I had mentioned how Craig Robinson hyped his development system and BS'ed about it claiming there was some secret sauce that differentiated it from others. I said Robinson was full of crap and the Knicks should look to get rid of him in a reorg. Here's an article from The Athletic discussing the Knicks development system and it's lackluster results so far and 3 coaches opinions of player development.
CHARLOTTE — When David Fizdale came in as the Knicks head coach in 2018, he did not put a single player development coach on his staff. Instead, he said, everyone would be involved in the all-important task. It was a remove from a growing trend across the league, where the NBA’s best organizations devote copious resources and man-power to building up young players.The Knicks had made powerful promises about that, too. Craig Robinson, the franchise’s vice president of player development, has been in place since the summer of 2017. During his first year on the job, he said he was installing a program that would innovate player development. He compared it to Nike and Google.
“If you look at how things are done around the league, no one is actually trying to do this the way we’re trying to do it,” Robinson said two months before Fizdale was hired. “So it’s also got that aspect of being able to do something that is completely new and could be transformative in the industry.”
The results for the Knicks so far have been underwhelming. There is no single resounding development victory to point to. Frank Ntilikina, the 2017 lottery pick, remains raw, though he has made progress. Kevin Knox, the 2018 lottery pick, has struggled as a sophomore. Mitchell Robinson was a dynamo as a rookie, but it is hard to say definitively that he has gotten better in his second season. Allonzo Trier had a solid debut as an undrafted free agent, earning a two-year contract, but has been marooned on the bench this season.
The Knicks’ development system has not drawn compliments in talking to some around the NBA. Before this season, the G League team had been a pipeline to the Knicks, with all five of Westchester’s starting lineup getting promoted in 2017-18, but none have stuck with the team. Five players have turned G League deals into NBA deals, though only Kenny Wooten remains in the organization. The players have been seen as bright spots — Trey Burke, Luke Kornet, Noah Vonleh — have been traded or not re-signed. The Knicks did not make Craig Robinson available to talk for this story.
One constant question has been whether the Knicks devote enough playing time to their young players. That issue has been raised again this season. The Knicks have prioritized veterans over their youth. Ntilikina was swept back into a clogged point guard rotation after getting a chance to start earlier in the year, when Dennis Smith Jr. and Elfrid Payton were away from the team or injured. Knox is playing 10 fewer minutes per game this season than as a rookie, and is averaging just 14.3 over his last 15 games. Smith has regressed altogether from last year, and his playing time has been inconsistent while missing time due to injury and a death in his family. The Knicks have not sent Knox, Smith or Ntilikina to the G League for more minutes.
“We’re looking at development in a lot of different ways and not saying it’s just about, you just need 25 minutes a game to develop,” interim coach Mike Miller said last week. “I think there’s more to it, there’s more ways that we can help these guys grow than doing that. They’re getting experience and they’re getting opportunities and they’re learning. We’re seeing growth.”
If the trade deadline was supposed to bring more opportunity, that has yet to arise. Knox has played at least 20 minutes once in the last 16 games. Ntilikina, while dealing with injury, has oscillated between polarities — playing 11 minutes one night and then 32 minutes the next. Robinson continues to come off the bench.
With 25 games remaining and a 17-40 record, amid the tumult of a February shake-up in the front office, it remains to be seen how the Knicks will approach the rest of the season. Miller does not see any number of minutes as a necessary threshold to reach to say that the Knicks’ youth is getting enough experience on a nightly basis. Instead, he takes a different viewpoint.
“It’s more about the quality when you get to a certain point,” he said. “You go through a period, you’ve got to get out there and play, and then I think a lot to really take the next step is the quality of the minutes and how productive you are and what role you’re playing. Those minutes mean something.”
To see how the Knicks’ philosophy to player development compares to their peers around the NBA, The Athletic sought out three head coaches in organizations known as among the league’s best to see what they believed was key to rearing young players:
[h=2]Raptors coach Nick Nurse[/h]How do you measure what works in player development and what doesn’t on a day-to-day basis?
We try not to evaluate daily. We say, you know, go to work daily, but evaluate periodically, right? And we try to have a little bit of a vision of taking it slow. You don’t want to throw them into too much too soon. But you also want to find out once in a while if you give them a chance to play against the first unit team on the road, start a game or, I don’t know, do something different. The one we always use is let Pascal (Siakam) bring the ball before that was — it’s not so much a rarity anymore. Everybody’s bringing the ball up the floor, but that a few years ago, and we were like, “We’re gonna play this way. With this kid, yeah, you can do it,” and things like that, but too get back to your question, I think that you gotta try to link in what you’re doing with these guys to your system you’re running. I think it takes a lot of people, not only the coaches but off-the-court people. There’s a lot to mentally, physically adjusting-wise. And I think we try to cover the whole person and the whole player if we can.
