It's shaping up to be a busy NBA trade season for the New York Knicks. In fact, it needs to be an active one, because the 'Bockers really need a boost—a much bigger one than a minor deal involving Guerschon Yabusele would provide.
Their formula for winning isn't computing. They have just three victories to show for their last dozen trips to the hardwood. And, as analyst Zach Lowe relayed on The Zach Lowe Show, their "ballyhooed, high-priced" starting five has struggled just to tread water. Its total point-differential for the season is just plus-16 in 158 minutes, and that's after an inflation from New York's 54-point thrashing of the Brooklyn Nets on Wednesday. (It was a dead-even zero before that beatdown.)
The sample size isn't enormous, but that's still 18 games of disappointing data, which should be more than enough to fuel this front office toward a sizable swap between now and the Feb. 5 cutoff.
A major move is a must for New York.
Heading into this season, it looked like the Knicks were poised to conquer the entire Eastern Conference. So much for that.
While a .591 winning percentage is somehow still good enough for third in the conference—it'd be eighth in the West—the Knicks are dangerously close to having the bottom fall out. They're just one up in the loss column on the seventh-seeded Orlando Magic.
Things have reached the cusp of a full-fledged crisis. Over the last three weeks, the Knicks are 17th in offense and 20th in defense. And, again, that's with the stats being skewered in their favor by that dismantling of the Nets. Just to help put those numbers in context, history holds that top-10 efficiency ranks in both categories are required for championship contention.
That's supposed to be the goal for this group, and based on the resources pumped into the roster, that should be the expectation, too. If the Knicks are still waiting for motivation to make a blockbuster trade, any one of the stats listed to this point should suffice.
The Karl-Anthony Towns-Jalen Brunson combo looks untenable on defense. Mikal Bridges, who has a single 20-point effort since Christmas, appears wholly underwhelming on offense. OG Anunoby looks rock-solid, but is that enough to justify his $39.6 million salary? Josh Hart's superpower is filling in the cracks, but at this point, he's basically just brooming up shards.
The Knicks need the type of trade that fundamentally changes who they are. It's not even about stopping this spiral, it's about fixing flaws to prevent these problems from popping back up in the future.
The wheel needs reinventing, and if that isn't accepted and acted upon over the next couple of weeks, there's a real risk of wasting this entire season.