The New York Knicks were a decent defensive team in the 2012-2013 season that lifted the club to the second seed in the Eastern Conference. That went away last season. It needs to eventually come back.
What Went Wrong Last Season?
The Knicks came unglued last season, fraying at the seams and fairly quickly giving up on head coach Mike Woodson after a really bad start. The Knicks stumbled to a 3-12 record after the month of November and never truly recovered. The team was in the dumps at 21-40 and recorded eight consecutive wins to get to 29-40, but that torrid pace wasn’t able to be sustained. The Knicks won four in a row to close the season, but that still left the team a game short of the playoffs, one behind the Atlanta Hawks, who nabbed the eighth and final playoff spot in the Eastern Conference.
A number of things happened within the course of the season that brought down the Knicks. First, the presence of Andrea Bargnani on the court, as a result of a transaction, saddled New York with a soft defensive player who wasn’t very valuable if the Knicks were trying to protect a lead or stay even with the opposition. Bargnani could shoot, but he was worthless on defense, and the Knicks had too many of those kinds of players, J.R. Smith and Raymond Felton being other examples. They didn’t do enough on offense to offset their drawbacks and flaws on defense, and with the team not being as strong defensively as it was the season before, the bottom quickly fell out from under this team, which sank like a rock as soon as the season started.
The Knicks were 27th in three-point field goal defense, 28th in made threes allowed, and in the bottom third of the league (20th or worse) in some other categories as well. Carmelo Anthony could only do so much to prevent this team from being even worse than it turned out to be. Big man Tyson Chandler wasn’t healthy enough to provide the kind of paint defense the Knicks were hoping for. The team really got to see how much a healthy Chandler had meant to the club in the 2012-2013 season that went so well.
Offseason Changes
The Knicks’ biggest change came when the Knicks replaced Mike Woodson with Derek Fisher at head coach. The longtime guard for Jackson’s Laker teams in Los Angeles will go from a player with the Oklahoma City Thunder to a head coach without any break or interruption in between. Fisher is tracing the path advanced by Jason Kidd, who also went directly from player to head coach without serving any time as an assistant. The Knicks are hoping that Fisher, with guidance from Jackson, will make the Knicks a solid defensive team. New York is hoping that point guard Jose Calderon will ignite the offense, and that rookies Cleanthony Early and Travis Wear can supplement what the veterans will provide.
Projected Finish
The Knicks have to reorganized and remake too many parts of themselves to be seen as a stable, dependable team that can make the playoffs. This team will fall short of the postseason in 2015.
Pick: 11th In The Eastern Conference
