It should be impossible to forget about him. He is 7-feet tall. He weighs 240 pounds. There are stretches — and those stretches get longer the longer he plays in the league — where he is the singular dominant force on both ends of the basketball floor.
Yet it is so often easy to forget about Mitchell Robinson.
When you think of the Knicks, you think about Julius Randle, whose emergence as a star has been the biggest reason — alongside the arrival of Tom Thibodeau — that the Knicks have risen from their decades-long doldrums. You think about RJ Barrett, who really does seem to get better by the week. Maybe you think about the possibilities of the point-guard tandem, Kemba Walker and Derrick Rose, Rose and Walker.
Maybe that’s when you remember about Robinson.
“He makes us,” Tom Thibodeau said, “a complete team.”
There were a lot of reasons given — many of them perfectly adequate — for why the Knicks’ season ended in that five-game train wreck against the Hawks. One of the things that should be at the top of the list, and is often overlooked, was the fact that Robinson didn’t play in any of those games.
In fact, he didn’t play in the Knicks’ final 31 games and was a DNP in 46 of their final 50 games. The first stretch was due to a broken hand in February when he was trying to block a shot by the Wizards’ Rui Hacimura. The final inactive stretch came after his fourth game back, in the Knicks final regular-season game against Milwaukee (whom the Knicks played Wednesday night at Madison Square Garden), when he broke his foot while guarding Brook Lopez.
And, man, was he missed. There were a lot of things that ailed the Knicks against Atlanta — famously Randle picking the worst time of the year to go into his only extended funk of the season — but the Knicks’ interior inadequacies were on display every game. Both Nerlens Noel and Taj Gibson are first-rate backups. Neither is the imposing presence Robinson is.
Robinson was back for the Knicks-Bucks game Wednesday night (while Noel was forced to his civvies, thanks to a bum foot). A few games ago Robinson gave the Knicks a terrible scare when he rolled on the ground in pain and blew out a sneaker, but that’s sort of the way it’s going to be because Robinson is such a valuable part of the team’s fabric — and also proven to be a little more fragile than he’d like.
“He has great instincts,” Thibodeau said about Robinson last week. “He has a terrific feel and he reacts well. And he’s so athletic that sometime he winds up putting himself in harm’s way. You hope that happens less and less, because we need him.”
As much as anything, the Knicks’ three primary centers represent so much of the ethos of why this team works well together. None of them require — or demand — the ball on offense, though all of them are more than happy to be on the receiving end of alley-oop lobs or drive-and-kick dunks.
All three are unselfish almost to a fault, and focus much of their attention on the defensive end of the floor. And, really, the Knicks’ ideal at the 5 is to have Robinson and Noel split the minutes every game — say 28 for Robinson, and 20 for Noel — and let them use their 12 fouls and their athletic gifts to give the Knicks a legit defensive presence at the rim.
“When they play together, I think we’re a handful to deal with,” Thibodeau said.
Of course, that’s the trick. That’s the concern. That’s the worry. Maybe it wouldn’t have changed the outcome of the Hawks series if Robinson had been able to go, but you can bet Thibodeau — and the rest of the Knicks — would’ve liked to see Atlanta try to build and sustain the interior swagger that so nicely complemented Trae Young’s blow-out performances.
It certainly would’ve been interesting to see if Clint Capela would’ve dominated as often as he did (he averaged 10 points and 13.4 rebounds) while having to deal with a healthy Robinson. Odds are that he wouldn’t have forgotten about Robinson.