Mike Brown wasn’t kidding when he said the New York Knicks would be shooting more threes this season. The offense is getting them up. Yet, as some have plastered a red flag onto the team’s efficiency from deep, Karl-Anthony Towns’ play is actually the bigger problem. New York needs him to be more of a drive-and-kick threat—something he’s never done before.
Towns has finished 37 drives so far this year. His shooting percentage on these plays is a ghastly 38.1 percent, but that number will tick up. He’s offsetting part of the damage by drawing fouls on over 16 percent of his downhill attacks.
The actual number that stands out? Zero. That is how many assists Towns has out of drives this year. Shaedon Sharpe and Aaron Nesmith are the only players who have yet to toss a dime going downhill while matching or exceeding KAT’s volume.
This is a problem. Brown has emphasized the importance of what he calls “spray” threes—triples set up by ball-handlers getting both feet inside the paint. That is why the Knicks are taking more corner threes than any other team at the moment. They are the most intuitive drive-and-kick spots.
To this point, Towns is not an active participant in setting up those looks.
This is a long-time Karl-Anthony Towns problem
It would be one thing if the Knicks could play the “Ah, it’s still early, Towns will come along” card with a straight face. They can’t.
Tunnel vision is ingrained into his live-dribble attacks. He has never ranked higher than the 35th percentile in passout rate on drives, according to BBall Index. This season, among 112 players to finish at least 25 drives, only Jaren Jackson Jr., Jaden McDaniels, and Bam Adebayo sport a lower passout rate.
Not surprisingly, the Knicks are seeing their corner-three frequency—and overall three-point-attempt-rate–plummet with Towns in the game. That can’t fly in Brown’s desired system. At least, this can’t be the case for someone New York considers its second option.
Learning a new offense can take time. But Towns’ mindset runs so counter to the Knicks’ vision that it’s jarring. OG Anunoby, Mikal Bridges, and Deuce McBride are all passing on a larger share of their drives. Even Jalen Brunson, who has struggled at times to juggle the duality of his role as both a cog and fulcrum, has a passout rate comparable to last year’s highwater mark.
The issue isn’t specific to Towns’ drives either. He is passing on a smaller share of his overall paint touches. His potential assists per minute are down from last season, too. And though he’s passing on a higher percentage of his post-ups, New York has essentially cut those touches in half. He also has yet to throw an assist from the block, and he’s had just one assist come out of any paint touch.
The Knicks need KAT to evolve
Expecting someone with more than a decade’s worth of NBA experience to rework the core tenets of their game is a dicey proposition. That doesn’t mean it’s unreasonable.
Towns has real standstill vision, and his north-south handle remains anomalous for a big man. He has the talent to survey his surroundings, or at least understand how to work the corners when he’s attacking downhill.
Narrowed focus is his defining issue. He gets dead set on blasting through the lane, or barreling into traffic, without having any counters or next decisions in mind. If that doesn’t change, the Knicks may need to relegate him to more space-in-place duty, so that everyone else—Brunson, Bridges, Anunoby, McBride—can keep the drive-and-spray music humming.
Make no bones about it, over-streamlining Towns’ offensive arsenal is a waste of talent. The Knicks will never be at their most dangerous if he’s deployed almost exclusively as a floor-spacer.
At the same time, they will never come close to sniffing their peak as a title contender if Towns doesn’t get with the current program. He isn’t the most important player on the team, but his fit within MIke Brown’s offense might just be the barometer for whether New York can be a serious title threat.