games.

I looked more closely at how Chris' contributions in the starting lineup broke out by using numbers from popcornmachine.net to see how he fared in the first and second halves of recent games. Duhon as a starter typically plays most of the first quarter (8-9 minutes), then returns in the second quarter for the last 4 to 6 minutes. The table below shows Duhon's +/- for the 2 first half segments he plays, and presents an overall +/- number for the second half, since I was mainly interested in evaluating how he performed as a starter at the beginning of games. (Thus for the table below,  a +4/-2 means the lineup he played with registered a +4 for the first quarter minutes he played, and a -2 for the second quarter minutes he played).

Chris Duhon: Opponent	1st Half +/-	1st Half Ast/TO	2nd Half +/-	Minutes
PHI	+4/-2	3 AST/0 TO	-2	32
TOR	-15/-5	2 AST/1 TO	+18	37
DET	+1/-11	0 AST/2 TO	-3	19
DET	+2/+9	5 AST/3 TO	-8	20
LAL	+1/+2	5 AST/0 TO	-4	31
DAL	-2/-10	0 AST/0 TO	-21	35
MIN	+26/-4	7 AST/0 TO	+2	31
TOR	+6/-8	5 AST/1 TO	-10	35
WAS	-8/+11	4 AST/1 TO	-5	37
MIN	+7/0	2 AST/3 TO	-9	35
WAS	-1/-3	2 AST/2 TO	DNP	13