All-Star Julius Randle finally explains the difficulties he experienced last season
Julius Randle is an All-Star for the second time with the Knicks. Credit: Kathleen Malone-Van Dyke
When last season finally ended, Julius Randle went home and put basketball behind him. He didn’t touch a ball, focusing on family and trying to forget the moments that burned through the year — the thumbs down and profane message to Madison Square Garden fans, the struggles both individually and as a team.
No one could blame him for wanting to get away from it all. A season earlier, fans at the Garden had serenaded him with “MVP!’’ chants. He was a revelation on the court, leading the Knicks to an unexpected playoff berth with a season that earned him his first All-Star Game appearance, second-team All-NBA honors and the NBA’s Most Improved Player award. And then it all seemed lost.
Late Thursday night, as he soaked in the honor of returning to this season’s All-Star Game as an Eastern Conference reserve, he spoke of the joy he’d regained and for the first time explained what he felt last season when it all went wrong.
He listed all of the people who had been a part of this return to form — the organization from the very top to the coaches, his teammates and family. And from a moment last summer when associate head coach Johnnie Bryant came to visit him in Dallas.
“Johnnie came to me in the beginning of the summer,” Randle said. “I hadn’t touched a basketball in probably like a month and a half, two months. Just had to clear my mind and get my mind back right for the grind. He came to me and had an honest conversation. Helped me put my ego and my pride to the side and you know, try to adjust my game, look at myself in the mirror and do what’s best for the team.
“He said something along the lines of, ‘If you were your teammate and saw you acting the way that you did sometimes, body language, showing frustration, whatever it was, would you want to be your teammate?’ And I was like, no. I had to look at myself in the mirror and take accountability and get better and learn from it.”
Bryant has not spoken to the media, but he tweeted overnight a silhouetted picture of him with Randle and wrote, “The goal is not to be better than anyone else but rather be better than you were yesterday.”
“The goal is not to be better than anyone else but rather be better than you were yesterday.” pic.twitter.com/3TcA5MAkPW
— Johnnie Bryant (@jbryant3) February 3, 2023
Randle’s regression last season was hard to figure. Coach Tom Thibodeau has pointed to the burden on Randle’s shoulders. With teams focusing on him after the success of the previous season and with injuries to the Knicks’ point guards, more was demanded of him. When it didn’t work, he retreated into a shell, dealing with a home crowd that hurled harsh criticism at Randle in front of his young son.
“I think, man, the biggest thing was, I don’t want to say I cared too much, but I care a lot,” Randle said. “It’s a lot that I put into it. I don’t want to make it about myself, but individually, throughout the summer, mentally and physically I put a lot into the game, and sometimes I get into my own head because I’m such a perfectionist with stuff, and when things aren’t going right, I can get a little frustrated.
“For me, I have to accept failure, accept those things . . . learn to deal with frustration. And I think that is really like the biggest adjustment. Success feels amazing and I don’t want to let go of it. For me, while we were having our ups and downs, I had to learn how to be a leader through success and failure.”
“I think that’s a big part of it,” Thibodeau said. “When you think about how you learn, you usually learn through trial and error. Sometimes it’s positive but a lot of times it can be negative. Nothing ever stays the same . . . So I think understanding that, taking a step back, saying OK, he wants to do well, it comes from a really good place. So learn from it and bounce back.”
Randle, who is averaging a career-high 24.7 points and 10.8 rebounds through 53 games this season, spoke about the honor of making the All-Star Game again and passionately made a case for why teammate Jalen Brunson should be there, too. But mostly he spoke openly about how he had risen again after what seemed like a tenure in New York that had spiraled out of control.
“Just how my mindset is, I’m a week or two [off after the season] and back into the gym,” he said. “The year before I think kind of hurt me, to be honest. The year before, we lost in the playoffs and I kind of jumped right back into it. Like anything in life, man, it’s OK to be obsessed, but sometimes you have to give yourself obviously a physical break. But for me it was more mental than anything. So I traveled, spent quality time with my boys and just kind of got away and just refreshed, just had to reevaluate everything.”
Steve Popper covers the Knicks for Newsday. He has spent nearly three decades covering the Knicks and the NBA, along with just about every sports team in the New York metropolitan area.
