The names and numbers kept rolling in, like reports of a legalized bank robbery where men wore jerseys instead of masks, and carried their winnings not under cover of night, but in open daylight…
Dejounte Murray, four years, $64 million
Domas Sabonis, four years, $74.9 million
Buddy Hield, four years, $86 million
Jaylen Brown, four years, $115 million
Pascal Siakam, four years, $130 million
One was more staggering than the next. It was as if the universe was sending one, final (hopefully unnecessary) reminder to the New York Knicks that for the next two years at least, they better help themselves, because help ain’t comin’ from the outside.
The flurry of deadline deals reached by soon-to-be restricted free agents were the last nails in the coffin of a free agency period that will be D.O.A. come June 30, 2020. What was already a fairly barren summer quickly became a wasteland, where arguably only a handful of the most desirable 100 or so names in the NBA will be available for meetings, if even that many.
It was against this backdrop that one Frank Ntilikina (along with, unsurprisingly, Dennis Smith Jr. and Kevin Knox) received an assurance that he would be playing basketball for a living at least through the 2021-22 season. That much is certain.
What is wholly uncertain is where those two years will be spent. Yesterday did little to clarify that. What it did instead was assure us that the folks running this team at least had enough good sense not to bite their nose to spite their face.
Remember: The best argument for not letting Ntilikina enter unrestricted free agency in 2020 had nothing to do with the promise he’s shown as a player (although there are some of us who believe that it quite real). No, the best argument is that regardless of whether Frank is in the team’s long term plans or not, picking up his option only increased his value.
The reason is simple: If New York did find a team willing to believe what they maybe aren’t - that Ntilikina’s offensive game will round into form at some point in the near future – having him for an extra season and retaining his restricted free agency rights only made the pot sweeter. After all, if nothing has been clear with Frank, it is that his development will be a marathon, not a sprint. Whether it’s in New York or elsewhere, picking up his option turned down the level of urgency, at least by a few notches.
The only evidence for an argument against this decision officially went out the window with all these announced extensions. If the Knicks’ brass was planning on making a max-contract, poison-pill-laden splash in restricted free agency next summer, they’d have needed every dollar they could get. Now, Brandon Ingram stands as the only player worth making such a bet on, and Ntilikina’s salary won’t impact that one way or another.
(For the record, I agree with my Pels podcaster buddy @ChrisTrew and think Ingram gets traded to a team that intends on matching any offer. I do not think that team will – or should – be the Knicks. The fully actualized version of Ingram is a little too close to what the Knicks hope RJ Barrett will become. Having two of those guys doesn’t seem to make the most sense in the world, although I’m willing to hear arguments to the contrary)
What does this really mean for the Knicks and Ntilikina long term? Maybe something, maybe nothing. At the very least, I think it means they couldn’t find a workable trade for him before the season started, which means he should be here until at least December 15, when contracts signed this summer can be traded.
You can bet that the Knicks will be active come trade season, and throwing in Frank as a sweetener might help get a deal done. Of course, he only sweetens the pot if a team thinks it has a chance of getting its money’s worth.
The fact that he has remained a Knick this long likely means no team has been able to convince themselves of exactly that. If he is largely glued to the bench when this season continues, that isn’t going to change.
Which leads us to the elephant in the room: What is the plan now? Any positive scenario which the front office envisions - Frank turning into a productive NBA player and retiring a New York Knick, Frank getting good enough to warrant another team giving up a real asset to attain him, Frank being decent enough to serve as the aforementioned sweetener - only happens if he plays in the damn games.
How is that going to happen? Whether Elfrid Payton was promised the starer’s job or not, he is going to get minutes.
Regarding Dennis Smith Jr., it would be both the the most and least Knicksy thing ever to bench Dennis Smith Jr. in favor of Frank - “most” because they’d be burying a supremely talented guard prospect who is only 21 and has shown real signs of being a good NBA player; “least” because they’d be apathetic to the PR hit that would certainly come from giving up on the perceived primary asset from the KP trade.
Either way, it ain’t happenin’.
So what happens to our young French son? Right now, there’s 13 guys who could at least plausibly be rotation pieces from this roster. Figure one of those 13 will have some kind of bump or bruise that will render them inactive on most game nights (it seems that Taj Gibson will be first up for this assignment with a sore calf).
That gets us down to 12. Damyean Dotson admittedly still has some rust and needs to find his rhythm after recovering from an offseason shoulder surgery. For argument’s sake, lets say he’s out of the early season rotation too, at least until Wayne Ellington starts getting some “DNP: rest” designations.
