Just How Much Would Dennis Schröder Help the Knicks?

Hard to Overstate How Much New York Needs a Point Guard

Rumors are swirling, with the trade deadline fast approaching (this Thursday, in case you don't have a countdown clock set in your home for some reason) that the Knicks are targeting Dennis Schröder.

There's two aspects to this worth considering. One is how much it will take to get him. And opinions differ on how much of the current nucleus the Knicks should give up in such a deal.

But let's not lose sight of just how much better he'd be than the current point guards, both for the present and future Knicks.

Schröder is in the third year of a four-year, $70 million contract he signed with the Oklahoma City Thunder. This means if the Knicks acquire him, he'd be under team control for as long as any of the three point guards currently on the roster are. Dennis Smith Jr. and Frank Ntilikina are signed through 2021, while Elfrid Payton's one-year deal becomes a two-year contract if he isn't waived by June 28, 2020.

So while Schröder is older than any of the other three, the window of time the Knicks would have any of them isn't substantially different. And Schröder isn't much older than Payton, at just 26, still in what should be his prime seasons.

2019-20 has been such a season, and it is worth considering just how much better he's been, along with whether any of the three point guards on the roster have a reasonable expectation of reaching a ceiling at the level Schröder already occupies.

Schröder, playing starter minutes this season (though coming off the bench most games) at 31.1 minutes per game, is averaging 19.1 points per game. He's doing it on 47.2 percent shooting from the field. Contrast that with Payton's 42.3 percent, Ntilikina's 37.9 percent and Smith's 32.9 percent, and you get a sense of just how much more potent Schroeder is as a scorer. 

How he does it is as important, too: he's strong penetrating to the rim, shooting a career-best 64.6 percent from 0-3 feet, getting 21.7 percent of his field goal attempts from that distance. Payton and Smith get to the rim more often as a percentage of their totals, but they are far less efficient once there -- 56.4 percent for Payton, 51.2 percent for Smith. (This is where it is worth pointing out how little Smith has done to turn his athleticism, the tool, into the usable NBA skill of finishing at the basket.) Ntilikina is taking only 20.5 percent of his shots from 0-3 feet and making them at just a 53.8 percent clip.

So for the present, Schröder is the clear choice. What remains unknown: whether any of the three point guards on hand are a good bet to reach the current Schröder performance level, and how long it would take.

Schröder also laps the field in the other highest-value shot, which is beyond the arc. He's struggled for much of his career to top league average from three, but this year, he's a sterling 38.8 percent from deep, on 5.4 attempts per game — a growth portended by his 80+ percent accuracy from the free throw line.

Ntilikina is an ugly 31.7 percent from deep. And he's the clubhouse leader. Smith checks in at 28.9 percent. Payton is at 23.1 percent. Only Ntilikina has a free throw percentage that suggests growth is particularly likely. None of the three, as anyone who has watched the Knicks can attest, require defenses to spend any time at all worrying about their attempts from beyond the arc, which fundamentally compresses spacing.

All this is before we get into the cornerstone of a point guard's job, distribution — Payton leads Schröder in assist percentage, but Schröder has posted higher assist percentage numbers in different offenses in the past, and even now leads both Smith and Ntilikina this season.

So exactly how and when the Knicks can acquire Dennis Schröder remains an vital question for the team to answer over the next 72 hours. But putting him on this roster changes, in some significant ways, how the offense can operate going forward.