The Demise of Brandon Knight
How a once valued point guard turned into one of the NBA’s worst
In July, Brandon Knight tore his ACL, ending his season way before it ever even started. The Suns were a big player in the Kyrie Irving sweepstakes, yet Knight’s injury was rarely discussed. Once a valued asset, the Kentucky point guard has proven to be one of the league’s worst players by advanced metrics. His steep fall in Phoenix after his inclusion of one of the league’s more confounding trades back in 2015 is fascinating. How has Knight panned out, and what could have been had Phoenix played their cards differently?
Brandon Knight was an awful player last year by many metrics. When he was on the court, the Suns were outscored by the opponents by a staggering 12 points per 100 possessions, nearly twice as bad as the worst mark of any team in the league. This was opposed to when he was on the bench, the Suns were outscored by a more reasonable (but still bad) 2.7 points per 100 possessions. Knight has always been an awful defender, and last season was no exception. His -3.08 defensive real plus minus ranked 458th out of 468 NBA players.
Knight can’t keep defenders in front of him, as he is too slow on defense. Defenders also punish him inside because he is impatient, often jumping too early on pump fakes. Knight only contested 7 shots per 36 minutes, an abysmal amount to go along with his poor block percentage of 0.6 percent. Additionally, he’s an awful rebounder, with only 3.7 rebounds per 36 minutes. It’s easy to spot his weaknesses. It only takes one screen to get past Knight and to the bucket.
He’s easily fooled off the dribble, as he consistently jumps at guards way too early. Patient guards take advantage of this to get off open looks.
He’s also a bad help defender. Look at how late he is to rotate onto Eric Gordon. At the beginning of the play, he’s stuck looking at the ball, and guarding nobody.
What are you doing Brandon? Eric Gordon gets an open look and Knight, per usual, helps too strongly, allowing Gordon to drive and kick to the open man.
Another poor help situation here against Dallas. First, Knight fails to find good rebound position and lets Harrison Barnes beat him to the board. Then, as the board is tipped back to Dirk at the three point line, Knight runs away from Dirk and leaves him open for the shot. Knight ran to help on a defender who Eric Bledsoe was already covering. The Suns were a dreadful defensive team regardless of Knight, but his lack of awareness is still staggering.
Knight’s poor defense last season wasn’t surprising, because he’s always been an awful defender. His defensive RPM in the 2015–16 season was -2.48, -1.85 in 2014–15, and -1.98 in 2013–14. What was specifically new to his failures last year was his extreme offensive inefficiencies.
Knight was always an offense-first guard, but last year he was terrible on that end of the floor. Knight shot a horrible 39.8% from the field, good for 371st in the league out of 468. When Knight was on the floor, the Suns scored 99 points per 100 possessions, which would have been worst in the league.
Why did Knight make the Suns offense so bad? This is a player who averaged at least 17 points per game for three seasons in a row, yet last year imploded. He shot 32 percent on three pointers last year, the worst mark in his career, while his volume from three decreased. Last year, he ranked in the 32nd percentile of players on catch and shoot threes, making him an inadequate floor spacer off the ball.
Knight shot poorly from all over the floor last year, especially from the restricted area. 47.5 percent is horrible (the league average is 57 percent) , especially for a guard like him who didn’t shoot well from three. His efficiency was bad in nearly every other spot as well, including from the mid range, a spot you’d think a guard with handles like him would be able to excel in.
Knight’s struggles inside were what set him back most. Defenders would allow him to drive because he struggled so much at the rim. Knight shot 33 percent on shots from 3–10 feet away from the rim, almost exactly the same as his percentage from three-point range. If you’re shooting that poorly from what should be your two most efficient areas, you are going to bog down the offense. Sometimes defenders don’t even contest, and he still misses easy shots inside.
Knight often takes floaters instead of driving inside and getting layups. It rarely pans out, as he ended up shooting further from the rim than three feet, and almost always with a defender in his face. He has no creativity at the bucket to get inside, even in transition with only one defender in front of him.
Also, Knight isn’t a capable passer. He ends up driving and taking contested layups at the rim when he has open guys. Here he takes a layup that is easily blocked instead of dumping the ball off to Tyson Chandler.
And here Knight misses Len on an easy alley-oop, and instead misses the floater.
Again Knight misses an open Len, opting for a highly contested layup.
Knight ranked 464th out of 468 players in overall real plus-minus last year, making him one of the five worst players in the league statistically. Although his past defensive performance may have predicted his decline to this point, his value back in 2015 was much higher than it is now. In what is now one of the more bizarre trade deadlines, after the Suns moved Goran Dragic to the Heat because Dragic had requested a trade, Phoenix decided to also trade Isaiah Thomas to the Celtics for a late first rounder.
That move alone has turned out to be a bad decision, as Thomas has turned into one of the best offensive players in the league and just helped the Celtics get a return of Kyrie Irving in a trade with Cleveland. But Phoenix then decided they needed to replace Thomas and Dragic with another point guard (even though they still had Eric Bledsoe), so they traded a coveted future Lakers first round pick to the Milwaukee Bucks. This pick was then traded, also a bizarre decision, by the Bucks to Philadelphia for reigning rookie of the year Michael Carter-Williams. Both Milwaukee and Phoenix have to regret these trades; Knight and Carter-Williams have turned into two really poor players, while the 76ers used the Lakers pick to move up from the 3rd spot to draft stud Markelle Fultz.
The fact that Phoenix traded away both Isaiah Thomas and that future Lakers pick is astounding now, two assets that have both been moved in blockbuster trades this summer. If the Suns had decided to hold onto Thomas and the Lakers pick in February 2015, the NBA is in a much different place. The Celtics may not have progressed along as a team like they have the last few years because they wouldn’t have had their All-Star point guard. This makes it less likely for them to sign Al Horford last summer because of their decreased success, which means Gordon Hayward doesn’t sign this summer, and they don’t have the assets to trade for Kyrie Irving.
Instead, the Suns could have had the pieces to trade for Irving this summer in Isaiah and the Lakers pick, along with Josh Jackson. Because Phoenix was floated as such a popular trade partner for Cleveland this summer without these two pieces, it’s ironic. Instead, Phoenix is stuck with a lot of young players who might not pan out in TJ Warren, Dragan Bender and Marquese Chriss, who are all projects at best at this point. Eric Bledsoe is a veteran point guard on a different timeline than the rest of the team, and seems like his days in a Suns’ uniform are numbered. Now Knight is out for the season, a year after being one of the worst players in the entire NBA. What could have been, Suns fans. What could have been.
All statistics courtesy of NBA.com, Basketball-reference, and ESPN.
