11-12-2019, 07:07 PM
A Different Porzingis Returns to New York
by Marc Stein
[img=596x0]https://ci6.googleusercontent.com/proxy/uawfOZA_qnPaUZcFK0O7nGdWbo5bHKx8BLhuoZS5pWjQhgQAjdRRD8pdiBHwsHPUBk3ivIL-i46UKthoNlWMSh5NgD28WFHqgL78xWURUg28IBhwwiYaCTSReF_zCl_FMpiYSeWwpFNfkBA6ImA4UIvBybwPeiAthaq_QjVonygSNuIWpDp1TUwbyV4conXGMtBeELfvLDKIM7Fg8ulIkt6WRB8=s0-d-e1-ft#https://static01.nyt.com/images/2019/04/03/sports/03porzingis1-newsletter/merlin_152952561_d4261fd2-eda8-438d-b8fc-1da097269bac-articleLarge.jpg[/img]
The first sportswriter from New York armed with Knicks questions for Kristaps Porzingis arrived in Dallas last Tuesday.
By the time Porzingis and the rest of the Mavericks fly back to Texas after Thursday’s highly anticipated reunion game at Madison Square Garden, he will have played his former team twice. He will also have endured nearly 10 consecutive days of fielding queries about the circumstances surrounding his departure from the Knicks — and the state of his game nine months later.
The Mavericks, though, don’t seem terribly concerned about this stretch of drama overload for their marquee newcomer. They prefer to focus on all the Knicks-free pavement in front of them for the rest of the season.
It is an easier position to take, mind you, if you believe — as Mavericks officials do — that Porzingis is ahead of schedule in his comeback.
“He is so much further on than I expected after 20 months off,” Mark Cuban, Dallas’s team owner, said on Monday, hours before Porzingis endured a foul-plagued nightmare in Boston in which he missed 10 of 11 shots from the field.
“I expected him to be rustier,” Cuban said. “And add that to a new system, new teammates, new city.”
Garden-goers can expect to see a different sort of Porzingis, 24, when he makes his first appearance at the Garden since the fateful night he tore the anterior cruciate ligament in his left knee against the Milwaukee Bucks on Feb. 6, 2018.
The Mavericks are generally using him in six-minute bursts as he continues to rebuild his stamina after such an extended period of rehabilitation. Porzingis is also still in the process of restoring the requisite confidence in his legs to throw himself into crowds.
In spite of such limitations, Porzingis is averaging a more-than-passable 18.3 points, 7.9 rebounds and 2.4 blocks per game in Dallas’s 6-4 start. In the biggest adjustment, he is spending more time beyond the 3-point line than he ever did as a Knick and is averaging 6.2 attempts per game from long distance, up from his highest figure (4.8 per game) in New York.
A whopping 43 percent of Porzingis’s shots in 2017-18 were what many teams regard as dreaded “long 2s” — shots from at least 10 feet but short of the 3-point line. The Mavericks are trying to wean Porzingis off the increasingly devalued shot. As Coach Rick Carlisle explained last week, Dallas’s staff is convinced that Porzingis is “one of the best spacers in the history of the game if you look at the analytics on it.”
“When he’s out above the arc, it has an amazing positive effect on the team that he’s playing for, whether it was New York or whether it’s us,” Carlisle said.
Porzingis’s presence on the perimeter, and his proficiency on catch-and-shoot opportunities from 3-point range, draws the opposition’s size away from the basket. That, in turn, opens driving lanes for the Mavericks’ Luka Doncic, who has taken an immediate leap from his Rookie of the Year Award-worthy debut season to certifiable franchise-player production.
Yet Carlisle acknowledged that the Mavericks were “still tweaking some things” offensively, because they don’t want Porzingis to feel marginalized in this gestation period of his partnership with Doncic. For all the hope that Porzingis and Doncic will ultimately form a new-age version of Dallas’s storied tag team of Dirk Nowitzki and Steve Nash, there is no getting around the fact that in the 224 minutes they have played together, Dallas is averaging just 101.7 points per 100 possessions, which would rank 28th in the league. In Doncic’s 125 minutes without Porzingis, Dallas has been an offensive juggernaut, averaging 124.7 points per 100 possessions.
Porzingis admitted after his Boston woes that he was guilty of “maybe forcing some things” amid stretches he hasn’t received the ball “as much as I’d like to.” The Mavericks have likewise come to learn that Porzingis isn’t always patient with himself — as evidenced by a nine-minute session with reporters at his locker last week in which Porzingis was deeply self-critical of his 4-for-14 shooting against Orlando.
After describing himself as “the first person that wants to get out of this moment,” Porzingis watched film with Carlisle the next day and began to ease up on himself. Porzingis conceded that he “maybe overreacted a little bit.”
