The OG is Back

A big piece of the Knicks' puzzle is about to return.

Good morning! We are so back.

Game Night

TONIGHT: Sixer at Knicks, 7:30 pm, TNT

Injury Report: FINALLY.

The news is still vague - “as soon as” is doing an awful lot of heavy lifting in the Shams report, and he’s still officially listed as questionable - but it’s better than anything we’ve gotten so far.

For Philly, Tyrese Maxey is slated to make his return. Should make for a poppin’ night at the Gardem

Halftime: See everyone tonight. Here’s the link.

What to watch for: Who does Anunoby start for?

Over the last month, ee’ve been reminded that no player is more firmly inside the Thibodeau circle of trust than Josh Hart, but does that necessarily mean he’ll continue to start? In terms of spacing, even with his occasional struggles, he’s far more of a threat than Precious. For all the handwringing, Hart is hitting 39.6 percent of 5.9 three-point attempts per game since the All-Star break, whereas Precious has hit five threes total in that time.

But keeping Hart in the starting five might not do much to solve the biggest issue New York is facing at the moment, which is where we’ll spend the majority of our time today.

Figuring out the Bench

Being in the Garden in person on Sunday night, witnessing the horror show that unfolded on the court before me, I couldn’t help but think back to a mailbag question I’d received from Mitch shortly after the Detroit trade. Mitch posited that OG was a natural replacement for RJ, but wondered how Bojan Bogdanovic and Alec Burks would replace the production the Knicks lost by sending out Immanuel Quickley and Quentin Grimes.

On the surface, I got where he was coming from. Both Quickley and Grimes had defined roles on this team as malleable, two-way pieces. IQ was obviously more of a generator of offense on his own, while Grimes thrived playing off of the team’s more diverse players. While Bogey and Burks shared some of the qualities lost with the departure of the Knicks’ young guards, they also presented key differences, starting with the fact that neither player is a conventional backup point guard, nor do they offer as much on the defensive end as the two players they were being compared to.

It made for a good question, and one I frankly wasn’t entirely comfortable answering. So, instead of making an arbitrary guess, I wanted to see how things played out over the coming weeks.

Well, Sunday marked one month since both Burks and Bogey made their debut in blue and orange, with Alec playing in every game and Bojan missing just one. It’s enough of a sample size that I felt comfortable taking a deeper look at Mitch’s question, although to do that, I thought we needed to go back in time - not just to the beginning of this year, but to the start of last season, when Jalen Brunson first arrived.

The reason is simply to divorce perception from reality. As we’ll see shortly, while Sunday was the latest instance of the reserves not holding their end of the bargain, New York’s bench woes are anything but a recent phenomenon…

PHASE 1: Brunson’s first season

All year long, we heard the narrative that New York’s depth was one of its greatest strengths.

To a large extent, this was true. They had the 6th Man of the Year runner-up in Immanuel Quickley, two starting-caliber centers, transition demon Obi Toppin (who had many fans calling for more playing time right up ‘till the end), and after the trade deadline, the insufferable Josh Hart. Tying it all together was RJ Barrett, who played third fiddle with the starters but had more opportunity to cook with the reserves.

In theory, it was a perfect mix. In reality, it was anything but.

According to Cleaning the Glass, in 883 non-garbage time possessions last season with Quickley & RJ in and Brunson & Randle out, the Knicks were outscored by 4.4 points per 100 possessions. They had a very good defense, but a bottom-of-the-barrel offense that ranked in the 4th percentile of all five-man combos league wide.

Looking at the top five most used lineups that fall under this umbrella, all were bad, and none could muster a half-decent offense:

While it’s tempting to blame the poor production on Barrett, in the 576 possessions IQ played without him (or JB or Julius), the overall results were better because of an elite defense, but those groups still scored just 113.0 points per 100 possessions - good for the 35th percentile across the league.

Clearly, this was a problem that needed to be remedied coming into this season.

PHASE 2: Pre-OG trade