1:51 pm Jan. 24, 2012
It's been an ugly two weeks for the New York Knicks.
They’ve lost six consecutive games, failed to reach 90 points in three of the losses, and only broke 100 on Saturday night against Denver thanks to the magic of overtime. The team is shooting just 41 percent for the season, and 30 percent from three-point range, yet they take 23 three-pointers per game. Carmelo Anthony is down at 40 percent overall, yet is taking more than 21 shots per contest.
Most crucially, Amar'e Stoudemire, who as recently as last season was a candidate for Most Valuable Player, has been unrecognizable. A 50-percent career shooter, he is down under 42 percent this year, and he has disappeared from the offense altogether for long stretches, getting a single shot after the third quarter in Saturday night's loss.
There’s not exactly a bright side here, but there are mitigating circumstances: injuries to Anthony and backup forward Josh Harrellson, and the slow return to health of point guard Baron Davis. And that in turn means that Stoudemire may soon have the tools in place to succeed.
At least, that’s how things had better work, since an Amar'e Stoudemire renaissance is the only thing standing between the Knicks and disaster at this point: the Knicks stand a half-game behind the LeBron-less Cleveland Cavaliers for the last playoff spot, on pace to win just 25* games in this strike-shortened 66-game season.
To start with, Carmelo Anthony's injury-related limitations may mean more of a role for Stoudemire, in the short-term. Anthony hurt both his ankle and his wrist in New York's Jan. 12 loss to Memphis. After the ankle forced him out for one game, he returned despite continued pain in his wrist, simply altering his shooting motion. The results in the four games since have been ugly—35-for-105, or 33 percent from the field.
After the Denver loss on Saturday night, Anthony turned introspective with reporters, musing aloud about the need to shoot less, even considering taking some time off. Ultimately, he decided Monday evening that he was too important to the team to consider taking the time to heal. It was a shortsighted decision—Anthony shooting 33 percent isn't helpful to any team but the one facing the Knicks—but hopefully, he'll pull back enough to allow his fellow star Stoudemire to take more shots.
This would be big. In an offense that is frequently started by Anthony, the same man who ultimately takes the shot, there's little chance for Stoudemire to create scoring opportunities. And when the ball isn't in Anthony's hands, it has been in the hands of point guards ill-suited for the role of distributor, whether due to inexperience (Iman Shumpert), age (Mike Bibby) or general inability to fulfill that function (Toney Douglas).
Also big: Baron Davis, the former All Star the Knicks signed just before the season, took part in his first practice Monday. Davis is recovering from a herniated disc, and while he didn't declare himself ready to play just yet, the Knicks have indicated that they will throw him into the mix quickly.
As with Anthony, the Knicks must be careful with Davis' health, since he and Anthony both need to be ready for the grind of the N.B.A. playoffs, assuming the Knicks make it that far.
With the return of Davis, Stoudemire will once again be playing with a point guard who can get him the ball. People who have criticized Stoudemire for his struggles this season—making the argument that he needed the two-time M.V.P. Steve Nash, his former teammate in Phoenix, to be truly elite—ignore how effective he was with the decidedly ordinary Raymond Felton running New York's offense, and even how well he played with Carmelo Anthony and Chauncey Billups running the show.
Davis would coming back just as the Knicks will be increasing their reliance on Stoudemire anyway, thanks to the injury on Saturday suffered by Josh Harrellson, Stoudemire's surprisingly effective backup so far this season. Harrellson's fractured wrist will keep him out of action for the next six weeks, leaving New York without a power forward who'd scored in double figures in four of sixteen games so far, shooting nearly 36 percent from three-point range.
So even when the second unit is on the floor, Stoudemire will need to be the prodigious scorer he was from the moment he entered the league until the very start of this season. The Knicks’ season depends on it.
*Due to an editing error, the original version put this number at 31, which is the number of games the Knicks would be projected to win in a full 82-game season.
