Circumstances May Benefit Dennis Smith Jr. with Knicks

Everything's conspiring in his favor with Knicks right now

For the Knicks in 2019-20, it's hard to find a more disappointing season to date than the one posted by Dennis Smith Jr. 

To be fair, he's entirely aware of this.

"I came into this league with a vision of what I'm going to be," Smith said last week. "I can't let that be shaken by anything that's happened."

It's hard to overstate how much his performance on Monday against Indiana reflects the vision of what NBA talent evaluators told me they thought Smith could be back in 2017, ahead of Dallas choosing him in the 2017 NBA Draft lottery.

15 points, five assists, seven steals, athleticism manifesting itself on both ends: this is the Smith everyone dreamed on after his season at NC State.

What's been so puzzling about Smith this year isn't that, at 22, there's still a need for further growth. It's that he's seen a dramatic reversal from what his NBA career norms have been coming into the season. Just as a topline: he somehow is both getting to the basket less, 32 percent of his shots from 0-3 feet after 38.5 percent of them last year, and he's making them at just a 54.8 percent clip, down from 58.4 percent last season. (He was at 60.6 percent accuracy from that distance as a rookie.)

The question is whether Monday night serves as a springboard or a temporary bit of statistical noise. Smith played 29 minutes in the Indiana game. Just to provide the context on how unstable his role in the rotation has been: he's played 20 minutes or more just eight times all season. Here's the amount of minutes he's gotten in the game following each of those first seven: 10, 21, 14, 25, 17, 20, 15. Put another way, he's managed to get back-to-back 20-minute games for the Knicks just three times all season. A shooting rhythm hasn't followed, but it's hard for a player to get into a rhythm without reps.

Enter: fate. Here's what the Knicks' injury report looks like heading into Wednesday night at Charlotte.

Injury Report 2/26 at Charlotte: Probable - Elfrid Payton (sore right ankle); Doubtful - Frank Ntilikina (sore groin).

— NY_KnicksPR (@NY_KnicksPR) February 25, 2020

That groin injury for Frank Ntilikina isn't going away, it seems. And the Knicks know what Elfrid Payton is for them, which is valuable, cost-controlled form 2020-21, and not someone the team really needs to evaluate. 

And with the Leon Rose era set to begin any day now, the new regime will want a long look at a young player the team has under contract for 2020-21, especially ahead of a point guard-heavy draft in which the Knicks have three of the first 35 picks.

So if Dennis Smith Jr. has a vision of what he'd be at the NBA level, and he wants that vision to come true in New York, it appears he'll have a chance to show it, starting tonight.