Another glimmering flash of potential before another string of games of bland mediocrity. Yawn. Wake me up when Frank Ntilikina puts together a serious run of nice performances and then I’ll get excited. For now, I’ll leave it to the Knicks fans among us to get excited. I won’t even blame them; their team just totally demolished the Blazers (who were supposed to be good and theoretically could still be good) with Ntilikina having a really solid game on both ends of the floor.
Ntilikina needs to make it work in New York, or he’s probably not going to make it work anywhere. No team is as invested in him as the Knicks are; if he gets traded, his new team will kick the tires on him, maybe rather hard kicks too, but if he doesn’t immediately produce they’re not likely to use a ton of development time on him. And then back off to Europe he goes! This situation might currently be happening to Dante Exum, the parallels between those two players’ careers are eerie.
There are good signs, though. Even if he is being, somehow, even less aggressive than ever in looking for his shot, it tentatively looks like he can help a team win with his defense. And he has enough passing ability to act as a lead guard. I think. But man, he really needs to work on scoring. Ricky Rubio is like 500 times the scorer and even he barely makes it work.