NY Knicks: 3 ways Frank Ntilikina can become NY’s version of Marcus Smart

Frank Ntilikina needs to become a better playmaker for the NY Knicks.

This one is going to be short. Frank Ntilikina needs to become a more reliable facilitator on offense. Plain and simple.

He was drafted as a point guard. Clearly, Frank is not a point guard BUT he needs to learn how to get his teammates more involved and try to make them better when he can.

Marcus Smart knows how to dominate a game with only scoring 10 points.

He does this by doing everything that I’ve mentioned so far; energy on defense, making life hard for the other team’s best player, grabbing rebounds, and lastly finding open opportunities for his teammates.

If you’ve been watching Knicks games for the past few seasons, almost all of Frank’s assists are either lobs to his rim-runners or routine passes to players who then create off the dribble and it’ll count as a Frank assist.

If and when Frank ever gets an opportunity to earn more minutes for New York, he needs to find more creative ways to make the team around him better and get that assists per game average up to between 4 and 5.

Marcus Smart seems to finally be coming into his own on offense as in the last 2 seasons he’s averaging about 13 points per game.

But he has always hovered around the 4-5 dimes per contest mark for basically his entire career as a secondary ball-handler.

Frank doesn’t even need to be a 10+ points per game scorer to be impactful, he just needs to do what he already knows how to on a higher level.