Flipping the Switch

After an uninspiring win, the Knicks rolled on the second night of a back to back against a team that always plays them tough.

Good morning! Can you believe we’re almost a quarter of the way through the season? The preseason feels like yesterday, and now here we are, with the Knicks tied for the second best record in the league over their last 13 games. Not that they can rest on their laurels, what with the hardest schedule in the NBA in the month of December.

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Game 19: Knicks 119, Raptors 106

You is not Him.

In a New York minute…

After briefly gaining a double digit lead behind crisp, clean two-way play in the first quarter, New York’s bench was uncharacteristically sloppy and let the Raps back in the game midway through the second. A tie game at halftime, things remained close until the final five minutes of the third quarter, when a Josh Hart offensive explosion (you read that correctly) put the Knicks in control heading into the fourth. Toronto had faint notions of threatening one more time, but a red hot Donte DiVincenzo put those ideas to rest, and the Americans won going away.

Three Things

1. Comeback Kings. After two decades of mostly abhorrent basketball, I’m surprised nobody came up with a “Top 10 Warning Signs of Knicks Fan PTSD” once the franchise started to get its shit together. Maybe that can be my homework for Christmas vacation.

Whenever I or someone else gets to it, I’d bet that “You worry every bad game will be the start of a 10-game losing streak” will be at or near the top of the list. That’s because in years past, the Knicks would crumble like an overbaked cookie at the first sign of adversity.

But this group? Aside from the disastrous 3-17 stretch that torpedoed the ‘21-22 season, Thibodeau’s troops have answered the call anytime they’ve been in trouble.

We witnessed it again on Friday night, when the Knicks followed up perhaps their worst performance of the season with one of their best. Better yet, they made a commitment to clean up the problem areas that are typically their undoing. They assisted on two thirds of their made field goals - only the fourth time they’ve done so, and just the second time since the second game of the season. They also took care of the ball well enough against a team that always uses its length to turn them over at a high clip.

Last but not least, they didn’t beat their heads against a wall by going inside when the openings weren’t there. The Raps gave them threes, and did they ever take them, hitting 16-of-36 for a 44.4 percent hit rate. Which brings us to…

2. Formula for success. It’s so nice to be on the other side of one of these tweets for once:

Not that winning the rebounding battle or scoring at the rim isn’t satisfying, but how frustrating is it when the Knicks are on the losing end of a game where they did so much right, only to be overwhelmed by a team that made a ton of threes?

Now, they can fight fire with fire.

The most impressive part of New York being among the 10 most accurate 3-point shooting teams in the league is that they’ve had some absolute clunkers on their resume. Their long range hit rates against the Cavs, Pels, Wolves and Bucks ranked as the 3rd, 10th, 30th and 47th worst 3-point percentages among 558 games played heading into Saturday. Only two other teams - the Raps and Lakers - have at least four games in the bottom 50, and they both rank in the bottom five in 3-point shooting league-wide.

Maybe the occasional brick-fest will continue to be a part of New York’s resume, or maybe they just needed to dust the cobwebs off before hitting their stride. Either way, their proclivity from distance seems absolutely legit nearly a quarter of the way into the season.

But it’s not just their accuracy that should have everyone excited; it’s the volume with which they’re hoisting these shots on a nightly basis. Saturday was already the 13th time this season that at least 40 percent of their shots came from deep. Last year, they hit that mark in fewer than half of their games. The result is an 11th place ranking in 3-point frequency according to Cleaning the Glass.

When you combine their 3-point volume (11th) and accuracy (9th) with their defense (5th in the NBA, via CTG), it puts the New York on the verge of a pretty important trifecta. Over the last five seasons, only 10 teams have finished the season ranked in the top 10 in 3-point frequency, 3-point accuracy and total defense. They are:

• 22-23 Celtics (2nd in frequency, 6th in accuracy, 3rd in defense)

• 22-23 Bucks (4th in frequency, 9th in accuracy, 4th in defense)

• 21-22 Jazz (1st in frequency, 10th in accuracy, 9th in defense)

• 21-22 Warriors (2nd in frequency, 9th in accuracy, 2nd in defense)

• 20-21 Jazz (1st in frequency, 4th in accuracy, 1st in defense)

• 19-20 Raptors (6th in frequency, 5th in accuracy, 2nd in defense)

