Knicks must soon decide if Julius Randle – after a rough playoff debut – is in their future
By Yaron Weitzman
FOX Sports NBA Writer
NEW YORK – Julius Randle won the NBA’s Most Improved Player award this season, but that designation undersells the leap he made as a player.
"Leap" is not even the right word. Let’s go with transformation. Julius Randle transformed this season, from an inefficient and mostly ineffective chucker into an All-NBA-level star. It’s a transformation that, in many ways, is unprecedented. We’ve seen players improve before, but rarely this late into their careers and rarely in this stark a fashion.
Consider, for example, that Randle, 26, was just the second player to win the award in his seventh season or later (Hedo Turkoglu was named Most Improved Player in 2007-08, his eighth NBA season).
And that Randle made 160 3-pointers this season, after making just 168 total over his previous six seasons. And that he became the first player in NBA history to enter a season as a sub-30% 3-point shooter (on more than 500 attempts) and then finish that season at 40% or better (h/t Marc Stein of the New York Times).
And that he also finished the season 15th in win shares (an estimate of the number of wins contributed by a player), ahead of stars like Luka Doncic and Trae Young, after ranking 167th in that category last season, behind the likes of Furkan Korkmaz and Damian Jones.
Randle’s stellar play transformed — there’s that word again — the New York Knicks from a pitiful cellar-dweller into the Eastern Conference’s fourth-best team. Their season, which concluded Wednesday night with a crushing 103-89 Game 5 loss at Madison Square Garden to the Atlanta Hawks, might have ended in disappointment. But if you take a step back and remember where the Knicks were not even one year ago, you can’t help but be in awe.
This year’s Knicks were exciting! They were exhilarating! They were...good?! These are not words often associated with this franchise. And while there’s plenty of credit to go around — the new front office, led by former Creative Arts Agency agent Leon Rose, made a plethora of shrewd moves, and new head coach Tom Thibodeau brought structure — Randle was the clear catalyst.
"He got us here," Derrick Rose said after Game 5.
But all that’s now in the past. The 2020-21 season for the Knicks has come to an end, meaning the honeymoon phase is now complete. Success, after all, breeds stakes, and stakes breed choices, and the first big one facing this new Knicks core centers around the question of whether they should lock in a player who in a win-or-go-home game misfired on 13 of his 21 shots, turned the ball over eight times and often looked overwhelmed.
The Knicks can offer Randle an extension this off-season. He has one year left on his contract and is due to make $20.7 million next year, with only $4 million of that guaranteed; it’s safe to assume the Knicks pick that up. From there is where things get interesting.
That extension? It could be for four years and about $106 million (salary cap rules limit any raise to 20 percent). Randle, however, could wait a year and become an unrestricted free agent in 2022, when he’d be able to sign a five-year deal with the Knicks for a little over $200 million. He could also sign a two-year max this summer (which would pay him about $55 million, on top of his 2021 salary), and then hit unrestricted free agency in 2024, when he’d be 29 years old and, having accrued 10 years of service, eligible for the so-called super-max extension, which would be for five years and about $250 million.
It’s worth pointing out that the fact that we’re even discussing Randle as a potential max player is remarkable. As recently as last off-season, Knicks executives had internal discussions about the salary cap implications of waiving Randle this summer before his full $20.7 million kicked in, according to league sources. Thibodeau also made clear to colleagues after being hired that he, too, did not believe Randle would be part of any long-term success.
Then, in November, the Knicks used the draft’s No. 8 pick to select Obi Toppin, an athletic scorer who, like Randle, played power forward and who, at the age of 23, was considered more NBA-ready than most of his peers.
Randle’s performance this season changed all that. He took advantage of the extended hiatus created by the pandemic and entered training camp in the best physical condition of his career. It didn’t take long for Thibodeau to become enthralled. He handed Randle the keys to the offense and played him more minutes than anyone else in the league.
Then the playoffs arrived. The Knicks faced the Hawks, who Randle had torched to the tune of 37.3 points per game in three regular-season contests. Yet in five games against the Hawks — Randle’s first playoff experience — he averaged just 18 points and connected on just 29.8% of his shots. It was one of the worst starts to a postseason career in NBA history.
Randle’s not the first All-Star to struggle in a playoff series. But watching him struggle the way he did, and to the extent he did, after an outlier of a season, during a season stuffed with outlying factors (no fans in the stands, condensed schedule, limited practice time) has to leave the Knicks concerned. It certainly has rival executives wondering whether Randle’s transformation was real. As one dubious scout put it, "Do you believe more in six seasons of performance, or one season taking place during a pandemic?"
