You hate a loss no matter what, no matter the team beating you, but I have some good news, and I have some bad news, which do you want first? I’ll start with the bad, all three players the Warriors had that were questionable came to play. Good news is, we still hold our 7th seed in the eastern conference. Of the three things we needed to do, we only did about 1/3 of them, which resulted in our loss. If you call 37 points, 6 assists and 6 rebounds containing Steph Curry, you’re bound to go 0-82. The Warriors went 13/38 from the three point line, surprisingly worse than we did, but it didn’t matter. James Wiseman came back from his wrist injury with 14 points in 16 minutes, Draymond flirted with a triple double, having a funky performance of 7 points, 12 assists, and 9 rebounds. Other Warriors had good performances such as Andrew Wiggins and Kelly Oubre Jr, the Warriors as a team struck on all cylinders against us. The Warriors beat the Knicks 114-106, now let’s dive into the Knicks side of the ball.
Before we get into performances and alike, I have to give a quick congratulations to Julius Randle on being named an all-star!!! Speaking of Julius, he had 25 points, 7 assists, and 10 rebounds in 35 minutes of action, a classic Julius Randle performance, no complaints here. By some miracle Elfrid Payton actually played good, dropping 20 points on 8/19 shooting, something I’m not too mad about, hopefully this is a changing of the guard for Elfrid Payton. Another player with a very surprising performance was Derrick Rose, who had 16 points, 8 assists, and 4 rebounds in 27 minutes of action, this is exactly the bench role he needs to be and the veteran for this young Knicks team. The center problem continued for the Knicks, with both centers Taj Gibson and Nerlens Noel scoring a combined 16 points in 47 minutes of play, something that is killing us every game. Obi Toppin got to play 13 minutes this game and had 7 points on a perfect shooting performance, going 3/3. Obi certainly needs to be more of a part of this rotation and needs to be playing anywhere from 18-22 minutes per game. IQ had a bad game, playing 13 minutes and having 3 points on 1/5 shooting, but with such limited time there is only so much you can ask for and he is not a key in why we lost. One person that can not go untalked about was one reason we lost tonight, the abysmal game of RJ Barrett.
I love RJ to death, I was happy we drafted him at three in the Zion draft and I’ve been okay with what he’s done on the Knicks so far, but tonight just really wasn’t it. In 27 minutes of play, RJ had 4 points, an assist, and 10 rebounds. Nice job on the ten rebounds, but how if our third overall pick dropping four points in a game we could’ve won if we had a more versatile offense, and one I believe we would have won if Mitchell Robinson was back. My issue isn’t even really with him only scoring 4 points, it was the awful shots he was taking. RJ was 1/9, hitting one three pointer (1/3 from the 3 point line) and going 1/2 on free throws. #3 overall picks can’t be going 1/9, as much as I want him to shoot his way out of this slump, I also don’t want him losing all confidence. Now it could just be a bad game, and we will see how this progresses, but RJ also had 3 turnovers as well as 6 fouls, fouling out of the game when we needed his presence. Definitely disappointed in my Knicks, but the season is still young, and tomorrow we go up against the 12-19 Sacramento Kings, once again in the Garden. Hope you enjoyed the read, and go Knicks!!!
TheDyspatch 