Harden Time

The Beard debuts with his new team while the Knicks look to right the ship.

Good morning! The Knicks are currently two games under .500. If they lose tonight, they’ll fall to three games under, which is someplace they spent about 24 hours all of last season. Hopefully it is a fate they can avoid.

Game Night

TONIGHT: Clippers at Knicks

When: 7:30 pm, MSG

Injury Report: RJ Barrett practiced yesterday and seems to be good to go, barring anything popping up pregame. For LA, you know who is set to make his Clipper debut, but key reserve Terrence Mann will be out.

Halftime Zoom: I’m back! Here’s the link.

What to watch for: All eyes around the NBA will be on LA, who will reportedly start all four of their future Hall-of-Famers. For the Knicks, it’s all about the offense, and whether they can avoid some of the shooting woes that have plagued them this season. It’ll also be interesting to see how the crowd reacts to Julius Randle if he gets off to a slow start.

Game 6: Knicks 105, Bucks 110

Feels like a week ago already, but let’s go through this one in more detail…

In a New York minute…

You’re not going to believe this, but the Knicks got off to a slow start from the field. After falling behind 11-2, New York got back in with with a 15-3 run spurred by transition buckets and defense. Behind nine offensive rebounds, they led 25-21 after one. The Bucks got their offense going in the second, and eventually built a 14-point lead early in the third. That’s when the Knicks started slowly chipping away, first behind Jalen Brunson, then Immanuel Quickley, and then Brunson again in the fourth. With 1:10 to go, New York’s starting point guard finally put them ahead with a three, but Damian Lillard answered right back, and New York couldn’t respond.

The Knicks fall to 2-4.

Three Things

1. Julius, Obviously. As someone who spent his Saturday morning going through Julius Randle’s offensive, um… “effort” from this game, I wondered whether leading with Randle here might amount to beating a dead horse.

It’s not. Not unless the horse just walked off the set of Walking Dead.

The Randle story cannot be killed. Like Michael Myers, it keeps coming…and coming…and coming…and just when you thought there couldn’t possibly be another sequel…

We burned him alive…HOW IS HE NOT DEAD?!?

That’s the Randle narrative, which has taken on a life of its own - perhaps even overshadowing the the poor play that inspires it.

TO BE CLEAR: Julius has been a disaster of Hindenburgian proportions this season. According to Cleaning the Glass, he is generating 72.6 points per 100 shot attempts. The next worst high usage player is LaMelo Ball at 85.9 PSA, and after that its Talen Horton-Tucker at 92.7. Other stars around the league like Trae, KAT and CP3 are slumping, but no one is doing it as spectacularly as Randle.

But this season is six games old. Normally, this would be far too soon to make any grand proclamations. Players with Randle’s accolades are usually afforded more rope before the vultures start circling, let alone ones coming off an injury.

But this isn’t a normal situation, because this isn’t the first time this story has been written.

Or the second.

Or the third.

Between Randle’s initial season in New York, the Atlanta series meltdown, thumbs down-gate, the ‘21-22 season as a whole, and finally last year’s playoffs, we’re now on the sixth iteration of Julius Randle proving all of his doubters right and making all of his believers question their sanity.

Like any long-running horror franchise, each additional installment engenders less and less thoughtful critique. We’re getting close to Jason Takes Manhattan levels of apathy here. It’s the same old shit, repackaged in a different place and time. No one has any energy left to relitigate the Julius Randle “thing.”

The result is an onslaught of negativity and doomcasting that will become a self-fulfilling prophesy if the narrative feeds his play as much as his play feeds the narrative. And do any of us, having watched this player for nearly a half decade now, believe that the noise isn’t getting to him?

This shouldn’t carry the weight that it does. New York hasn’t played bad. They have a positive net rating against a brutal schedule. They’re far from the only team with big ambitions to have started poorly.

But if Julius doesn’t right the ship soon, the dark cloud that grows bigger and bigger each additional time he misremembers how to play basketball will consume the Knicks and their season before they know what hit them. That is the power of this city, where the volume is amplified tenfold, and where there is no brighter spotlight than the one that shines amidst colossal failure.

Love Julius or hate Julius, if you want the Knicks to be good this year, pray to whatever God you believe in that he gets himself right, and soon.

It’s not like there’s any patience left to deal with the alternative.

2. Oh yeah, about that Brunson guy... On Saturday night, Jalen Brunson became the ninth Knick ever to score at least 45 points for a second time in blue and orange, joining Bernard King (8 times), Carmelo Anthony (7x), Patrick Ewing (6x), Richie Guerin (5x), the aforementioned Julius Randle (3x) and Willis Reed, Latrell Sprewell and Allan Houston, all of whom did it twice.

His second half was majestic, as he poured in 29 points and single-handedly kept the Knicks in the game.

2023 DPOY runner up Brook Lopez didn’t stand a chance.

Things still aren’t perfect. He’s struggled from deep in every game besides Atlanta, and 4.3 assists to 2.5 turnovers isn’t anywhere close to his normal averages. You get the sense he still hasn’t found the right balance between passing and shooting - arguably the singular swing skill that will determine whether he can ever be a championship-level point guard.

But Friday night was a great step in the right direction, and with Randle’s ongoing struggles, it couldn’t have come at a better time.

3. Shooting woes. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

After overcoming a 20th ranked effective field goal percentage last season to finish with the third ranked offense in the league, New York is now dead last in effective field goal percentage.

Their three-point shooting has stood out with some especially poor performances, including a 10-for-39 showing against Milwaukee, but the Knicks weren’t even in the bottom five in 3-point percentage entering the weekend. From two-point range though, not only are they last, but they’re last by a mile.

