A few notes from the Knicks’ loss to Toronto on Thursday:
This year, maybe more than others, there are many NBA-ready free agents looking for jobs. If you watched the Knicks shoot 3-for-36 from three on Thursday and are wondering whether they’re looking to add any shooting, keep mid-January in mind.
Entering the season, some Knick decision-makers wanted to asses the roster at the 15-20 game mark before considering any roster changes.
That doesn’t mean that the roster is going to change at the 15-20 game mark. It just means that the Knicks, entering the season, wanted to take a few weeks to assess the roster before considering any moves.
New York currently has 15 players and two two-way players on the roster. So the club would need to release a player to add a free agent.
The Knicks are without several guards due to injury (Immanuel Quickley, Frank Ntilikina, Dennis Smith Jr., Alec Burks) at the moment, but none of the injuries are believed to be significant.
QUICKLEY CONTINUES TO PROGRESS
Immanuel Quickley missed Thursday’s game, but it sounds like he’ll be back on the floor soon.
“Each day he’s done quite a bit more, more contact, that sort of thing,” Tom Thibodeau said Thursday. “He’s not quite there so we felt let’s wait another day or two and see what it looks like.”
The Knicks play Indiana on Saturday and then Atlanta on Monday.
Dennis Smith Jr. will re-join the Knicks during their road trip but will need to work on his conditioning once he’s cleared for practice.
“It’s a contusion that’s pretty deep,” Thibodeau said. “So once he’s ready to go, there’s the conditioning part of it, which is important. So we have to get him back into practice and work on that as well.”
THIBS’ PHILOSOPHY ON THREES
Thibodeau doesn’t have a problem with the Knicks taking a ton of threes – as long as they are quality shots.
“If you get the right play, if you get the movement, if you force the defense to collapse, you kick it out, and if one of your shooters is open, that’s all I go by,” Thibodeau said in response to a question after the Knicks missed 33 of 36 3-point attempts on Thursday. “When you rate your shots, which we chart and rank, if it’s a high percentage play, before you know what the result is, what you try to determine is if it’s a good shot or not. So if a guy’s wide open, there’s no one within five feet, you gotta shoot it. I think we were shooting 47 percent from three the first four games and we got high-quality shots. I thought we got high-quality shots again tonight. I want to look at the film before I comment further on that.
“That’s part of the NBA game. We emphasize the open three, the layups and the drive to the basket to try to get to the free throw line. It’s all part of the offense. So we always feel that if we defend, rebound and keep our turnovers down, that will put us in a position to win. I felt we had a shot at this.”