• 19-20 Miami (7th in frequency, 2nd in accuracy, 10th in defense)

• 18-19 Warriors (7th in frequency, 3rd in accuracy, 9th in defense)

• 18-19 Jazz (8th in frequency, 9th in accuracy, 1st in defense)

• 18-19 Celtics (9th in frequency, 7th in accuracy, 7th in defense)

Why is this a big deal? For one, the 10 teams above averaged 54 wins and none finished with fewer than 49 wins¹ or lower than 5th in their conference. More importantly, they finished with a fair bit of playoff success. Only three of the 10 failed to make it out of the first round (two Utah teams and last year’s Bucks), while three made the conference semis, one made the conference finals, two made the NBA Finals, and one - the ‘22 Warriors - won the chip.

This season, no team is inside the top 10 in all three, but the Knicks come the closest, with the Celtics also right there (Boston in 13th in 3-point accuracy, but are less than a percentage point from 8th). If New York keeps it up, there’s a good chance this is going to be a very successful season by any metric.

3. Nova Core. For just the second time all season, Tom Thibodeau closed consecutive non-garbage time games with the same final five, and against both the Pistons and Raptors, those lineups had a distinctly Wildcat feel.

Along with starters Jalen Brunson, Julius Randle and Mitchell Robinson, Josh Hart and Donte DiVincenzo were on the court until the final buzzer. It was the third time this season that these five finished a game, which is the most of any closing lineup.

After Friday, the quintet became the 5th five-man combo to pass 50 total minutes on the season, and the results have been pret-ty good:

They aren’t the best Knick fivesome by the numbers - that designation goes to IQ & Hart plus the three starters, which was also gangbusters last season and has already surpassed last year’s minutes total - but they’re still pretty great. The Nova Core is outpacing opponents by 17.1 points per 100 possessions. Most impressively for the iso-heavy Knicks, this group assists on 66 percent of made field goals.

That probably shouldn’t come as a surprise given the shared court currency that Brunson, Hart and DiVincenzo bring to the table. It also means we’re going to see more of these five in key moments of games throughout the season.

Probably a lot more if I had to bet.

Play of the Day

Speak of the devil…

This is a great example of how the Knicks can leverage the individual isolation abilities of their stars into easy shots for supporting pieces. It all starts with Jalen Brunson doing his best Mark Jackson impersonation on Dennis Schroder, which then forces Pascal Siakam to shade off of Julius above the arc. Randle’s instantaneous decision to put the ball on the floor keeps the train moving, drawing in Josh Hart’s corner defender.

We’ve talked for 10 months about how important it is for Hart to shoot when he has the chance to do so (and to his credit, he did in this game, as we’ll get to shortly), but he’s also savvy enough to punish a hard close out when the defense is off balance. He does that here and finds Brunson, who then kicks to DiVincenzo for the three.

The best part of this play is the constant and purposeful off-ball motion. From Brunson’s subtle relocation to the corner, to DiVincenzo drawing the potential help defender away from the corner, to Donte again repositioning once Hart begins his drive, it all contributed to the final result.

The Knicks are at their best when they move with meaning.

💫 Stars of the Game 💫

⭐️ Josh Hart: If you weren’t watching the game and just following on Twitter, you’d have thought it was April Fool’s Day after this one from Stefan Bondy:

After what we can now affectionately refer to as “Usage-gate,” in which Hart politely griped about his role to the press, only to have his head coach claim that his usage rate was actually up this season (it wasn’t), you couldn’t help but laugh at Hart’s scoring escapade in Toronto.

After a decidedly un-Hart first 16 games, Josh has now sandwiched his two best games of the season around a solid second half performance vs Detroit.

In this one, he had a highly efficient 17 & 8, including the aforementioned run in which he personally outscored the Raptors 15-8 over a four minute stretch at the end of the third. The outburst helped double New York’s lead and gave them enough breathing room where they were never seriously threatened in the fourth.

And yet my favorite Hart sequence of the night game much later, when he helped the Knicks put this one away for good in the fourth:

After stonewalling Siakam on the drive, Hart dove in for the tough board, left some bodies in his wake, and then got the ball out to JB fast, leading to the IQ triple.

Nice to see Josh good and gruntled.

⭐️ ⭐️ Donte DiVincenzo: 67 times in franchise history, a player has made at least seven threes in a game, but in only seven of those games has the marksman in question played fewer than 30 minutes.

