New York Knicks: 15 greatest draft steals in franchise history

Upon entering the NBA in 2007, Wilson Chandler seemed to play the part of a late first-round pick throughout his rookie season. The 23rd overall selection had pockets of talent that would flare up here and there, but the Knicks didn’t really give him many chances to show what he could do.

The following season — his sophomore campaign — Chandler would receive the sixth most minutes per game on the roster and would go on to average 14.4 points per game. It was then where the organization and its fans realized what they possessed in a player with little expectations coming out of DePaul University.

Chandler stands 6-foot-9, while weighing roughly 225 pounds. In 2019, players with those physical traits tend to occupy the power forward position in small-ball lineups. In New York, that was rarely the case because such a tactic had never been attempted.

Chandler wound up playing over half his minutes at small forward yet still found ways to be effective in a league that hadn’t come close to the evolution it’s experiencing in the present day.

With the ability to handle the basketball as a pretty decent athlete, he was a problem to deal with on the fast break. In his final season with the Knicks, he even appeared to have developed a 3-point shot, canning 35.1 percent of his 4.8 attempts per game.

Those two factors helped him thrive under Mike D’Antoni during the 2010-11 NBA season, where he averaged a career-high 16.4 points per game over 51 contests. Unfortunately, he was then traded to the Denver Nuggets in the Carmelo Anthony deal, where a more team-centric approach lessened his role and later his production.

Chandler’s tenure with the Knicks came in one of the more irrelevant times for the franchise. He didn’t really contribute to winning, nor were his stats gaudy in any sense of the word. However, his sheer production was a nice surprise for fans who probably didn’t even know of him prior to his arrival.