The Agony & the Ecstasy

After a disappointing trade deadline, the Knicks got their best win of the season.

Good morning! What is there even left to say about this team? I have a few words, first about last night’s game, and then about the Knicks’ trade deadline inaction, and then a deep dive into several trades from a New York perspective. Let’s get to it…

Game Recap: Knicks 116, Warriors 114

This. Freaking. Team.

After 55 games’ worth of play that made most fans apoplectic over the front office’s inaction yesterday, the Knicks came out with arguably their best effort of the season in one of the toughest places to play in the NBA. While they were a bit lethargic to start, New York didn’t take long to shore up their defense and make the Warriors earn everything they got on offense. When the Knicks had the ball, they rarely took a bad shot. Almost every possession was executed with a purpose and produced actions that put their players in positions to succeed.

What was almost always at most a two-possession game started to turn in the late third and early fourth quarter, when New York’s bench spurred a 16-4 run that gave the Knicks a 13-point lead. The Warriors battled back, cutting it to two, but Evan Fournier and Quentin Grimes hit key threes down the stretch and New York overcame a few missed free throws in the last 11 seconds to win after Klay Thompson missed a short mid-ranger to win it at the buzzer. Exhale.

3 Takeaways

⓵ Julius keeps it rolling. You’ll see more of him below as he is - spoiler alert - last night’s 3-star player, but it needs to be said up front: this is the guy we saw last season, and had so many Knicks fans convinced this organization was onto big things moving forward. On a night when Steph Curry went for 35 & 10, Randle had an argument for being the best player on the floor.

NEW YORK KNICKS @nyknicks

Stay locked in. Let's keep going.

It begged the question: what would this Knicks season have been if this is the version of Randle we’d gotten all year? There’s an argument that their 25-31 record would be inverted, at the very least. If that was the case and everything else was more or less the same, would we have been having the same conversations about selling off pieces and focusing on playing the youth? And if the Knicks think this is the version of Randle they’ll get moving forward, how does that alter how the approach the rest of the season? More thoughts on this in a bit.

⓶ Cam has a moment. I couldn’t quite give him one of the Stars of the Game - his night was a little bit too much of a mixed bag for that - but for the first time as a Knick, we saw why the front office thought it was worth it to spend a first round pick to see what Cam Reddish could do with his untapped potential.

This is the shot distance that got Cam traded from Atlanta, as he routinely relied on middies instead of getting all the way to the rim and/or drawing contact. He attacked a fair amount last night though, and some of those forays into the paint were impressive, but seeing how silky smooth this jumper was made me sympathetic to Reddish for going to it so often.

There’s a player in here somewhere. It’s now up to the Knicks to give him a chance to come out. On that note…

⓷ What Now? RJ Barrett sat out last night with the bum ankle he suffered late in the loss to Denver, and as a result, there wasn’t any immediate issue with the rotation. Quentin Grimes took Barrett’s place in the starting five, and Reddish got time as a backup wing alongside Alec Burks. Barrett might sit out again, potentially until after the All-Star break, but that’s when Derrick Rose is slated to come back, which presents another issue.

The easy part of the solution, and one I’ll discuss more below, is to banish Kemba Walker for good. He was the one player who had a poor game last night and has had one strong game since he won Player of the Week eight weeks ago, and that lone solid outing was after he missed nine games recovering from a knee injury. But mothballing Walker still leaves the Knicks with 11 guys (and that’s not including Deuce McBride, who probably deserves a look at some point).

What will they do? Maybe rotate rest days for Rose, Burks, Fournier, and Randle? But what if what we saw last night continues, and it spurs a hot stretch that gets this team back into play-in position? At that point, will it just be “best player plays?”

As much as whether they make the play-in and what they can do if and when they get there matters, how they handle the rotation down the stretch of the season will matter just as much.

💫 Stars of the Game 💫

⭐️ Quentin Grimes: He only had six points on four shots, but one of them was arguably the biggest of the game on the best possessions of the game, featuring two offensive rebounds by Julius and Mitch and ending in Grimes splashing it from deep and putting the Knicks up eight with just under three to go.

The best part of this shot? No one watching had any doubt that it would go in.

That’s not why Grimes is here though. Against a team with a lot of tough covers, Girmes’ defense was invaluable, and he never let up. It was great to see him be the connecting cog on both ends with more talented players than he usually plays with. He more than fit in.

⭐️ ⭐️ Alec Burks: The man who everyone assumed would be gone and many wanted dealt came up big like he has so many times before. Burks only took seven shot but scored 15 points to go with six rebounds and five assists. He closed the game at point guard in place of the ineffective Kemba Walker and while Burks had his usual hiccups (a late travel and a costly missed free throw) they don’t win this game without him.

⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ Julius Randle: Over his last five games, Julius Randle is 10th in the league in scoring at 27.2 points per game. The efficiency still isn’t quite there - he’s still shooting under 50 percent from the field in that time, and a tad over 30 percent from deep - but he and Giannis are the only players putting up over 25 points, 10 boards and six assists over that stretch. More importantly, he continues to play with pace, purpose and poise. Even his isolations have gone from infuriating to inspiring:

After his 28-point, 16-point, seven-assist (and two-turnover!) outing, Randle’s teammates seemed to come up to him one by one after the win and congratulate him on the effort. For better or worse, Randle is still the leader of this team and the guys feed off his energy. That has been much more curse than gift this season, but with 26 games left, there is still time to turn it around.

But Randle needs to continue playing like this if this season has any shot of having meaning outside of ping pong balls and development. We’re at two weeks. Can it go another two months? Where wins and losses are concerned, that’s the only question that matters.

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Trade Deadline Postmortem

Let’s start here, because starting anyplace else would be disingenuous: this day was confirmation that the front office’s gambit this season included a significant miscalculation.

What was that gambit? Essentially that running back the same core as last season, with some key additions that were supposed to raise the ceiling of the group, was safest way to proceed given the organization’s long term goals.