Have A Good Summer: New York Knicks

We had another team eliminated from the playoffs on Saturday as the New York Knicks were sent home by the Indiana Pacers. Here, we bid the Knicks adieu and take a look at some of the things that will define their offseason.

• There will be an extreme reluctance to admit this for obvious reasons, but this was a pretty successful season for the Knicks. I can tell you from talking to a great many of my friends that it doesn't feel that way to a lot of people, but any season that ends with a trip to the conference finals, in this city, should be considered a successful one. It hadn't happened in 25 years. They hadn't won 50-plus games in back to back seasons in 30 years. They did both of those things this year. They lost the series, and they deserved to lose it. But they were a good team that had a good year, even if it felt kind of strange pretty much the entire time. To me, though, just because it ended in disappointing fashion doesn't mean it wasn't a success.
• About that strange feeling... It begins with a starting lineup that was supposed to blitz the league and buoy the Knicks' success but instead was mostly just fine and over the second half of the year was pretty bad. The net rating of the Jalen Brunson - Mikal Bridges - OG Anunoby - Josh Hart - Karl-Anthony Towns unit was +6.6 through the end of December, -1.9 from January through the end of the regular season, and -6.2 in the playoffs. The defensive weaknesses of Brunson and Towns were supposed to be papered over by the three wings, and too often that wasn't the case. (At least in part because Hart also became a liability defensively.) The shooting wasn't as good as it should have been. (At least in part because Bridges and Anunoby didn't shoot enough threes and Bridges had one of the worst shooting seasons of his career.) They very often amounted to less than the sum of their parts, and for a top-heavy team, that wasn't a sustainable way to win.
• In Game 6, the Knicks' two best players were simply not good enough. Jalen Brunson finally found himself struggling against Indiana's defense, as Andrew Nembhard was living in his pockets all game and he just could not find a way to take care of the ball. After doing better on defense in Game 5, he was back to being a liability on that end in Game 6. Karl-Anthony Towns' defense was maybe the team's second-biggest issue in Game 6 after the turnovers and run-outs the opposite way, and he looked disjointed and out of sorts offensively all night as well. It obviously wasn't just about the two of them, but when your best guys don't show up for an elimination game, you're probably not going to win.
• One of the few guys who did show up for Game 6 was OG Anunoby. Guy is awesome. He can be an inconsistent and frustrating offensive player but he is an absolute marvel on the other end of the floor and when he's being aggressive on the drive and making his shots, it's really quite something to behold his two-way brilliance. He's worth every penny of the new contract he signed last summer.

• The Towns experience went just about the way you should have expected it to go coming into the year. He was at times marvelous. He was at times maddening. He was very often both within the same game or even the same trip up and down the floor. He is basically an unstoppable offensive player when he's being aggressive. He's such a good shooter. He's brutalizing in the post. He even got his off-the-dribble game to a higher level this year, and especially in this series against Indiana. But he too often disappears from the offense. (This was also the case throughout his entire career in Minnesota. Again, no surprises.) And that was especially true once teams started consistently guarding him with wings rather than bigs. He and Brunson didn't amplify each other's skills enough. And his defense was a major liability early in the year, then again at various times during the playoffs. He was good against Boston but brutal against Indiana. But again, you knew coming into the season that his defense would be an issue. We've seen throughout his career that a team with Towns at the five is not going to be able to survive defensively against the best offensive teams. But if you play him next to a center, if often negates — or at least diminishes — his biggest advantage on offense. That's just what it is. In a vacuum, the cost to acquire Towns was worth it. The Knicks weren't going to bring Julius Randle back beyond this year anyway, and Donte DiVincenzo was the price of doing business. Trades don't happen in a vacuum, though, and they're definitely in an interesting place with Towns and his contract next. (He's extension-eligible, by the way. That should be interesting.)
• The Mikal Bridges experience was much more frustrating. His jumper was inconsistent all year. He was money from the corners and mid-range but his altered release point left his above-the-break threes consistently short. He shied away from contact seemingly whenever possible. He struggled defensively to begin the season while getting used to playing with Towns, but eventually came around and hit an incredible level for the first two rounds of the playoffs. He then struggled again with Tyrese Haliburton for much of the conference finals. He had a few playoff stretches where he arguably won the Knicks the game with his mid-range scoring but also some games where he just could not hit shots and would not take layups. He got an outsized shared of the blame from Knick fans all year as a sort of exemplar of why they liked last year's team better than this year's, but he also just wasn't good enough — regardless of what it cost to acquire him. Some of that is on him, obviously. The shooting, the lack of aggressiveness. Some of it is on the coaching staff. I still cannot believe that he didn't play the second unit minutes at the start of the second and fourth quarters when Brunson was sitting, for the whole year, essentially until the playoffs. (He did occasionally, but that should've been his consistent role.) He didn't have the ball in his hands often enough, and therefore was relegated to being the type of option he was in Phoenix rather than a hybrid of that player and the one he was in Brooklyn, which is what was clearly the idea behind acquiring him in the first place. And some of it is on the fit. He and Towns struggled with their communication on screens all year. They never got on the same page. It doesn't necessarily seem like he and Tom Thibodeau (more on Thibs in a bit, obviously) were on the same page, either. My friends would say the vibes were simply off with Mikal all year, and I think I'd have to agree.
• Josh Hart would probably like to destroy the tape of the final three games of this series. I think he's more an exemplar of what went "wrong" for this team, as much as one could say that things went wrong for a team that went to the conference finals, than Bridges is. He's sort of the guy who represents the lack of innovation and experimentation throughout the regular season and the playoffs, and Thibs' reluctance to ever take him off the floor in favor of another shooter, rather than another big man, was at times bordering on comical. (Teams were only able to guard Towns the way they did because Hart was always on the floor.) The starters with Deuce McBride in place of Hart, famously, played 82 non-garbage time possessions all regular season, then 16 more in the playoffs. Hart is a very good player and he obviously has an important role to play as a chaos-causer, rebounder, playmaker, and guy who gets them out in transition. But there are going to be some nights where he doesn't have it, and on those nights it has to be okay to cut his minutes and turn to someone else. If the Knicks can find a different fit for the starting lineup and bring Hart off the bench for 24-28 minutes a game rather than having to depend on him to play 36-plus every single night, they'd probably benefit from it.