Of course, given the news media caldron in which he spent his first three and a half N.B.A. seasons, perhaps it was an inevitable overreaction. Porzingis is bound to gradually realize and embrace the fact that scrutiny and criticism in Cowboys-obsessed Dallas won’t approach the levels he is accustomed to, which should be a boost to his comeback efforts.
To wit: The Knicks may have won Round 1 against the Mavericks on Friday night in Dallas with their most complete performance of the season, but a 2-8 start and heavy home losses to Sacramento and Cleveland appear to have plunged Coach David Fizdale, and perhaps even the front-office duo of Steve Mills and Scott Perry, into a job-security crisis earlier than anyone expected. Just in time for Porzingis’s return, his old team is in crisis.
Perceptions have changed since the Knicks dealt Porzingis to the Maverickson Jan. 31. In some corners of the league, Dallas was assailed for potentially surrendering too much — two future first-round picks packaged with the promising young guard Dennis Smith Jr., in addition to taking on the expensive contracts of Tim Hardaway Jr. and Courtney Lee — for a player with Porzingis’s injury history. It was widely presumed that the Knicks made the deal with the knowledge that a significant free-agent score was looming. The price doesn’t look quite as steep now; not after the Knicks flopped in free agency despite the team owner James L. Dolan’s hints at major signings in a March radio interview.
The New York Police Department said this week that there is no update on an investigation it opened in March after a complaint brought by a woman who said Porzingis sexually assaulted her at their Manhattan apartment building in February 2018. Porzingis, who has not been charged, has denied the allegation.
The Mavericks, when it was their turn, bestowed a five-year, $158 million contract upon Porzingis in the first allowable minutes of free agency on June 30 and have made the player’s comfort level a priority after watching how quickly his relationship with the Knicks spiraled.
One example: Dallas has hired Manolo Valdivieso, Porzingis’s physiotherapist from Spain, after the Knicks refused to do so. It is a concession that the Mavericks have made to a franchise centerpiece before; Nowitzki’s physiotherapist from Germany, Jens Joppich, still drops in for occasional work with various Dallas players even though Nowitzki retired in April.
“It’s a new N.B.A.,” Cuban said, adding that it’s incumbent on teams today, when it comes to their stars, “to try to re-earn their loyalty every day.”
Until they can pinpoint a new face of the franchise to succeed Porzingis, it will be difficult to dispute that the Knicks are struggling mightily to adapt to it. No matter what happens Thursday night.
by Marc Stein
[img=596x0]https://ci6.googleusercontent.com/proxy/uawfOZA_qnPaUZcFK0O7nGdWbo5bHKx8BLhuoZS5pWjQhgQAjdRRD8pdiBHwsHPUBk3ivIL-i46UKthoNlWMSh5NgD28WFHqgL78xWURUg28IBhwwiYaCTSReF_zCl_FMpiYSeWwpFNfkBA6ImA4UIvBybwPeiAthaq_QjVonygSNuIWpDp1TUwbyV4conXGMtBeELfvLDKIM7Fg8ulIkt6WRB8=s0-d-e1-ft#https://static01.nyt.com/images/2019/04/03/sports/03porzingis1-newsletter/merlin_152952561_d4261fd2-eda8-438d-b8fc-1da097269bac-articleLarge.jpg[/img]
The first sportswriter from New York armed with Knicks questions for Kristaps Porzingis arrived in Dallas last Tuesday.
By the time Porzingis and the rest of the Mavericks fly back to Texas after Thursday’s highly anticipated reunion game at Madison Square Garden, he will have played his former team twice. He will also have endured nearly 10 consecutive days of fielding queries about the circumstances surrounding his departure from the Knicks — and the state of his game nine months later.
The Mavericks, though, don’t seem terribly concerned about this stretch of drama overload for their marquee newcomer. They prefer to focus on all the Knicks-free pavement in front of them for the rest of the season.
It is an easier position to take, mind you, if you believe — as Mavericks officials do — that Porzingis is ahead of schedule in his comeback.
“He is so much further on than I expected after 20 months off,” Mark Cuban, Dallas’s team owner, said on Monday, hours before Porzingis endured a foul-plagued nightmare in Boston in which he missed 10 of 11 shots from the field.
“I expected him to be rustier,” Cuban said. “And add that to a new system, new teammates, new city.”
Garden-goers can expect to see a different sort of Porzingis, 24, when he makes his first appearance at the Garden since the fateful night he tore the anterior cruciate ligament in his left knee against the Milwaukee Bucks on Feb. 6, 2018.
The Mavericks are generally using him in six-minute bursts as he continues to rebuild his stamina after such an extended period of rehabilitation. Porzingis is also still in the process of restoring the requisite confidence in his legs to throw himself into crowds.
