Back when he was best known for being the original celebrity NBA fan, watching the fabled Knicks of the early ’70s do their thing night after night, Woody Allen unwittingly lent a voice to describe one of the cornerstones of a future generation of Knicks.
“Eighty percent of success,” he said, “is showing up.”
With the rate of inflation, and given the way load-management protocols seem to flummox the NBA at every turn, that figure is probably closer to 92 percent now, especially as it applies to Julius Randle. Randle can be many things as a basketball player, and to Knicks fans who endeavor nightly to watch him they can often be contradictory.
Often within the same game.
Sometimes in the same possession.
But make no mistake about Randle: he shows up. He plays. Monday night in Los Angeles he twisted his ankle in the first quarter. Shook it off. At halftime he needed four stitches to close a bloody lip. Shook it off.
Later, he hit the 3-pointer (with Anthony Davis in his face) at the shot-clock buzzer that essentially cliched a 114-109 win for the Knicks, allowing them to fly home with a 2-2 Western swing ahead of Wednesday’s first intramural squabble with the Nets at Barclays Center. It underlined a terrific night for Randle when he had 27 points and 13 rebounds with a plus-17 rating, often doing battle head-to-head with LeBron James.
“Scratch it out, gut it out,” Tom Thibodeau said.
The Knicks’ coach was referring to his team’s gritty effort, but he was clearly swayed by Randle’s, too. Randle is one of the most curious stars we’ve ever had around here, in any sport. There are nights when the Garden is so frustrated by him, the boos spill out of every corner — most recently in the middle of their most recent game at Madison Square Garden.
But as they were finishing off the Raptors that night, Dec. 11, Randle stepped to the free-throw line with 13 seconds to go at the end of a 34-point, eight-rebound, five-assist night and was serenaded with an extended chant of “M! V! P!” And that’s not the first time he’s felt — and helped inspire — the Garden’s extreme schizophrenia.
“All I know,” Jalen Brunson said a few weeks ago, “is that we seem to win an awful lot when Julius is playing well. And I don’t think that’s a coincidence.”
What the trip west offered was a tour-de-force for both the Knicks’ All-Star Emeritus (Randle’s earned the honor two of the past three years and is gathering testimony for another) and their All-Star-in-Waiting (if Bruson’s 50-point splurge against the Suns didn’t clinch him a spot yet, it put him in a hard-to-refute place). It’s a reminder of just how essential the Knicks’ two best players are.
But it’s lately been a further reminder of exactly how important Randle is to the formula, for all the deserved praise heaped on Brunson. Randle, unquestionably, can be a frustrating player. When he tries to shoulder too much offensive burden he can be a turnover machine. There are brief intervals on the court where he seems to lapse into laziness, and often those spasms happen at the worst possible time, and with a camera lasered on him.
That’s the ironic part. Fans can react viscerally to those fleeting interludes but they hardly represent the spirit of Randle’s game, which is grounded in durability and sneering his way through aches and pains and bruises and strains. He plays. He works. He shows up. If that sounds like damning with faint praise … well, look around the league on every given night. Look at how many players are sitting in civvies without a cast or a walking boot.
Beyond that, when Randle is playing at his optimum level — which is to say rebounding, using his staggering array of inside moves, taking open 3s and not forcing passes — his is a beautiful game to watch. That’s true merely with the eye test. But it’s also borne out in his production. Over his last 11 games this is Randle’s average output: 27.4 points, 9.3 rebounds, 5.0 assists, shooting 57.1 percent from the floor.
Given how poorly he began the season — through six games he was shooting just 27.1 percent — it’s an especially relevant stretch, and proof that he may have shed the one-year-on, one-year-off pattern he’d established across his first four seasons here.
“What’s the answer? What changed? Playing to my strengths,” Randle said in Phoenix last week. “Understanding spots on the court where I can either get a high-percentage shot or they double me and I can kick out and play-make for my teammates. While I can shoot the ball and make a ton of 3s, I understand who I am as a player, what my strengths are.”
Starting with this one: showing up for work, every day, lunch pail in hand.
Read more