Now we’re at 11. You can play 11 guys in a regular season NBA game. Is it a good idea? Or, maybe better, is it worth forgoing the standard “first / second unit” approach that provides the stability players crave? Maybe, maybe not.
If the answer is “no,” then it would seem that Frank will be battling Allonzo Trier for his minutes, which is the height of irony, as two more different players, you could not find.
Trier is a scoring machine that often cares not for basketball subtleties like defense, passing, and moving without the ball. Ntilikina, on the other hand, is capable of being the most impactful player on the floor without ever scoring a basket, at least for short stretches. One is the ultimate good soldier; the other, maybe not so much.
Best of all, they’re both capable of playing Bizzaro World versions of the same role: 12-15 minute a night spark plug, Frank for his D, Trier for his O. They can each serve as the nominal point guard, or play alongside one.
Maybe this shakes out differently on a daily basis, with both men alternating getting PT on any given night depending on the needs of the evening. San Antonio is locking down the offense in Game One? Send in Iso Zo (or is he no longer Iso Zo? But isn’t this still his Twitter handle? I’m so confused..)
Then, maybe Kyrie starts going off in Game Two, so you send in the French Prince. Around and around we go.
No scenario would shock me (well, that’s not completely true. If Ntilikina were named the starter for Wednesday night, I might faint) but if I were to bet on one transpiring, it would be this.
Let’s see what happens. The Knicks play a real game tomorrow, and Frank will be a part of it. In and of itself, that counts as progress.
For now.
The One Thing I Want To See From Kevin Knox
by Tom Piccolo
We say it every year. We mean it every year.
“This season is all about the development of our young core.”
If the Knicks exceed expectations this season on the backs of veterans on (essentially) one-year deals – Marcus Morris, Wayne Ellington, Taj Gibson, etc., the exhilaration of winning would still be a welcome change, make no mistake. Knicks fans would still get excited about the wins, but there would be a shallowness to that excitement. Most of us would deeply prefer to see promising play from RJ Barrett and demonstrable improvement from guys like Mitchell Robinson, Frank Ntilikina, and Dennis Smith Jr.
However, there is no one whose development I’m more interested in watching this season than Kevin Knox.
Knox learned a lot during his rookie season. For one, he found out that life comes at you pretty fast in the NBA. One moment, you’re the Eastern Conference’s Rookie of the Month, the next you have a legitimate case for the worst statistical season in the league. By the end of last year, it was clear that Knox had several holes (craters? crevasses? canyons?) in his game that he must address in order to become an average NBA wing, let alone a foundational cornerstone for this franchise going forward.
Defensively, he needs to get better in every aspect – guarding the pick-and-roll, navigating screens off-ball, help-side awareness, contesting shots, preventing dribble penetration, closing possessions with rebounds…literally all of it.
On the other end of the floor, things were marginally better. From behind the arc he was passable, albeit just barely. Overall, he shot 34.3% on nearly 5 attempts per game: good enough accuracy on a high enough volume to at least draw attention from defenders. His form is fluid, versatile and repeatable, and his three-point shot projects to be a reliable weapon in the years to come. Will he reach his stated goal of 40% from behind the arc this season? Unlikely. But, that feels like an attainable goal at some point in the coming years.
You could make the case that, if you had to choose one area for improvement, basketball “feel” and the resulting shot selection would be the thing to look for in Knox’s second season. He took too many of his shots from no-man’s land, launching more long mid-rangers than 80% of the league’s forwards, per Cleaning The Glass. Too many of those shots came outside the flow of the offense, early in the shot clock. He combined that high volume with the worst midrange accuracy in the league. Per NBA.com, 71 players took at least 150 midrangers last season; Knox ranked dead-last, connecting on 42-of-174 (24.3%) of those mid-range attempts.
All that said, I’m not too hung up on those stats, as troubling as they seem. It’s reasonable to project improved shot selection from Knox in the coming years. Last season, the Knicks needed a then-19-year-old Knox to carry a tremendous burden of the offense for a 17-win team. Given that enormous responsibility, combined with the shortage of surrounding talent, his questionable shot selection was practically inevitable. Over time, there’s hope that Knox will trim those off-the-dribble long twos from his shot diet like Dennis Smith Jr. cutting out Bojangles.
Really, the one thing I need to see from Knox this season is a dramatic improvement in finishing shots at the rim.