Teams like Minnesota and Atlanta rushed into the first star deals they could find last summer. When the right deal presents itself, the Knicks will pounce.īut that "right deal" qualifier is critical here. While many of their veterans have fallen out of the rotation, they still have mid-sized contracts with valuable team options on players like Rose and Evan Fournier to easily match dollars in a trade. New York has 10 first-round picks at its disposal. That is exactly what the Knicks are currently built to do. Of course, we know that the goal is explicitly not to keep it together, which is why we opened this story with a comparison to the teams that recently traded for stars. Add all of this together and the Knicks not only have a winner that appears sustainable, but assuming they keep it together, is probably going to get better in the coming years. Their 10 most-used players are all 28 or younger, and aside from Randle and Brunson (as well as deadline acquisition Josh Hart, who hasn't been around long enough to hit the threshold), they're all 24 or younger. Those players have delivered.Īnd for the most part, those players are quite young. The latter demands excellence out of your best players. The former relies on beating the opponent's worst players. This approach is inherently more sustainable. Swap Sixth Man of the Year favorite Immanuel Quickley in for Barrett and that figure drops to just plus-7.2. Their most-used lineup of Randle, Brunson, Barrett, Robinson and Quentin Grimes outscores opponents by 8.6 points per 100 possessions. The 2021 Knicks won games with their bench.īut the 2023 team? They win with their starters. Their next three most-used lineups, all built around bench sensation Derrick Rose, outscored opponents by at least 14.4 points per 100 possessions. Swap in Mitchell Robinson for Noel and the net rating improves to a pedestrian plus-1.9. Barrett, Elfrid Payton and Nerlens Noel was New York's most-used lineup that season at 554 total minutes… and it was outscored by 4.6 points per 100 possessions. Without Brunson, the 2021 Knicks largely lost the minutes their starters played. This is perhaps the biggest difference between the 20 Knicks. 4 compare quite favorably to Mitchell's in the same time period. 4, Brunson has looked like the star the Knicks keep failing to trade for. Good shots are easier to come by with Jalen Brunson in town. Of course, it helps that the entire playmaking burden isn't falling on his shoulders this season. ![]() He's also down to just 3.9 turnovers per 100 possessions, the lowest figure he's posted since the 2015-16 season, which was his de-facto rookie year. Randle is making better decisions with the ball, and that's not just limited to the shots he's taking. Only 16.2% of his shots came within three feet of the rim in 2021. He's cut his mid-range attempts in more than half from 5.8 per game to 2.6 this season, and in exchange, he's added three 3-pointers. Randle is down to more reasonable percentages on his jumper this season, but more importantly, he's relying on better shots. The same trend played out in his 3-point shooting: 160 makes on 41.1% shooting in his Most Improved Player season, 168 makes on 29.5% in his entire career beforehand. In his entire career prior, he'd made 178 in total. Randle hit 171 mid-range shots that season. Speaking of unsustainable shooting, much of their 2021 success offensively relied on Julius Randle making jumpers that, to that point in his career, he'd never made. This season, they're at 37.6%, which is tied for ninth and largely in line with the league average. Knicks opponents shot just 34.7% on wide-open 3-pointers that season, the second-lowest figure in the league. The 2021 team won largely through a smoke-and-mirrors defense that ranked fourth in the NBA, but did so on the strength of unsustainable shooting luck. 4 seed in the Eastern Conference only to get unceremoniously eliminated in the first round before fading back into the lottery? Well, yeah, but this team doesn't have much in common with this one. ![]() After all, weren't we here just two years ago, when a surprising Knicks team earned the No. The Knicks have the NBA's third-best offense and eighth-best defense since that date. Only the Nuggets, Bucks and 76ers have won more games. But since that mythical date when the Knicks shortened their rotation to nine and committed to their young players, New York has been among the best teams in the NBA. Durant has only played three games in Phoenix, after all. 4, all of them have been worse than the New York Knicks. What do those five teams have in common? Since Dec. Five teams have traded for All-Stars since the beginning of the 2022 offseason: the Atlanta Hawks ( Dejounte Murray), Minnesota Timberwolves ( Rudy Gobert), Cleveland Cavaliers ( Donovan Mitchell), Dallas Mavericks ( Kyrie Irving) and Phoenix Suns ( Kevin Durant).
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