When it comes to developing players, do young players need to play minutes either at the NBA level or G League or can some of that be done behind the scenes?
Yes. I’m a firm believer that they need to be playing. They gotta play. How do you get any better if you’re not playing? I am big, big, big believer that if they’re not getting minutes with the big club that they gotta go down and play as many minutes as they can get down there.
[h=2]Nuggets coach Mike Malone[/h]What is the key to development now in the NBA?
The easy answer is allowing young players to play and, more importantly, play through their mistakes. That’s what we’ve done. We don’t have a G League team, so we have guys that have all been given a chance to play and grow up and get game minutes. Right now the biggest challenge we have this year is Michael Porter, who falls into that young guy (category), he really hasn’t played in two years. He needs game minutes, and we’re trying to get him those as much as possible while understanding on the other side of that coin that the expectations are for us to be a team that competes for the Western Conference finals. So very, very hard to do both, but I think allowing our young guys to play has been the key to them developing and maturing.
Can a player develop if they don’t play?
No. I don’t think so. Experience is the best teacher. You can watch film. You can do a million and one workouts on the practice court, but if you don’t get game minutes in a game atmosphere, I don’t see how you’re going to get better.
[h=2]Nets coach Kenny Atkinson[/h]What’s the key to player development and are minutes necessary in the course of that?
Yes. I think that was our huge advantage. That we had these ample minutes and we had a runway for these guys to improve. I think without that, without the opportunity — you can argue that’s the first part of development that you need the minutes. It’s hard to develop in the shadows, so to speak, and we went through a lot of struggles with that development process. Obviously if you take it from the beginning to get Joe (Harris) and Spencer (Dinwiddie) and Jarrett Allen and those guys, where they were three years ago, where they are now, so I think their minutes were huge. And patience. I think personally I kinda used a three-year marker, like, that’s where it starts. You really want it to start kicking in the development where guys are really starting to blossom. Sure, there are exceptions where guys right off the bat, they’re really good, but three (years) is kind of the magic number for me. But I know every every situation is different, every team’s different.
CHARLOTTE — When David Fizdale came in as the Knicks head coach in 2018, he did not put a single player development coach on his staff. Instead, he said, everyone would be involved in the all-important task. It was a remove from a growing trend across the league, where the NBA’s best organizations devote copious resources and man-power to building up young players.The Knicks had made powerful promises about that, too. Craig Robinson, the franchise’s vice president of player development, has been in place since the summer of 2017. During his first year on the job, he said he was installing a program that would innovate player development. He compared it to Nike and Google.
“If you look at how things are done around the league, no one is actually trying to do this the way we’re trying to do it,” Robinson said two months before Fizdale was hired. “So it’s also got that aspect of being able to do something that is completely new and could be transformative in the industry.”
The results for the Knicks so far have been underwhelming. There is no single resounding development victory to point to. Frank Ntilikina, the 2017 lottery pick, remains raw, though he has made progress. Kevin Knox, the 2018 lottery pick, has struggled as a sophomore. Mitchell Robinson was a dynamo as a rookie, but it is hard to say definitively that he has gotten better in his second season. Allonzo Trier had a solid debut as an undrafted free agent, earning a two-year contract, but has been marooned on the bench this season.
The Knicks’ development system has not drawn compliments in talking to some around the NBA. Before this season, the G League team had been a pipeline to the Knicks, with all five of Westchester’s starting lineup getting promoted in 2017-18, but none have stuck with the team. Five players have turned G League deals into NBA deals, though only Kenny Wooten remains in the organization. The players have been seen as bright spots — Trey Burke, Luke Kornet, Noah Vonleh — have been traded or not re-signed. The Knicks did not make Craig Robinson available to talk for this story.
One constant question has been whether the Knicks devote enough playing time to their young players. That issue has been raised again this season. The Knicks have prioritized veterans over their youth. Ntilikina was swept back into a clogged point guard rotation after getting a chance to start earlier in the year, when Dennis Smith Jr. and Elfrid Payton were away from the team or injured. Knox is playing 10 fewer minutes per game this season than as a rookie, and is averaging just 14.3 over his last 15 games. Smith has regressed altogether from last year, and his playing time has been inconsistent while missing time due to injury and a death in his family. The Knicks have not sent Knox, Smith or Ntilikina to the G League for more minutes.
