One of the addictive qualities of the game is this: there is still the capacity to surprise. Even in an age of analytics, there is still a requirement to play the games, to either make sense of the numbers or defy them.
Hey, any dice player can tell you: the laws of probability insist you won’t keep hitting point after point when the bones are in your hand, but we’ve all seen it happen.
It was always a little remarkable how quick people were to declare Frank Ntilikina a bust. Some of that wasn’t his fault. Some of that was residual anger loitering after Phil Jackson was exiled days after selecting Ntilikina as one of the last transactions of his stormy tenure. The anger was understandable, the skepticism plausible.
It just wasn’t very fair to the kid.
And, please remember, he was a kid — just 18 years old when Jackson picked him with the eighth pick of the 2017 draft — and that he’s still a kid (fewer than 100 days past his 20th birthday). There may be an abstract age limit to being a prodigy, but there isn’t one to merely being precocious enough to intrigue.
We saw flashes of that last year.
We are seeing chunks of that now.
This is what’s called progress, even on a team that isn’t being graded against a curve the way the Knicks are. Really, as much as this offends the mathletes among us, all you really need to do is trust your eyes: he’s better now than he was then.
Can his ceiling be much higher?
You certainly hope so. But we’ll only know by watching.
“He’s a young player,” Knicks coach David Fizdale said not long ago. “And that means he’s exciting and he’s frustrating and he’s working hard every day and there are times when you look up and realize: he’s doing something well now that he didn’t do two weeks ago.”
In a way, Ntilikina’s story resembles Kristaps Porzingis’; he may not have inspired cheers and jeers of outrage on draft night, but it wasn’t as if Knicks fans were rushing out to flood the box office. Porzingis’ true arrival happened quicker: many nights in his rookie year he really did look like the best player on the floor already.
That didn’t happen for Ntilikina last year, and there are still times when the game seems to go a revolution or two too quickly for him. But the more reps he gets, the more intriguing he looks. Not every night. Not every game. But enough. And in this season of limited expectation, enough is … well, often enough.
“Most of the time our point guard is organizing us,” Fizdale said. “And he’s excellent at that. That’s something, I didn’t want to force that on him. Let him feel out the offense, let him see where guys score from, where opportunities come from, let him guard bigger people, multiple people. Now that I’m putting him back there it’s a different view of things.”
And Ntilikina is like a sponge, soaking as much as he can.
“Whatever Coach tells me where he wants me, let’s do it, let’s go,” Ntilikina said after the Knicks lost that wild and zany game to the Warriors last week, which was Ntilikina’s 15th career start but also the first time we really saw the range of things he’s capable of, including guarding both Steph Curry and Kevin Durant effectively, a skill set that maybe a dozen players in the world have, maybe less.
“That was my mindset. It doesn’t matter. We all know it’s going to change and we have to find the best rotation for our group. I’m always going to be ready wherever he wants me.”
Where Fizdale wants him is at the front of that omnipresent learning curve, finding different ways to augment his game, inventing different ways to look the part of a genuine star on the make. He isn’t there yet, isn’t really close to there yet. But he’s a lot farther along than he was. And as a cornerstone of these not-ready-for-prime-time Knicks, it’s a treat to watch.
“It’s good to see hard work pay off,” Fizdale said.
Yes. Yes it is.