Barrett has improved his finishing around the rim, but his shooting has always been his biggest question mark, one he appeared to answer last year when he shot 40.1 percent from deep. All of Barrett’s numbers have declined from last year as well. Randle is shooting only 41.7 percent from the field and 32.5 percent from 3 - all below his career averages. Randle, the team’s best player, has faced an onslaught of double teams without reliable shooting around him, and he has struggled. Like with Walker, if Fournier isn’t consistently a 3-point threat, there’s little reason for him to be on the floor. But overall, Fournier shot 5 for 12 for 13 points in 22 minutes, with no rebounds or assists. Thibodeau did call his number on Tuesday night against the Nets, and Fournier rewarded him by hitting a game-tying 3-pointer with 18 seconds left. The team is near the top of the league in contested shots and toward the bottom in wide-open ones.įournier’s stats dipped in November like Walker’s did, causing Thibodeau to barely use him in key moments late in games. The Knicks don’t have much of a fast-break offense and often depend on isolations to get their points - which would be fine if their shooters did more work on their own to get open rather than just standing still. A great shooter.”īut Burks doesn’t fully solve a starting lineup problem that led Thibodeau to increasingly rely on the bench late in games. “You’re able to switch 1 through 4,” Derrick Rose, the Knicks reserve guard, said of Burks’s insertion into the lineup. Early in the third quarter, Burks blocked a Patty Mills 3-pointer - easier for him than for Walker. On Tuesday night, he was just as likely to guard the 6-foot-5 James Harden as the quick rookie guard Cameron Thomas, who is 6-foot-3. He’s bigger - listed at 6-foot-6 - which makes him a more versatile defender. Inserting Burks into the starting lineup for Walker makes some things easier for the Knicks. If his 3s aren’t falling, there isn’t much else he’s doing on the court. In 12 games last month, Walker shot only 29.6 percent from deep. But Walker’s play took a nosedive in November after a hot start. He’s averaging 11.7 points per game on 42.9 percent shooting from the field, and an excellent 41.3 percent from 3-point range. Walker wasn’t the sole issue, but he was a big part of the problem. That places this unit among the worst starting or bench lineups in the N.B.A. Its net rating - a measure of how much better or worse a team or group is than their opponents - is negative 15.7, according to the league’s tracking numbers. The starting lineup the Knicks (11-10) have played for much of the season - Walker, Barrett, Evan Fournier, Julius Randle and Mitchell Robinson - hasn’t just struggled. 21, against Chicago, the Bulls raced out to a 20-8 start en route to victory. Even against the Houston Rockets, one of the worst teams in the N.B.A., the Knicks fell behind 18-11 in the first quarter before tying the game by halftime and winning. 10 loss to the Milwaukee Bucks, the reigning champions, the Knicks went down double digits in the first quarter. But for the Knicks, the starters - even beyond Walker - are the reason they are a fringe playoff team instead of near the top of the Eastern Conference standings. If playoff teams are consistently hurt by any part of their roster, it’s usually a thin bench. At 31, Walker, in theory, should still be in his athletic prime.īut Thibodeau was trying to correct for an urgent, and frequent, problem: Knicks starters putting the team in a hole that the bench has to dig it out of. Thibodeau told reporters that Walker would be out of the rotation entirely.Ĭhanging a starter this early in the season is significant, particularly when it’s one with Walker’s résumé. And it wasn’t just that Walker, a four-time All-Star who signed with the Knicks in the summer, was being yanked from the lineup. So it was surprising this week, a quarter of a way through the season, when Thibodeau said that he was pulling the plug on Kemba Walker as the starting point guard in favor of Alec Burks, a reserve for most of his career and not a traditional point guard. He’s often been criticized for playing them for too many minutes, rain or shine, whether or not they are performing well. Knicks Coach Tom Thibodeau has long been known as resistant to change, particularly in the way he uses his starters.
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