In a league of stars, the New York Knicks are sans-star. Starless. Pitch black. Quiet. An empty NY night sky. What follows are measured and objective portraits of the architects of The Great Knick Rebuild: 20.0. These are our star builders. The everyday heroes who operate in the shadows. In this, the endless offseason, with Knicks basketball a dusty and distant half-memory, take comfort in the existence of these invisible heroes. Beavering tirelessly towards the mythical competitive promised land, or at the very least, somewhere less shitty than here, less shitty than now. 

In Part 3 of the series: Johnnie Bryant, the (All-)Star Maker.

(Check out Part 1, featuring Walt Perrin, and Part 2, featuring Brock Aller, if you haven’t already!)

Greetings beautiful reader! Quick question for you: Can you hoop? 

Yes, I’m talking to you. With the eyes and the face and the unhealthy obsession with a New York Knicks team that last played good basketball a few millennia ago. Can you play a little? Of course you can. I have no doubt you were, in your misty-eyed prime, a problem of Knoxian proportions. I believe you. I believe in your talent. Granted, we all hail from a wildly deluded species blessed with an innate and irresistible tendency to lionize our little old insignificant selves. But damnit, if only you were 6-foot-8 with hands the size of satellites, no doubt about it, the NBA would have sounded its dog whistle of destiny, and you would have dutifully scampered towards stardom.

Well, my fellow driveway MVP, you can add Knicks Associate Head Coach Johnnie Bryant to the list of NBA if-onlys, in that spending time in the gym with Bryant seems to track well with success in the Association. Much like being as tall as a ladder or being born with Boban-esque mutant-mitts increases your chances of NBA success. Luckily, for all our eyes and faces and questionable obsessions, being coached by Johnnie Bryant increases your chances of NBA success, too. 

All of which is to say: Tom Thibodeau’s 35-year-old right hand man is developmental kerosene. A guru of sorts. The man behind many an infamous “leap.”

Johnnie Bryant was an under-recruited and undersized point guard heading into college. Six-foot-nothing. But he could shoot the hell out of the ball: a splash artist; a connoisseur of twine. A legend of the long-ball. At the University of Utah, from 2005-2008, Bryant knocked down 245 of 557 3-pointers, good for a smooth 44%. He’s still the Mountain West Conference career 3-point percentage leader. He has degrees from Utah in human development and family studies, as well as sports management. If I had sources, they would unanimously declare him a well-rounded individual and an excellent hugger, with a communicative handshake.

He grew up in Oakland, from the same area as Damian Lillard (who he’s close with, because of course he is). He and Dame played for the same AAU team. They trained together in the summers before Dame added the D.O.L.L.A and logo to his name. In Lillard’s words, Bryant is his “big brother”. After college, in 2009, Johnnie played one professional season in Germany for Telemotive Muenchen, where he averaged 21 points, 3.4 rebounds and 2.6 assists per game. After dipping his toes into professional basketball, he decided to jump headfirst into coaching, founding the Bryant Sports Academy in Utah, where he privately worked out the likes of CJ Wilcox, Ronnie Price and Paul Millsap. He quickly demonstrated a knack for cultivating relationships and a reputation for skill development.

In 2012, the Utah Jazz bought him in house as a player development coach under Ty Corbin, and later promoted him to assistant coach in 2014 under Quin Snyder. Having worked under Snyder for six years, he’s likely been influenced by the Jazz Head Coaches European style of play, emphasizing ball and player movement, the power of the pass, and a system that prioritizes unselfish team basketball. He was instrumental in the development of pre-buckled-ankle Gordon Hayward and bubble inferno Donovan Mitchell, two players who were drafted late in the lottery who were talented, but who were by no means surefire future NBA studs before Johnnie got them in the gym.

At just 35 years old, he’s barely older than a lot of NBA veterans, but it would be a mistake to see this as a weakness or a de-facto indicator of a lack of experience. Rather, his age is part of what makes Bryant uniquely effective in molding the skills of a variety of All-Star talents. Relationships are one of the foundations of coaching, and it would make sense for young players — the players most in need of development — to be naturally receptive to younger coaches. Perhaps this peer group proximity contributes to the recent phenomenon of team-independent NBA skills coaches, who tend to be younger than your average NBA assistant. 

Relative youth, though, is just one part of the developmental puzzle. Like its esoteric cousin, “culture,” “development” is a kind of meta-platitude that is recognized as important, but often left undefined (or maybe undefinable), given our lack of access to the behind-closed-doors process of getting better as a young player. Given the generally unknowable nuts and bolts of development, it’s often ignored, reduced down to a binary leap or non-leap. Some players get better. Some don’t. Of course this is down to a bunch of variables, not least what’s between the ears of each individual 20-year-old prospect. 

But beyond the factors teams can’t control, the coach doing the coaching has to matter. Just like NBA players, who we happily dissect and rank and re-dissect and re-rank, some coaches must be better than other coaches at various elements of coaching. This sounds simplistic and self evident. But given the effort and investment in scouting, in the draft, in the ticking financial clock of rookie extensions, development is a crucial part of the team building puzzle, and to the extent that teams can put themselves in a position to better develop young players, hiring the right human to make sure a leap happens, matters. 

Johnnie Bryant ticks a lot of coaching boxes. On paper, it looks like he was constructed in a kind of developmental laboratory. Qualifications in human development, family studies, and sports management sound like a dreamy triumvirate of degrees; essentially a certification in capital-C NBA Culture. He boasts further qualifications, in 3-point shooting, the single most important and in-demand NBA skill, as well as a track record of turning promising prospects into All-Stars. In Millsap, Hayward, and Mitchell, Bryant has a few sparkling endorsements of his developmental chops, and whilst they may have made the leap from promising prospect to NBA All-Star without Byrant’s teaching, the fact is that they didn’t, and we can’t know whether they otherwise would have.

The differences between garbage and good, good and great, great and game-changing; cannot be distilled down to one or even a handful of variables. Unequivocally part of the cocktail, though, is having coaches who specialize in taking raw talent, ladder-tall teenagers, freshman with fingers the size of forearms, and turning them into the best basketball versions of themselves. 

There’s an old coaching adage: “you can’t teach talent.” It contains a general truth, that talent is the most important prerequisite to success, because it cannot be acquired. We often think of it in the LeBronian sense, that the greatest players have some combination of characteristics and ability that manifests itself in an on-court operating system that’s somehow superior. It wasn’t taught. It’s just there. Well, at the highest levels of learning, in both athletic and academic arenas, teaching is also a talent that can’t be taught. The best teachers, like the best basketball players, just have “it.”

Is Johnnie Bryant this kind of teacher? A guy who has his professions version of “it”? Can he coax a leap or two out of this young Knicks roster? 

I’m not sure. Maybe. It’s possible.

Let’s lock him in a gym with Dennis Smith Jr., Kevin Knox, Frank Ntilikina, RJ Barrett, Mitchell Robinson, Iggy Brazdeikis, Jared Harper, Kenny Wooten, draft pick X, draft pick Y, and draft pick Z, and find out. 

I’m serious. Lock them all in there. We’ll give them a couple of months of food. We’ll all set up outside in deck chairs (socially distanced, of course). Munching popcorn, sipping Kool-Aid, as they emerge one by one. Leaping. Developed. Like beautiful basketball butterflies.