The Top 20 Wings in the NBA

With the offseason winding down, let's have some fun and make a list.

Good morning! Reminder that this is the second of four newsletters coming your way this week, with tomorrow and Friday being the other drop days. Next week, we’re back to the normal five.

Also, kudos to Tommy Jones and brenhart for spotting an error in yesterday’s edition: under the new CBA, teams are now permitted to have 21 players on their roster in the offseason as opposed to the 20 that had been previously allowed. That means the Knicks have one more spot left to fill. My guess is that they’ll use it on a familiar face.

Wings are the Thing

Today’s double entry mailbag covers arguably the greatest strength of the 2024-25 Knicks: their wings.

To ease our way into this conversation, our first question comes from Brian, who asks:

How concerned are you about our lack of size in a league that’s getting bigger?  We have only one rotation player over 6'9" and our top three off the bench are all guard-sized (yes, I know Josh plays bigger, but we saw how his lack of size hurt against Siakam).

On a scale of 1-10, probably a 2 or 3.

This isn’t to minimize Brian’s concern. As he says, the league is very clearly trending towards skilled size. Denver established the blueprint two years ago by winning it all behind a starting five that included 6'10" Michael Porter Jr at small forward and 6'5" Kentavious Caldwell-Pope at shooting guard. Then last season, Minnesota followed the same script en route to the league’s best defense while Dallas rampaged through the West playoffs behind their own jumbo starting five. And of course we had Boston, with no starter shorter than 6'4".

But the Celtics are also the best example of why I’m not very worried about the Knicks. The goal for every NBA team is to accumulate as many versatile wing players as possible - guys who don’t take anything off the table at either end of the floor. Boston did that and got a title for their trouble, but the Knicks are now nipping at their heels with the addition of Mikal Bridges.