On a night one of the rims had issues, the Kings had even more
Late one night in a hookah bar in Alah Hahn’s hometown, a cop walked in. At the time I was dating a very white girl (culturally). I liked her political leanings, but she was blind to her privileges.
“Evening, folks,” the cop said as he passed us.
“Sup,” I replied, watching him till he was out of sight, then turning back to see my girlfriend looking as revolted as if she’d caught me flashing a nursery school bus. She herself had nothing but obvious disdain for cops, never recognizing the privileges that permitted her to do so without paying a price — there’s a reason the saying isn’t “First they came for the tall, pretty white girls who came from money, and I said nothing, because I wasn’t a tall pretty white girl who came from money.”
The New York Knicks beat the Sacramento Kings 143-120 last night, in a game with plenty of obvious candidates for the big takeaway. How about Josh Hart’s fourth triple-double in under a month? OG Anunoby scoring 20 first-half points on his way to a game-high 33 was big, especially on a night Karl-Anthony Towns struggled with his shot inside the arc and abandoned it outside of it. Mikal Bridges submitted a set of scintillating slash lines, 27/5/7 on 67/71/100 shooting. Even if your biggest concern with this season is Tom Thibodeau’s Captain Ahab-level obsession with hunting down the limits of human endurance, 13 Knicks saw action last night, including four subs who played 10+ minutes. It’s the efforts of that last lot that stood out to me by raising the question: do the Knicks possess some privileges they’re blind to?
Deuce McBride is generally regarded as the one Harlem Globetrotter on a bench closer to Washington General territory, but last night continued a season-long streaky shooting stretch by Mr. Miles. His 3-point shooting has gone from 56% in October to 33% in November to 42% last month to a chilly 25% this month, not helped by him missing seven of eight 3s last night. He continued his odd home/road splits, where he’s making 34% of his longballs at MSG versus 40% on the road. And yet the Knicks, with their supposed Achilles’ heel being their bench, improved to 4-1 this season when Deuce shoots 20% or worse from the field, and he finished the game +16.
Amidst Jalen Brunson ho-humming his way through 25 points and 11 dimes, Towns gutting through another double-double and Hart doing everything other than checking the rim’s height and horizontality — as we spent a 10-15 minute second-half delay learning, the Garden has a guy for that — the Goliaths were lucky the Lilliputians were there doing all the little things.
Start with Precious Achiuwa, whose play again suggested the ironic possibility that the bench big the Knicks are supposedly always eyeing either via trade or Mitchell Robinson resurrecting from the dead may already be here. Last night Achiuwa’s basic box score looks like no big deal — four points, five rebounds. But what was a big deal was De’Aaron Fox, DeMar DeRozan and Malik Monk trying their luck against him eight times and only scoring twice. Something to hang your hat on for when May rolls around, it’s Game 6 against Boston or Cleveland and suddenly the season comes down to Achiuwa being able to give you 10 straight minutes of winning basketball. He can.
If you built a Tower of Babel of NBA defenders, with the top lockdown artists living on the ground floor and each successive floor reserved for lesser defenders, you wouldn’t expect to find Landry Shamet in the penthouse, but he’d definitely be close enough to hear God’s whispers. But the Knicks have Hart, OG and Bridges to handle the heavy lifting on the wing. They don’t need Shamet to be a great defender, just a good team defender. The Kings went at Shamet six times. They came up short on five of them. Between that and his three first-quarter 3s helping the Knicks to an early double-digit lead, Shamet was 3-and-D to a tee.
Cameron Payne played 10 minutes last night and didn’t do anything special on offense — missed all five of his shots from the floor, had a few assists. Whoop-dee-damn-do. You may be thinking “Why’d they specify ‘on offense’? Is Miranda gonna try to sell me on Payne doing something special defensively, ‘cuz there’s no way.” No! Sales is like the one job I just can absolutely not do. But I am going to point out than in Payne’s 10 minutes not only did no King score against him, they only tried him once.
You don’t “avoid” Cam Payne because he’s some Darrelle Revis out there and it’s best not to test him. That’s a dude most of the Kings could attack in some way. Fox is quicker. DeRozan and Keegan Murray are bigger; even Monk is stronger. They don’t pay me enough to dive into the film, but I suspect Payne’s clean sheet was in large part thanks to his teammates helping and communicating enough on defense to keep the Kings from even getting looks at him. Like the Secret Service, only if it was doing something worthwhile.
Quoth DeuceJuice: “This is the way.” It is, and it’s gonna be for a while. The Knicks are done playing Oklahoma City unless they meet in the Finals. The Celtics and Cavaliers are pretty much the only real statement games left until the playoffs. All the Knicks can do between now and then is what they’ve done most of this season so far: blow everybody else out. Next game is a pretty good cruiserweight bout when Memphis visits Manhattan Monday. See you then, loves.