Finding a Role for Joakim Noah
The Knicks may be better without the center who they just signed to a 72 million dollar contract. This conundrum moving forward shall be an interesting one.
Joakim Noah is washed up. I’m talking hot water, extra long spin-cycle, separate the reds from the whites, washing machine washed.
With this being said, Noah’s four-year $72 million contract cannot be benched and must be worked with. The problem, however, is that the Knicks have looked much, much better without him on the court.
Arguably the best consecutive 24 minutes the Knicks have played this season came in the second half of their game against the Dallas Mavericks on November 14.
The Knicks started the game stagnant, scoring only 36 first-half points, but a bold move by Jeff Hornacek, which came with much praise from fans and analysts alike, was credited by many as the difference maker to the game.
That move? You guessed it. Well, maybe you did. Anyway, Noah didn’t touch the floor in the second half. The amount of money he made to sit on the bench for those 24 minutes? 109 thousand dollars.
The Knicks went on in the second half to score 57 second half points and beat the Mavericks by double-digits. The most important factor that led to an influx of offense and increased ability on defense? Spacing.
When Noah is swapped with Justin Holiday and the Knicks go with the smaller lineup, they are able to stretch the floor, putting four guys and Rose who can confidently knock down threes and deep twos on the floor. In the game versus Dallas, for example, Holiday was at a plus THIRTY plus/minus in just 15 minutes. Granted, he shot 6-for-7 and this is not consistently going to happen but the spacing will. The more shooters and legitimate scorers on the floor, the better opportunities and less attention gets focused on Carmelo Anthony and Kristaps Porzingis.
Sunday night the Knicks got their first look at an entire game without Noah, who was inactive due to illness, and they beat the a solid Hawks team by ten points. This could have been a fluke, however, and one game is too small a sample size to make a concrete argument about.
But, then they won again, Tuesday night against a more than solid Portland Trail Blazers team. The Knicks overcame what has been their biggest demise over the last handful of seasons, defending strong guards.
Damian Lillard and C.J. Mccollum are arguably the top offensive backcourt duo in the NBA, and the Knicks neutralized them. McCollum and Lillard are averaging 50 points combined per game this season, the Knicks limited them to 38 points. Not a total shutdown but that is OK. All you can ask for sometimes is solid enough defense to give your offense a chance to outscore the other team, and this is exactly what happened against Portland. That is what is able to happen when you have five scoring threats on the floor.
Down the stretch in the fourth quarter, the Noah-less Knicks were able to experiment more down the line, and Hornacek’s choice was to leave Mindaugas Kuzminskas in the game. Kuzminskas went on to play the entire fourth quarter and score a handful of giant baskets to help seal the Knicks victory.
It is unclear whether or not Noah will be able to make a solid impact on this team. I will keep my fingers crossed that we don’t have $72 million of waiting to do, and that he will be able to serve some role during this time. Maybe it will be helping Porzingis be a better defender himself, as James hypothesized in his article he wrote earlier this week. Maybe he will be able to give the Knicks 20 solid minutes of defense a game. It needs to be something because that is way too much money to pay someone to sit on the bench.
— Bailey Carlin, site writer
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