Why RJ Barrett might be the best answer to the New York Knicks’ playmaking issues.
This NBA season is filled with question marks for the New York Knicks. They are one of the youngest teams in the league and are coming off of a season where they finished 12th in the Eastern Conference. Expectations are low.
This is the first season under both the new front office headed by Leon Rose and the coaching staff lead by Tom Thibodeau. The Knicks are looking to emerge from what has seemed like an endless abyss of directionless management.
What would a successful season look like for the New York Knicks?
New York wants to change the perception that they are a losing organization. For a team that won’t be able to attract a superstar player, you have to start within your own house. That means developing homegrown talent.
The Knicks roster is loaded with recent draft picks, and so far, it hasn’t yielded any results in the win column. While there have been stretches of promising play from these prospects, there hasn’t been anything consistent where Knicks fans can confidently say their team has found a future franchise player.
Expectations have already been tempered for former lottery picks Kevin Knox and Frank Ntilikina. The same can’t be said for last year’s 3rd overall pick RJ Barrett, who many believe can be a star-caliber player.
After a slow start from starting point guard Elfrid Payton, Knicks fans are already searching for a replacement. Sure, Immanuel Quickley will eventually return from injury, but he can’t play all 48 minutes. How will the Knicks solve their playmaking issues? Perhaps by looking to RJ Barrett.
Lessons Learned: RJ Barrett’s Rookie Year
When you are the 3rd overall pick in the draft, you are being selected with the likelihood that you will become a cornerstone of an NBA franchise. RJ Barrett certainly gave fans hope that he could one day grow into that player.
RJ Barrett’s rookie season was filled with terrific highs and alarming lows. Some of those lows were due to RJ’s limitations as a player, but others were a direct result of the situation he was in.
Barrett may have been drafted to become the team’s franchise player, but the roster around him did not reflect that. While Barrett had some big games, for much of the season he was used as a complementary player.
Just because Barrett isn’t a point guard does not mean shouldn’t be getting a bulk of the touches on offense.
RJ Barrett was playing well down the stretch last season. In his last 13 games, Barrett averaged 16 points per game while shooting just under 44% from the field. This was in spite of getting fewer touches per game than Elfrid Payton, Julius Randle, Frank Ntilikina, and Bobby Portis in that stretch.
Without going into too much detail about last season’s roster, we know it was bad. It was a roster unfit for the modern NBA. Stuck in the middle of the madness, was a rookie RJ Barrett.
So what is a “Step in the right direction” for the Knicks this season? Really, it’s developing their young players and establishing a new team identity under Tom Thibodeau. The way they can accomplish this is by giving the keys to RJ Barrett.
Leading the Way: RJ Barrett in 2020-21
The Knicks roster has a lot of familiar faces from last season, but some significant tweaks as well. Looking at the veterans the Knicks lost, the ones they retained, and the ones they brought in, there will certainly still be significant competition for minutes.
So how do the Knicks create a cohesive rotation that not only helps their young players develop, but leads to actual, exciting basketball? They can start by making RJ Barrett the go-to-guy.
RJ Barrett is not a point guard. As of now, he’s somewhere in between a small forward and a shooting guard, but he has flashed some terrific play-making ability.
This may initially sound like a silly statement, but it’s really about Barrett’s strengths. RJ Barrett is a lot more effective with the ball in his hands than without. He isn’t very quick for his size and he isn’t a knockdown shooter, so he’s limited as an off-ball player. What Barrett does do extremely well is get to the rim. His combination of strength and slithery dribble moves allows him to create penetration and draw in defenders. There aren’t any other players on the roster who can do this as consistently well as Barrett.
So what about the other guards? Many have been impressed with rookie Immanuel Quickley’s preseason. In just a few exhibition games, Quickley has displayed very encouraging point guard skills and potentially elite shooting ability.
Can Quickley become the team’s point guard of the future? That remains to be seen, but his emergence is important because it provides the team with, at the very least, a complementary piece to Barrett.
The same goes for Obi Toppin. He has excellent potential as a prospect in his own right, but his ability to stretch the floor and effectively rim run will be a nice complement to RJ Barrett’s slasher playstyle.
Having Barrett play with guys like Toppin and Quickley will be a breath of fresh air compared to the spacing he was forced to operate with last season. Just because he’s not the point guard, doesn’t mean he can’t be the focal point of the team’s offense.
Plenty of teams use their star 2-guard or small forward as their highest usage player. Donovan Mitchell, Jayson Tatum, Kawhi Leonard, and DeMar DeRozan all had the highest usage rate on their respective team.
We know RJ Barrett is not that level of player yet, but if the team believes he can get there, they need to start acting on it. The Knicks didn’t draft RJ Barrett to be Julius Randle’s sidekick.
If the Knicks can roll out the correct lineups (Lineups filled with shooters and rim rollers) around Barrett, it could become the formula that brings them success. Success for the Knicks doesn’t mean an overnight title contender, it means a team that is laying the groundwork for future prosperity.
Let him make mistakes. Give him the ball in crunch time. Let RJ Barrett learn how to become the franchise player.