After one season with the New York Knicks, how did Kevin Knox’s run grade out?
Kevin Knox’s first season with the New York Knicks was inconsistent. The ninth pick in the draft had a year that typically happens for rookies: stretches of good games and bad games as he gets accustomed to the length of an NBA season.
With the Knicks being such a bad team lacking any true offensive threats, most nights lots of eyeballs would be on Knox as the coveted lottery pick, so it’s tough to judge the ceiling until he plays with better talent.
Kevin Knox’s has lots of work to do on both ends if he wants to have more impact. The Knicks were a better team without him than with him. He was a net -3.8 rating on offense and the Knicks were a +7.6 defense rating without him, overall a -11.3 rating in his first season. Those numbers are staggering as the Knicks were a team that lacked talent but still were better with him on the bench. Knox was rated as one of the worst defenders in the NBA last year. I am not too worried as he develops he should become a better defender. He flashes some of that ability on plays like this.
He has all the raw tools, the length, the lateral quickness, the size to play the 3, 4, 5 in today’s NBA. The effort has to be better. The worry has to be that he just does not put it together and always plays inconsistently on both ends of the floor, still, he is only 19 and has lots of time to grow.
It wasn’t all bad for Knox, as he showed the tools to be a scorer in this league flashing it in December averaging 17.1 points. He did go through stretches of struggles as he hit a wall in the months of January to March, still scoring around 13 points but shooting dropped from 41 to 42 percent to the low 30s. Teams started playing him differently making him put the ball down and create, instead of his bread and butter of catch and shoot, this led to Knox settling for contested jumpers.
Like Tim Hardaway Jr, the next step has to be his ability to take his man off the dribble and get to the free throw line. Some of that showed up in the last month of the season as his scoring went back up to nearly 16 points and he got to a season-high 5.5 free throw attempts in the month of April. That uptick in free throw attempts shows some of that ceiling he possesses.
The season for Knox is hard to judge as the tools are there and we had flashes of brilliance, like when he scored 3 straight 20 plus games between Dec. 19 to 25 and poor ones shooting 7-34 over a three-game stretch between Feb. 26 to April 3. These extremes make his season very hard to judge and you add into the fact that all the analytic numbers show that the Knicks are a better team without him, led me to this grade. Still, Knox is only 19, so there is plenty of time for him to grow and develop his game.