The issue, if you’re the Knicks, is that if you peek beneath the hood of Randle’s performance, the only major difference you see is that this season, he happened to hit a ridiculous amount of tough jump shots, at a rate he’d never done so before.
Here are the numbers: Randle drilled 41% of his 3s, and shot 40% when launching them off-the-dribble, according to NBA.com; entering the season he’d shot over 30% from deep just once in his career and in 2019, hit just 14.6% of his 3-pointers off-the-bounce. He also connected on 44% of his long mid-range jumpers, according to Cleaning the Glass, a five-percent jump from the previous season and career-high.
Sure, Randle made better decisions on the court, and his passes were more on point. But he still pounded the ball into the floor (in fact, his hands were actually stickier this year, according to Second Spectrum, which tracks things like dribbles and seconds per touch) and still struggled to finish at the rim (59% shooting there, after being at 60% the year before; both marks, according to Cleaning the Glass, are way below average).
With this in mind, it’s easy to understand why Randle failed in the playoffs. A lot’s been made about the Hawks using center Clint Capela to build a wall between Randle and the hoop, an alignment that clearly rattled Randle.
"They just had a great scheme, credit to them," he said after Game 5.
The problem with that? During the regular season, only 23% of Randle's shots came at the rim, one of the lower marks among forwards. At 6-foot-9 and 250 pounds, he may be big and burly. But he’s not very explosive, nor does he jump particularly high. In other words: it wasn’t the Hawks’ scheme that flummoxed him. It was that his jumpers — whether open or contested — kept clanking off the rim.
In the playoffs, Randle’s 3-point percentage plummeted to 33.3%. He hit just 18.9% of his pull-up 2s (through the series’ first four games), after making 41.9% during the regular season. And forget contested shots. According to NBA.com, through the series’ first four games, Randle also misfired on 24.1% of his open looks.
"The guy was hitting insane shots all season," one rival assistant coach said. "We were all up on him, tried to take away his shot and they kept falling. It never felt sustainable."
Does that mean the Knicks should be scared of locking him up long-term? Not exactly. For one, they can free up around $60 million in cap room this off-season, and in a weak free agency class where the top prizes will likely be DeMar DeRozan and Lonzo Ball, you can do worse than locking Randle in at about $26 million a season. Even if the Hawks exposed some of his limitations.
We just saw Randle make a leap. Who’s to say he can’t learn from his playoff failures and make another one?
"It's all about making adjustments during the game and just learning from all of your experiences," Rose said. "Now the next time when he's back in the postseason, he has a foundation to work from. If anything, it's just a learning experience."
It’s also important to remember that the Knicks spent most of the season operating below the salary floor. They did not build a roster to compete. This became clear in the playoffs as the Knicks shot just 32.9% on catch-and-shoot 3s, according to Second Spectrum, a nearly 8% drop-off from the regular season.
Randle certainly didn’t do his part against the Hawks. But there were also dozens of possessions where he’d lure in extra defenders and then hit an open teammate along the perimeter, only to see them launch a brick. Having a player who can command a double team and generate open looks for teammates, even when he’s struggling, is not something to take for granted. It’s not Randle’s fault that those teammates couldn’t finish.
"We have to have the proper amount of shooting around (Randle)," Thibodeau said during the series. "That’s sort of what they’ve done with (Trae) Young. They’ve surrounded him with great shooting."
For the Knicks, locking in a player coming off an All-Star season at a below max-rate is just good cap management. But that doesn’t mean Randle would, or should, accept. Barring something catastrophic, it’s hard to imagine any scenario where he hits the open market in the summer of 2022 and doesn’t find at least one deal for at least four years and $80 million. Meaning that if he were to reject an extension now, he’d basically be betting around $20 million to make $100 million. Those feel like good odds.
All of this means that one year from now, we’ll likely be right back in this same situation. Which is probably the best thing for all parties involved. More time means more clarity, and more clarity typically leads to better decisions. In the meantime, both the Knicks and Randle can focus on recapturing the magic of the regular season and take solace that a max contract, which only one year ago would have seemed absurd, is even being discussed.
"We'll be back next year," Randle said after Game 5.
Asked what he was looking forward to about the off-season he replied, "[I’m] very anxious to get back to the grind."
Yaron Weitzman is an NBA writer for FOX Sports and the author of "Tanking to the Top: The Philadelphia 76ers and the Most Audacious Process in the History of Professional Sports." Follow him on Twitter @YaronWeitzman.