Know the Knumbers: The Knicks down the stretch
From points to playing time, there’s still plenty to pay attention to as the Knicks wind down the regular season
Numbers, numbers everywhere! Let’s have fun with some Knicks numbers!
Mount Rushmore, Schmount Rushmore
The only reason Mitchell Robinson doesn’t belong on the Mount Rushmore of all-time Knick shotblockers is because there is no Mount Rushmore of all-time Knick shotblockers – neither literally nor figuratively. For an original franchise with almost 80 years of history, the pickings seem pretty slim. The NBA didn’t track blocks until 1973-74, so that’s 28 years of Knicks rejecting fools lost to history. Patrick Ewings’s 2,758 blocks may become a 56-game hitting streak kinda record, i.e. unbreakable. That’s more blocks than the next five Knicks on the list combined, a list that may be more barren than you’d think.
Kyle O’Quinn is a top-10 Knick shotblocker. No way in hell anybody woke up this morning thinking that, and that includes KOQ. Amar’e Stoudemire is ninth! In my lifelong quest to absolve Charles Smith of a crime he didn’t commit, consider it my amicus brief to point out Smith is eighth. Seven through three = Kristaps Porziņģis, Marcus Camby, Kurt Thomas, Marvin “The Human Eraser” Webster and Bill Cartwright.
Mitch is pretty comfortably alone in second (the next-highest active Knick is Precious Achiuwa, tied for 46th with Channing Frye).
And yet Mitch may very well finish outside the team’s top-three in blocks for the second straight year. He finished a block behind Donte DiVincenzo for third a year ago, and with 10 games left he’d probably need to double his blocks from one to two a game to catch Josh Hart in fifth, which’d be fun to observe mathematically but absurd on any practical level; Mitch just needs to stay healthy and keep conditioning. He may finish the season sixth on the team in blocks, but come the playoffs everyone knows the heart of the Knick defense beats in the chest of No. 23.
By comparison, Ewing spent 15 years in New York and led the team in blocks 14 of them. Even in 1998, the year he missed most of after breaking his wrist, finishing ninth in minutes, he still led the Knicks in stuffs. His final season at MSG was the only time he didn’t.
Also blocks-related: unless Karl-Anthony Towns turns into Ewing the last 10 games and goes on a shotblocking bonanza, OG Anunoby will lead the team in blocks this season with somewhere around 60. The last time the Knicks were led by a number that low? Gotta go back to 2014-15, when Cole Aldrich was the law. Anunoby would also be the first Knick shorter than 6-foot-10 to lead the team in blocks since . . . any guesses? It was 2009 when this player had twice as many as second-place Jared Jeffries. You were loved here once, Wilson Chandler.
