Leading Men
Behind the combined efforts of RJ Barrett and Julius Randle, the Knick have turned around their season.
Good morning to any and all fans of the team with more wins in their last 11 games than they had in their previous 26. It has been that kind of a turnaround for the Knickerbockers of New York, and boy oh boy, is it wonderful to have fun basketball back in our lives once again.
If you’ve been away because, well…the Knicks kind of stunk for a bit, there’s never been a better time to get back in and become a full subscriber to this newsletter.
Let’s do this.
Game Recap: Knicks 117, Hawks 108
Both teams came out of the gate firing, with solid shot-making by the Hawks and the Knicks once again using RJ Barrett drives as the foundation of their offense. New York clamped down on the defensive end midway through the second, and over a nearly nine-minute stretch across halftime, gave up just 13 points to the league’s second ranked offense. The Knicks’ offense got a little stagnant as we got into the fourth, and a borderline blowout turned into a one-possession game for most of the final frame. Thankfully New York saved its best for last, and with Julius Randle running the show late, repeatedly targeted the weak, balding underbelly of Atlanta’s defense and got good shots almost every time down the floor. This one wasn’t close in the end.
3 Takeaways
⓵ The Knicks…are…good? Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Even over this 8-3 stretch which has seen the Knicks get back above .500, climb into a tie for 9th in the conference and within a game of 7th place, they barely have a top 10 net rating in this span. They also still have a negative net rating on the season, in a tight cluster with the Spurs and Hornets for 16th through 18th place in those rankings. But for the first time since what seems like last season, New York followed up a good, well-played win with another good, well-played win. Once is an accident, twice is a coincidence…win today against Charlotte, and we can start talking.
⓶ RJ continues leaping. As we’ll get into in a bit, RJ Barrett was not the Knicks’ best player on Saturday night. He wasn’t quite as efficient inside the arc as we’ve seen lately and there were times we were reminded of the limitations he still has in his game (more on that below). But if this was an example of a not great game from RJ Barrett, then RJ Barrett is a star, or at least a star in the making.
Over his last eight games, RJ is one of five players in the NBA averaging at least 24 points, five rebounds, three assists and two made triples per game, joining LeBron James, Devin Booker, Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown - and Barrett’s 42.6 percent conversion rate from deep in those games leads the group. That’s the company he’s been keeping lately.
⓷ Smart Defense. Early on, it looked like this was going to be a long night - not in the figurative sense, but literally: the refs were calling everything and the Knicks committed nine personal fouls in the first period alone. New York cleaned up their act though, and the Hawks only attempted six freebies for the rest of the game after getting to the charity stripe 11 times in the first quarter.
It’s been the continuation of a trend that has allowed New York to rise to a season-high 16th place in the defensive rating rankings: not fouling. Over their last five games, the Knicks have the second-lowest opponents’ free throw attempt rate in the NBA, and are 10th on the season. Combine that with the 9th best free throw rate when they have the ball, and we can see that New York is succeeding on the margins in a subtle but important way.
Macri, How Can You Not Be Concerned About…
Obi Toppin? Primarily, because this is a second-year player who is entirely dependent on the playmaking of others to look good, and the looks simply haven’t been there for him as he’s scored 10 total points in the last six games. It doesn’t mean New York’s most electrifying player over the season’s first 37 games has suddenly lost it.
It does mean, however, that the ways he can impact the game are more limited than others, and without the well-oiled machine that was the Knicks’ fully healthy bench helping to prop him up, he hasn’t been able to make the same impact. When Derrick Rose returns and Immanuel Quickley no longer has to handle so much of the ball-handling responsibilities, Toppin will be back to his normal self.
More importantly, while Obi Toppin is an important player and asset for this team, he is not bigger than the team. His recent lack of production shouldn’t put a damper on the team finally playing solid, consistent basketball. Not everyone is going to make a positive impact all the time.
💫 Stars of the Game 💫
⭐️ Mitchell Robinson
⭐️ ⭐️ RJ Barrett
Grouping these two together not only because they are split by the thinnest of hairs, but because you can argue that any of the four non-Randle starters deserves the two-star designation. That’s how well they played.
Burks just continues to do a little bit of everything for this team, racking up nine boards and eight dimes to go with an ultra-efficient 17 points on eight shots. Fournier may have an even better argument. The Hawks were on a 14-3 midway through the fourth to cut the lead to two when Fournier knocked down a massive step-back three and followed it up with a pretty drive to push the lead back to seven. Then with just over two minutes left, he knocked down a three to increase the lead to 11, and that was that. He came up big when it mattered most.
And yet, they fall just short. The competition was that tough.
The Hawks simply didn’t have an answer for Mitchell Robinson, who had 14 and 13, including five on the offensive glass.
We sometimes complain about his inability to match up with the game’s elite big men and fives who can really stretch the floor, but there is a flip side to that coin, which is that many teams simply don’t have the personnel who can handle Robinson if he’s active and engaged. He hasn’t always been throughout the season, but he sure is lately.
As for RJ, he didn’t have the really good stuff (just 6-for-15 inside the arc) but as all great players must, he found other ways to help, relentlessly driving and doing as good a job drawing fouls as we’ve seen all year. Thanks to eight made freebies in 10 trips, he ended up with 26 points. The next step in his evolution: figuring out how to punish teams who stick a big on him and dare him to beat them.
There was another instance a few minutes later when RJ was matched up on Onyeka Okongwu and came up with a similar attempt and result. Gallo is crafty as hell and Okongwu is very mobile for his size, but even so, learning how to take advantage of these sorts of mismatches is the next step in Barrett’s path to stardom.
⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ Julius Randle: Forget the counting stats. Julius Randle has had a positive plus-minus in each of the last three games. That hasn’t happened since a three-game stretch that started at the end of April last season.