In spite of such limitations, Porzingis is averaging a more-than-passable 18.3 points, 7.9 rebounds and 2.4 blocks per game in Dallas’s 6-4 start. In the biggest adjustment, he is spending more time beyond the 3-point line than he ever did as a Knick and is averaging 6.2 attempts per game from long distance, up from his highest figure (4.8 per game) in New York.
A whopping 43 percent of Porzingis’s shots in 2017-18 were what many teams regard as dreaded “long 2s” — shots from at least 10 feet but short of the 3-point line. The Mavericks are trying to wean Porzingis off the increasingly devalued shot. As Coach Rick Carlisle explained last week, Dallas’s staff is convinced that Porzingis is “one of the best spacers in the history of the game if you look at the analytics on it.”
“When he’s out above the arc, it has an amazing positive effect on the team that he’s playing for, whether it was New York or whether it’s us,” Carlisle said.
Porzingis’s presence on the perimeter, and his proficiency on catch-and-shoot opportunities from 3-point range, draws the opposition’s size away from the basket. That, in turn, opens driving lanes for the Mavericks’ Luka Doncic, who has taken an immediate leap from his Rookie of the Year Award-worthy debut season to certifiable franchise-player production.
Yet Carlisle acknowledged that the Mavericks were “still tweaking some things” offensively, because they don’t want Porzingis to feel marginalized in this gestation period of his partnership with Doncic. For all the hope that Porzingis and Doncic will ultimately form a new-age version of Dallas’s storied tag team of Dirk Nowitzki and Steve Nash, there is no getting around the fact that in the 224 minutes they have played together, Dallas is averaging just 101.7 points per 100 possessions, which would rank 28th in the league. In Doncic’s 125 minutes without Porzingis, Dallas has been an offensive juggernaut, averaging 124.7 points per 100 possessions.
Porzingis admitted after his Boston woes that he was guilty of “maybe forcing some things” amid stretches he hasn’t received the ball “as much as I’d like to.” The Mavericks have likewise come to learn that Porzingis isn’t always patient with himself — as evidenced by a nine-minute session with reporters at his locker last week in which Porzingis was deeply self-critical of his 4-for-14 shooting against Orlando.
After describing himself as “the first person that wants to get out of this moment,” Porzingis watched film with Carlisle the next day and began to ease up on himself. Porzingis conceded that he “maybe overreacted a little bit.”
Of course, given the news media caldron in which he spent his first three and a half N.B.A. seasons, perhaps it was an inevitable overreaction. Porzingis is bound to gradually realize and embrace the fact that scrutiny and criticism in Cowboys-obsessed Dallas won’t approach the levels he is accustomed to, which should be a boost to his comeback efforts.
To wit: The Knicks may have won Round 1 against the Mavericks on Friday night in Dallas with their most complete performance of the season, but a 2-8 start and heavy home losses to Sacramento and Cleveland appear to have plunged Coach David Fizdale, and perhaps even the front-office duo of Steve Mills and Scott Perry, into a job-security crisis earlier than anyone expected. Just in time for Porzingis’s return, his old team is in crisis.
Perceptions have changed since the Knicks dealt Porzingis to the Maverickson Jan. 31. In some corners of the league, Dallas was assailed for potentially surrendering too much — two future first-round picks packaged with the promising young guard Dennis Smith Jr., in addition to taking on the expensive contracts of Tim Hardaway Jr. and Courtney Lee — for a player with Porzingis’s injury history. It was widely presumed that the Knicks made the deal with the knowledge that a significant free-agent score was looming. The price doesn’t look quite as steep now; not after the Knicks flopped in free agency despite the team owner James L. Dolan’s hints at major signings in a March radio interview.
The New York Police Department said this week that there is no update on an investigation it opened in March after a complaint brought by a woman who said Porzingis sexually assaulted her at their Manhattan apartment building in February 2018. Porzingis, who has not been charged, has denied the allegation.
The Mavericks, when it was their turn, bestowed a five-year, $158 million contract upon Porzingis in the first allowable minutes of free agency on June 30 and have made the player’s comfort level a priority after watching how quickly his relationship with the Knicks spiraled.
One example: Dallas has hired Manolo Valdivieso, Porzingis’s physiotherapist from Spain, after the Knicks refused to do so. It is a concession that the Mavericks have made to a franchise centerpiece before; Nowitzki’s physiotherapist from Germany, Jens Joppich, still drops in for occasional work with various Dallas players even though Nowitzki retired in April.
“It’s a new N.B.A.,” Cuban said, adding that it’s incumbent on teams today, when it comes to their stars, “to try to re-earn their loyalty every day.”
Until they can pinpoint a new face of the franchise to succeed Porzingis, it will be difficult to dispute that the Knicks are struggling mightily to adapt to it. No matter what happens Thursday night.