• Shout out to Mitchell Robinson. Guy worked his way back from a pair of ankle surgeries to be New York's second-best player in the playoffs, looking like an absolute pterodactyl-style monster for most of his time on the floor. I was consistent in insisting that they trade him for someone to help this year (while also insisting that nobody would take on his contract due to the injury issues, which is exactly what happened), but there's nobody they could have acquired who could have helped them more than he did during this run.
• There are a lot of decisions to be made this summer. (There will obviously be some Giannis Antetokounmpo talk, but I cannot possibly imagine a scenario where the Bucks don't get a lot more than what the Knicks can offer.) Towns and Bridges are eligible for extensions. I'd think they hold off on Towns and pay Bridges, just based on the actual dollar cost of each potential transaction. I'm already ready for the full-scale freakout at the cost of Mikal's extension. Of course, they could also decide to move on from one or both of them after just one season, if they're convinced this mix of players just doesn't work. They've been aggressive in rectifying moves that they view as mistakes, before. I think it's more difficult to do so when the moves were as costly as these were, but it's not impossible. Robinson is headed into the final year of his deal. He was obviously essential to the playoff run, and given his $13 million salary, you're probably not going to find equivalent value for him on the trade market, but it's also hard to justify giving him another contract given how infrequently he's actually on the court. If they move on from Robinson, and if Precious Achiuwa isn't back (which I can't imagine he will be), is Ariel Hukporti ready to be the backup center? (I'm skeptical.) If Thibs isn't going to be willing to play McBride with the starters, do you try to turn him into a piece that will be a better fit? You'd almost certainly have to combine him with Robinson or someone else to do so, considering his low salary. Do either Delon Wright or Landry Shamet want to come back on minimum deals again? I can't imagine Cameron Payne will be back after the way the playoffs went. Is Tyler Kolek ready to be the backup point guard if Payne and Wright are gone? Is Pacome Dadiet going to give the Knicks anything or is 2024 essentially going to turn into another draft that the Knicks punted because taking a guy mostly because he would be willing to accept 80% of the rookie scale contract, rather than because he could be a contributor? More than anything else, they really need someone else who can create off the dribble for someone other than himself. I'm not sure that guy is on the roster, and I'm not sure how they go about getting him.
• Okay, about Thibs. There are Knick fans that will swear up and down that he's a terrible coach. I think those fans are very silly. He's a good coach. (He collects all the low-hanging fruit by getting his teams to play hard, hammer the glass, limit fouls and turnovers, and come prepared every night. If all that was easy, everyone would do it.) He just has flaws, and those flaws stick out more, the further you go into the playoffs, where flaws are always magnified. There are more specific ways to lay them out, but they all essentially boil down to inflexibility. Inflexibility with lineup decisions. Inflexibility with regard to who is a sacred cow on the roster. Inflexibility with schemes. Inflexibility with the general philosophy of how you can win in the modern NBA. If there's anything that we've seen especially the past few seasons, it's that flexibility is one of the biggest virtues you can have these days. You have to be able to play multiple styles. You have to be able and willing to use different kinds of lineups and different kinds of schemes. Look at the two teams in the Finals this year. The Thunder are maybe the most flexible team in recent memory. The Pacers go deeper than almost anyone in the league and Rick Carlisle will try absolutely anything to gain an advantage. Look at last year's Celtics, whose versatility turned them into a team that essentially had no weaknesses because it could play your style, better than you could, no matter what that style was. Even look at the Nuggets from two years ago, who could close a different way every night because they would use their best bench player (Bruce Brown) in place of any non-Nikola Jokic or Jamal Murray starter if that guy didn't have it going on any particular night. The Knicks are not like that, and it seems like that's by design, because they don't want to be. They want to play their way, with their guys. You just can't always do that. Especially when your guys struggle, as a group, the way they did in the second half of the year. All of this said, Thibs is very obviously not going anywhere after back to back 50-win seasons and a conference finals trip, and while I know there was reporting to the contrary, I don't think he was going anywhere even if the Knicks had lost earlier in the playoffs. He and Leon Rose are essentially brothers. The Knicks barely pretended to consider anyone else for the coaching job in the first place. Brunson came to the Knicks at least in part to play for Thibs, and routinely reiterates his confidence in the coach when given the opportunity. I'm not the kind of person who thinks you should already have the next coach lined up if you're going to move on from your current coach, but that is the common thinking in and around the league, and I don't see an obvious fit there. (To me, unless your coach is giving you an obvious advantage through scheme or culture or preparedness or something else every single night, you should be open to a change, and you should search far and wide to find the right fit. Interview everybody and hire the guy with the best plan. But that's a minority view.) I do think changing the coach is probably the easiest route to trying to find a different result next year, if only because it would be difficult to make a difference-making trade, but I also don't think there's a remote possibility of it happening. So instead, I will reiterate what I do seemingly every year a Thibs team gets eliminated: He needs an offensive coordinator that will bring in new ideas, and he needs to be more flexible overall.