Chapter 1: What insights does Fred Katz share about Norman Powell's bowleggedness?
Good morning and welcome to the NBA Daily presented by Amazon Prime for January 22nd, 2026. I'm Dave DeFore here with Fred Katz and Zena Keita. Coming up, we go deep with Fred Katz on Norm Powell's bow legs and also the Knicks and where they're going to go from here. Good morning, everybody. What's up, Zena? What's up, Fred? Welcome back. How's it going, buddy?
Going great. I'm committed to short, dispassionate answers for the entire episode.
See, this is the problem. All right. Just to pull back the veil a little bit for people listening at home. See, Fred is one of our favorite guests on the show because we do this every single day. And Fred doesn't.
Chapter 2: How has Norman Powell adapted his game this season?
And he always has so much to say that we get to just sit back a little bit. And I'm not going to say these are rants. Because, you know, that implies that it's a negative thing. These are more like they're not monologues either.
They're just NBA lectures like we're in college. We're learning something.
NBA lectures with Fred Katz. I've been playing around with what we call this, but I like that NBA professor Katz. There you go.
I mean, look, look, if there's one way to get people to listen to a podcast, it's to tell them, hey, this guy who's on, not only does he talk too much, but he's also going to lecture you. I would say that Dave, you're correct in, in that it's not because it's because I'm not on here all the time, except every single person in my life tells me to shut the hell up 19 times a day.
So I, I, I don't know if that's necessarily true. Stefan Bondi from the New York post. And I have a, have a great joke because he and I are very good friends and, and Bondi writes for the post and like New York, you know, newspapers have these incredibly high stress deadlines where you have to send in 900 stories by a certain time.
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Chapter 3: What are the current issues facing the New York Knicks?
And I'll just turn to Bondi and start telling him a story when he's one minute from deadline and I'll be 19 minutes into the story. And so he's now started to just know to just turn to me and be like, Fred, shut the, can I curse on here?
No, actually this is a children's show, Fred.
Yeah. Yeah. There, there, there are choice, choice curse words, but, but I'm always like, Oh, right. Sorry. I normally laugh.
You're all good? Well, listen, again, one of our favorites for this reason. Before we get to the Knicks, and we are going to talk about the Knicks, I want to talk about your Norm Powell story over at The Athletic because this guy's having an amazing season, and it's flown a little bit under the radar.
Zena has been saying for, I don't know, about a month that Norm Powell is one of the best players in the Eastern Conference and that Miami would have fallen apart. I mean, she's right, of course, but Fred, this story is very interesting, especially the part about his legs. His legs are weird.
I, I, I never knew.
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Chapter 4: Who should be blamed for the Knicks' struggles this season?
Did you guys know that about his legs?
I mean, I've, I've seen him, but it just, it didn't occur to me. I mean, there's plenty of people, but his legs are very pronounced in the way that they're weird.
Yeah, they're they're they're bowlegged. And I was honestly I was I was unfamiliar with the concept. Like, I think I was obviously. Yeah, I think I was in the minority. I think I just had a huge knowledge gap.
Full disclosure, Xena and I talked about this before the show, and we were trying to guess how you would pronounce bowlegged because like we're from the south. So we say bowlegged. But shouldn't it be bowlegged?
think it's legged oh no it is it is we just we didn't know if that was like a southern influence yeah sorry so wait on that really really quickly bread do you know what knock need is i assume the opposite correct like like pigeon toad i know pigeon toad yes so if you have bow legged the knees go outwards if you are knock need they go inwards towards each other
Right, like famed NFL referee Ed Nockney.
Or Kenny Smith from the NBA now.
That was a bad Ed Hockley pun.
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Chapter 5: What potential trades could the Knicks consider?
So did Norm Powell grow up riding horses? What is it behind the bow-leggedness?
So really the way it happened was because I was talking to him. It was nice enough to sit down with me for a while about kind of the season that he's had and what stands out to me so much about him. And what I wrote this story about is his adaptability, because to be honest, I, and I said this to his face, I kind of put Norm Powell in a box. I kind of thought I knew what Norm Powell was.