Taking it a step further, he’s had a positive plus-minus in eight of his last 11 outings. When you consider that he had just nine just games in the previous 30 contests, it really hammers home just how much better he’s been playing. Along with fellow early-season villain Evan Fournier, Randle has the best on-off metrics on the team over their last 13 games.
On Saturday night, we saw several examples of why that is, as the many layers of this unique player were on display. He was decisive. He was quick-thinking. He was a fully engaged orchestrator, even when the play didn’t result in a shot attempt coming off his hands, as Ben Ritholtz expertly broke down here. He often used his nearly unmatched combination of skill and strength to get good looks for both he and his teammates.
More than any of that though, and more than the 24 points or the nine assists or the six rebounds, Randle gets three stars today because he just wanted this game more than anyone else on the court:
It’s good to have you back, big guy.
Leading Men
It took 43 games.
Forty three games.
But finally, finally, I felt like I was watching last season’s Knicks. Or at least a version of the Knicks that made me feel the way I felt about them last season.
I didn’t feel this way during the 5-1 start, which every Knicks fan knew deep down was built on the fool’s gold of unsustainably hot shooting1. I certainly didn’t feel this way after their defense started to become exposed, dropping all the way to 4th worst in the NBA after 10 games - a mirror image of last season’s top-four ranking.
I didn’t feel this way after any of the “good” wins2 we had during the 7-14 stretch that looked so ominous at the time, because they all contained the same troubling signs, whether it was poor play from the starters, allowing teams to make big comebacks, or both. I didn’t feel this way after they started racking up W’s against substandard NBA competition that you knew would be L’s had those teams been healthy.
I didn’t even feel this way after the Mavs game, when we saw the Knicks give their best effort of the season, simply because it was on national TV, and I’d been fooled before.
But I feel this way now, after New York followed up a great effort with one that was arguably even better. Slowly but surely, they have recaptured their defensive identity, ranking ninth in the NBA since their first 10 games, fifth over their last 15 games, and second in the league over their last 11.
There are other signs. The starters, after all scoring in double figures in the same game on opening night and then failing to do so again for nearly three months, have now done it twice in a row. Over this extremely limited sample size of three games and 65 total minutes, the current starting five is outscoring opponents by nearly 23 points per 100 possessions and has a positive net rating on the season.
It is an across the board improvement. Among non-bigs, Evan Fournier has a team-high 56.5 effective field goal percentage over the last 15 games, during which he is averaging over 17 points, and New York is now 12-2 when he scores at least 18 points. Alec Burks has been less efficient as a starter, but helps the team in so many other ways, averaging 6.7 boards and 4.7 dimes over this most recent stint with the first five. And of course there is Mitch, whose five highest scoring games of the season have all come in his last 15 outings. No one in the league has grabbed more offensive rebounds in the last 10 games than Robinson.
But the story of this turnaround, and any story about this season that concludes with a happy ending, has two men and only two men as its main characters - not as best actor and first supporting, but as co-leads.
But any fan of movies knows there is no such thing as true co-leads. Only one name can appear first in the credits or at the top of the poster. The producers have to pick someone to run in Best Actor.
And as this Knicks turnaround has taken shape, that person is RJ Barrett. On four straight nights and six times in the last eight games, Barrett has led New York in scoring. Randle, meanwhile, hasn’t paced their offensive attack since Christmas, and has only been their leading point-getter twice in the last 20 games.
This is not to say it is Barrett’s team now. Randle is still the guy who commands the attention of opposing defenses, as Ben Ritholtz captured brilliantly by highlighting Atlanta’s reaction to Julius getting the ball immediately before his assist to RJ on a huge bucket late in the game:
What we’re witnessing now is New York’s new normal - one where Julius doesn’t have to do nearly as much as he used to, and where Barrett is finally efficient enough, with enough diversity to his game, to take on more of the load. There still isn’t necessarily a great deal of synergy between them, at least not when it comes to being involved with the same play at the same time, but that’ll come. The first step was figuring out a workload that was amenable to both parties. We seem to have that foundation.
There are 39 games left. Nothing that happens over that time will turn the Knicks into contenders. They would still do well to grab a play-in spot. But for a front office that may have been asking themselves some mighty uncomfortable questions over the last few months, the movie they’re seeing play out before them - and most especially the stars of that show - have to be making them feel a whole lot better about things.
🏙 Game Night 🏀
Who: Knicks vs Hornets
When: 1:00 pm
Where: MSG
Who’s out: Kemba Walker is once again listed as questionable, although no one should hold their breath. Cam Reddish remains out, as does Nerlens Noel, who has had the year from hell. For Charlotte, they’ll be without 6th Man of the Year candidate Kelly Oubre Jr, who is in health and safety protocols.
Halftime Zoom: Click here to enter!
What to look for: How the Knicks play in the most meaningful game of the season. The steaks couldn’t be bigger, at least not for a January game. A win and a Toronto loss in Miami would vault the Knicks into a tie for 7th place in the East; a loss would leave them two games back of the Hornets and potentially on the outside of the play-in looking in. This is also a chance to show that the Knicks we fell in love with last year really are back. Keep the train moving boys.
The next entrant on the #NYK75 will be here tomorrow. In the meantime, happy Dr. Martin Luther King Day everyone. Never stop dreaming.
🏀
That’s it for today! If you enjoy this newsletter and like the Mets, don’t forget to subscribe to JB’s Metropolitan, or his new hockey newsletter, Isles Fix. See y’all soon! #BlackLivesMatter
They were 2nd in the NBA in effective field goal percentage over that early stretch, which is almost comical now given how they’ve ranked 26th ever since, although they have been a barely manageable 21st over the last 15 games.
The Lakers win, the first Hawks win, and the first Spurs win are really it.