New York is hitting just 44.9 percent of shots inside the arc. How bad is that? Their 2FG% is closer to the 3FG% of the Clippers (42.0 percent) than the 2FG% of the next worst team inside the arc - the Wolves at 48.3 percent.

Zooming in even more, the problems have been from close range. According to Cleaning the Glass, the Knicks are mediocre when it comes to short and long mid-range shots, but are hitting exactly half of their shots at the rim. Going into Sunday’s games, the gap between their rim shooting and that of the 29th ranked Pistons (58.3 percent) was larger than the gap between the Pistons and 15th ranked Indiana (66.5 percent).

Based on positional rankings, most rotation players are culprits to some degree, but one stands out among the rest:

You see that number correctly. Julius is hitting 17 percent of his shots from close range on 18 attempts, which is worse than his conversion rate on above the break threes.

The good news is that all of these numbers should rebound, but like everything else with this team, time is of the essence.

Play of the Day

It didn’t wind up amounting to anything, but for seven seconds of game time, this looked like it was going to be one of the biggest shots of Jalen Brunson’s Knick career:

This was only Brunson’s second 3-pointer of the game, as almost all of his damage was from inside the arc and from the foul line.

That gives us our fun fact of the day! Brunson is the first player 6'2" or shorter to score at least 45 in a game while hitting two or fewer threes since 2008. Two players pulled it off that year: Tony Parker, and in a Knicks overtime loss to the Blazers in March of 2008, Nate Robinson.

💫 Stars of the Game 💫

⭐️ Mitchell Robinson: A toss up between Mitch and Immanuel Quickley, who had a good argument for getting more than 22 minutes in a game where he was one of the few Knicks who could hit a shot (5-for-10, 14 points).

But I went with Robinson, who pulled down 15 rebounds (6 offensive) and continues to play high level defense all over the court. He was 0-for-4 from the field, but three of those attempts were on tip shots after someone else missed and he couldn’t quite come down with the offensive board.

Robinson has widened his league-lead in offensive rebounds per game, grabbing nearly two more a night than second place Jalen Duren, and he’s 6th in overall rebounding.

⭐️ ⭐️ Quentin Grimes: The breakout game we’ve been waiting for.

After hitting 5-of-10 from downtown, Grimes’ 3-point percentage went up from 30 to 36 percent - a good reminder to disregard early season small sample size theater.

I really liked what we saw from Quentin in this game, specifically on his first two makes:

I know we’ve all been calling for Grimes to have a quicker trigger, but he has to be comfortable with the shots he’s taking. Here, he uses the Randle…umm…screen? Sure, let’s call it a screen. Anyway, he uses it to create some separation between him and Dame and get some breathing room.

On his second make, Grimes pump fakes, but doesn’t go into his usual drive. Instead, he simply repositions and gets off a cleaner look.

I know we fret over Grimes having to share the court with three ball dominant players, but the byproduct of this is that the weakest perimeter defender will be on Grimes every single game. He has to find ways to take better advantage of those situations, and on Friday night, he did just that.

⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ Jalen Brunson: I already waxed poetic about Brunson, so I’ll just take a moment here to acknowledge the murmuring from his doubters: No, Jalen is not a perfect point guard, and yes, his score-first mentality is at least part of the problem in addition to being part of the solution. You’d love his assist rate to be up around 35 percent, or even 30, as opposed to the 25 it currently is.

I get it. I also get that this team was going nowhere before Brunson arrived and would be in the middle of nowhere if he left. He remains unequivocally the Knicks’ best asset, and pondering whether he’ll ever be able to adjust his game to accommodate a true A1-level star is a first world problem we should be lucky to have.

In the meantime, we know he’s capable of spearheading an elite offense because we just saw it last season. And for whatever its worth after six games, New York has a top-three defense even though he’s on the court for most of every game.

Perspective.

Tip-Ins…

🏀 Speaking of that top-three defense, at some point we will stop paying attention to the tiny sample size and consider it reality. To that end, it was a good sign that the Bucks nailed nearly 43 percent of their shots from behind the arc and the Knicks still limited them to 110 points. Teams are now hitting roughly league average from three against New York, which is a good sign that the defensive uptick is here to stay.

🏀 It’s a good thing RJ Barrett seems to be on the verge of returning. Thanks to an almost inconceivable 35.0 effective field goal percentage, the starting lineup with Hart in place of Barrett was scoring at a rate that would result in relegation if the NBA allowed such a thing, whereas the RJ-led lineups had been having better success:

The issue (as you’ll see from the third line of lineup data) is that the RJ-led backup units haven’t exactly feasted either. The common denominator? Josh Hart, who should send Julius Randle a gift basket for taking all of the negative attention and not leaving any left over. Hart is hitting 33 percent from the field and 25 percent from three. The weakest part of this sad resume? He’s 3-for-14 on midrange attempts.

🏀 Not escaping blame here is Donte DiVincenzo. After a nice home game against the Cavs, he was 1-of-8 on Friday night. He’s run very hot and cold as a Knick.

🏀 After mashing the Bucks on the boards, 56-41, New York is now comfortably leading the league in defensive rebounding percentage and is third in offensive rebounding.

🏀 With RJ out again, Thibs essentially played an eight-man rotation, with Deuce getting just two first half minute. Pretty clear who’s in the circle of trust.

Final Thought

The Knicks passed several tests last season, but this is a new year with new goals, and things are rough right now. That’s the penalty of having real expectations. You want that pressure - it means you’re leveling up. All part of the growth process.

Right now feels like a pivot point, with the Harden-enforced Clippers, the surprising Spurs, the frisky Hornets and the world-beating Celtics all on the docket in the next week. At this point, a 5-5 start would be significant achievement. The Knicks have no one to blame for that but themselves.

The first test of the season has arrived. Time to learn something about this group.

🏀

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”