I kind of thought he was an instant offense guy who was going to be a second, you know, second side option and second units, good score, that kind of stuff and a good player. But last year he really surprised me with the way that the Clippers were using him, just running him around more screens than he had ever run around in his entire life and using him totally differently. And,
You know, I said this around the end of last season where he played 60 games. But if he had played 65 or if the 65 game rule didn't exist, I don't think it should for MIP. Because if the whole point of the 65 game rule is not to legitimize awards, that's just a... I guess unintended consequence of it. The whole point of it is to encourage people not to load manage. Right.
Chapter 6: How is Mike Brown's coaching impacting the Knicks?
If I don't think anybody in the history of the NBA has ever been like, I could load manage, but I might not get MIP.
Right. Yeah.
I could load manage, but what if I don't get clutch player of the year? Like, I get the logic for, like, MVP and All-NBA and All-Defense and all that kind of stuff, even if I don't think it's a great rule. But, like, I don't get the logic for MIP.
I would actually be okay with just for the team awards. So, like, All-NBA, All-Defense, you have to play 65 games, and the other awards being not tied to this. I mean, they're going to make a change. I think that this year is probably the tipping point.
I don't know they're going to. You don't think so? No, because it's got to be negotiated in the labor deal. And that's really complicated.
Yeah.
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Chapter 7: What are the implications of the Knicks' defensive inefficiencies?
They can't just be like, oh, we hate it. You hate it. Like it's always a negotiation. Someone's going to come across and be like, we hate it. And the other side is going to be like, oh, OK, you hate it. Well, then I guess you should give us something back. And they're going to be like, we know you hate it, too. We're not giving you anything back. Just do it.
And then they're going to be like, nope, you said you hate it first. You got to give us something back. And then it gets renegotiated in the next CBA. So like, I'm not saying it's not going to happen. I'm just saying like, it's more complicated than like a lot of people don't like it. So they're going to change it.
Chapter 8: Is there a realistic path for the Knicks to acquire Giannis?
It has to actually be negotiated in the collective bargaining agreement, as opposed to being just some grand pronouncement from the league. But again,
i i said at the end of last year like if norm powell were eligible for mip i would have voted for him for mip because not only did he put up career numbers with the clippers but he did it in a way that we hadn't seen and i kind of think you know a guy in his 30s completely changing the way that he played becoming this off-ball menace and scrambler of defenses that we had never seen before
I thought that that's kind of the embodiment of MIP. Like, it's not like Ja Morant, who was supposed to be awesome, was already awesome and then became even more awesome. Like, that's not the embodiment of MIP to me. The embodiment of MIP is somebody who does it, you know, in a different kind of trajectory.
It's a blue collar award, right? Like, it's not like a prestige, like, oh, I was a top 10 pick and I had a rough first two years. Yeah, I feel the same way.
And then he goes to Miami this year. Miami is setting less screens than you could ever imagine any NBA team set, although they've done it a little more lately. But he's not running around screens, and he's doing it off of ISOs. And now, if you look at the... the second spectrum numbers, first of all, he's already set a career high in number of isolations for a season.
He's on pace to more than double his previous career high. And if you set the minimum at 200 isolations in a single season, which he's already over, if you set the isolation at 200 isolations in a season, Since Second Spectrum started tracking that stat in 2013, there have been like 600 something seasons where players have had 200 plus isolations.
And the Heat are scoring 127.2 points per 100 possessions. on passes, shots, turnovers, and fouls out of Norm Powell isolations. Wow. That would make for the most efficient isolation season ever since this stat started being tracked 13 years ago. And all of a sudden it's like this dude changed his game completely by running around a bunch of screens last year.
Now he's changed his game completely going one on one. Now, I will say not all isolations are created equal. Right. Like there's a difference between like prime James Harden with Houston, where it's like 19 dribbles going to create something, get to my step back. Then he is Norm Powell, who's who's who's not not necessarily always bringing it up.
A lot of it is like getting a mismatch in transition and attacking, or it's getting the ball on the move because the heat are all about like cuts and then refilling spots for the cutter. Like, and then he attacks two, three dribbles off of that, but he's been tremendously efficient.
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