Just a sampling of some Knicks players did tonight against the Hawks:
Mitchell Robinson – career high 22 points
RJ Barrett – career high 27 points
Kevin Knox – season high 17 points
Frank Ntilikina – career high 3 points
Bobby Portis – career high 2 faces punched
And that’s just a sampling. I would run into the YouTube character limit if I tried to do the whole team. The Knicks were really unstoppable in this game, everything they were throwing up at the rim was going in, unless it was a lob to Robinson, in which he was catching it and then putting it in. The Hawks weren’t really playing any defense, sure, but there are plenty of games this season where the opposition didn’t play much defense and the Knicks still couldn’t do anything except aimlessly meander on offense while looking confusedly at the bench as if anyone over there would know what was going on either.
Robinson did get to pad his stats a little bit at the end, as the Hawks were aggressively doubling way too far from the basket, leaving the lob connection unguarded and easy to convert. But who’s going to care? In the end, the boxscore says he had 22 points, that’s a career high, and that’s all that matters. It’s not like he was TRYING to statpad. He just ended up wide open by the basket and scored it, like any player would do. I mean, basically, it was the Hawks who were statpadding for him.
Next step for Robinson now that he’s hit the 20-point mark for the first time: start shooting a jumper or two. It’s fun watching him dunk, but it would be even more fun to see him splash an elbow jumper.