“We’re looking at development in a lot of different ways and not saying it’s just about, you just need 25 minutes a game to develop,” interim coach Mike Miller said last week. “I think there’s more to it, there’s more ways that we can help these guys grow than doing that. They’re getting experience and they’re getting opportunities and they’re learning. We’re seeing growth.”
If the trade deadline was supposed to bring more opportunity, that has yet to arise. Knox has played at least 20 minutes once in the last 16 games. Ntilikina, while dealing with injury, has oscillated between polarities — playing 11 minutes one night and then 32 minutes the next. Robinson continues to come off the bench.
With 25 games remaining and a 17-40 record, amid the tumult of a February shake-up in the front office, it remains to be seen how the Knicks will approach the rest of the season. Miller does not see any number of minutes as a necessary threshold to reach to say that the Knicks’ youth is getting enough experience on a nightly basis. Instead, he takes a different viewpoint.
“It’s more about the quality when you get to a certain point,” he said. “You go through a period, you’ve got to get out there and play, and then I think a lot to really take the next step is the quality of the minutes and how productive you are and what role you’re playing. Those minutes mean something.”
To see how the Knicks’ philosophy to player development compares to their peers around the NBA, The Athletic sought out three head coaches in organizations known as among the league’s best to see what they believed was key to rearing young players:
[h=2]Raptors coach Nick Nurse[/h]How do you measure what works in player development and what doesn’t on a day-to-day basis?
We try not to evaluate daily. We say, you know, go to work daily, but evaluate periodically, right? And we try to have a little bit of a vision of taking it slow. You don’t want to throw them into too much too soon. But you also want to find out once in a while if you give them a chance to play against the first unit team on the road, start a game or, I don’t know, do something different. The one we always use is let Pascal (Siakam) bring the ball before that was — it’s not so much a rarity anymore. Everybody’s bringing the ball up the floor, but that a few years ago, and we were like, “We’re gonna play this way. With this kid, yeah, you can do it,” and things like that, but too get back to your question, I think that you gotta try to link in what you’re doing with these guys to your system you’re running. I think it takes a lot of people, not only the coaches but off-the-court people. There’s a lot to mentally, physically adjusting-wise. And I think we try to cover the whole person and the whole player if we can.
When it comes to developing players, do young players need to play minutes either at the NBA level or G League or can some of that be done behind the scenes?
Yes. I’m a firm believer that they need to be playing. They gotta play. How do you get any better if you’re not playing? I am big, big, big believer that if they’re not getting minutes with the big club that they gotta go down and play as many minutes as they can get down there.
[h=2]Nuggets coach Mike Malone[/h]What is the key to development now in the NBA?
The easy answer is allowing young players to play and, more importantly, play through their mistakes. That’s what we’ve done. We don’t have a G League team, so we have guys that have all been given a chance to play and grow up and get game minutes. Right now the biggest challenge we have this year is Michael Porter, who falls into that young guy (category), he really hasn’t played in two years. He needs game minutes, and we’re trying to get him those as much as possible while understanding on the other side of that coin that the expectations are for us to be a team that competes for the Western Conference finals. So very, very hard to do both, but I think allowing our young guys to play has been the key to them developing and maturing.
Can a player develop if they don’t play?
No. I don’t think so. Experience is the best teacher. You can watch film. You can do a million and one workouts on the practice court, but if you don’t get game minutes in a game atmosphere, I don’t see how you’re going to get better.
[h=2]Nets coach Kenny Atkinson[/h]What’s the key to player development and are minutes necessary in the course of that?
Yes. I think that was our huge advantage. That we had these ample minutes and we had a runway for these guys to improve. I think without that, without the opportunity — you can argue that’s the first part of development that you need the minutes. It’s hard to develop in the shadows, so to speak, and we went through a lot of struggles with that development process. Obviously if you take it from the beginning to get Joe (Harris) and Spencer (Dinwiddie) and Jarrett Allen and those guys, where they were three years ago, where they are now, so I think their minutes were huge. And patience. I think personally I kinda used a three-year marker, like, that’s where it starts. You really want it to start kicking in the development where guys are really starting to blossom. Sure, there are exceptions where guys right off the bat, they’re really good, but three (years) is kind of the magic number for me. But I know every every situation is different, every team’s different.