Donte DiVincenzo has now done it twice, including Friday night, when he made seven triples in just 22 minutes of action, tying J.R. Smith for the least amount of time necessary to hit that mark.

But Smith was never shy about getting his shots up, and sure enough, he hoisted 14 attempts from deep in his 22 minutes of action. DiVincenzo needed just nine, making this one of the most efficient 3-point shooting performances in Knicks history. They also came in high leverage situations, including perhaps the biggest three of the game to make it 101-89 and end a 10-5 Raps run that had momentum turning fast.

DiVincenzo is now hitting 54 percent from deep over his last eight games. It took a little while, but New York’s summer addition is paying off in spades.

⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ Julius Randle: Against a team with a lot of size at a lot of positions, Randle overpowered the Raptors with a mix of strength and skill. He finished with 20 points on 8-of-15 shooting and was just short of a triple double with 10 rebounds and nine assists (with only two turnovers).

Only once in his first 17 games was Randle able to top 50 percent from the field while dishing at least eight dimes and three or fewer turnovers. He’s now done it twice in a row.

Benjy’s thread from yesterday does a great job of showing all the ways that Julius was a matchup nightmare in this game, but I’d boil it down to a series of quick, correct decisions. Whereas his bad games feature a bad combination of stagnation on some plays and rushing on others, this was a perfect blend of patience and urgency.

Of course, there were the handful of defensive plays that left you wanting, but with offensive production like this, it’s impossible to complain. In fact, his overall effort inspired me to create the 7 Levels of Randle, which I’m going to refer to henceforth as shorthand for how he played

• Level 1: Unstoppable offense, inspired defense (the game in Denver last season)

• Level 2: Unstoppable offense, solid defense

• Level 3: Great offense, solid defense

• Level 4: Good to great offense, passable defense

• Level 5: Positive offense, poor defense

• Level 6: Poor offense, poor defense

• Level 7: Detrimental offense, “I have dinner reservations after the game and don’t have time to shower so I mustn’t perspire” defense

This was between a level two and a level three, which is super encouraging considering it was arguably his best game of the season. Imagine how much higher we can go!

Tip-Ins…

🏀 In the strongest indication yet that Jalen Brunson’s improved pull-up shooting has made its way onto opposing scouting reports, Toronto was all over him anytime he got within five feet of the arc. It certainly seemed like an adjustment on his behalf, but he ultimately responded well, finishing with 22 points, eight assists and just two turnovers. He is playing the best basketball of his career, including on defense, where he’s become quite the pest, and in drawing his league-leading 14th charge.

🏀 After holding teams to single digit offensive rebounds in 11 of their first 15 contests, the Knicks have now given up 13 or more in three of their last four games, including new season highs against the Suns (18) and now the Raptors (19). New York still leads the league with a defensive rebound rate of 74.4, but this is now something worth monitoring.

🏀 After swiping four steals north of the border, Mitchell Robinson is now 18th in the league with 1.5 steals per game - tops among centers league-wide. He is like an octopus in the paint, and opponents are paying the price.

Add it to the DPOY resume.

🏀 Lost in the exploits of his teammates were some signs of life from Quentin Grimes. After going 0-for-1 in the first half, Grimes had a 35 second stretch in which he grabbed an offensive board on his own missed three, got fouled on the subsequent drive, made his first two free throws of the year, and then had a pretty drive and dish to Mitch.

Positive steps for the third year guard.

🏀 Lastly, the much ballyhooed RJ leap has come back down to earth. In seven games since returning from his migraine issues, Barrett is averaging 14.6 points, 3.9 board, 2.3 assists, 1.9 turnovers and is hitting 34.4 percent overall and 25 percent from deep. He had a nice start in this game, scoring the first seven Knick points, but missed 10 of his last 13 attempts. On the bright side, his defense has mostly remained strong.

Up Next…

The knockout round of the In-Season Tournament awaits in Milwaukee tomorrow night.

Final Thought

I’d have signed for 11-8 over the first 19 games in a heartbeat, and would have lived with 10-9. Even with some rough losses, 12-7 feels like a praiseworthy result.

🏀

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

1. I pro-rated the win totals to an 82-game season in 2019-20 and 2020-21, when teams played fewer than 82 games.