Knicks 'excited' for Friday's preseason opener after being sidelined since March
Knicks guard Frank Ntilikina dribbles the ball at Madison Square Garden on Thursday, Jan. 16, 2020. Credit: Kathleen Malone-Van Dyke
The last time the Knicks played a game was March 11, with the news of the COVID-19 shutdown coming while they were making their way through an overtime game in Atlanta. And for a franchise that was running down the string, the preseason game that marks their return to action Friday might be more important than that regular-season game.
The Knicks have a new head coach in place in Tom Thibodeau, a new front office and a revamped roster — albeit one you might see in any offseason pickup game at the University of Kentucky.
While the expectations may be similar, when the Knicks tip off at Little Caesars Arena in Detroit on Friday night, it will mark their first game action of any type in nine months. That will provide some excitement for a team in need of it.
With the coronavirus still raging, the stands will be empty, and with the players heading out on the road for the first time, the lack of a bubble leaves some uncertainty about just how this will work. But the Knicks are happy to be on the court.
"I’m excited. We’re all excited," Frank Ntilikina said in a Zoom call. "We prepared very well. It’s been a while we didn’t play. Every player in here is really excited. We had a good training camp, a solid training camp. We worked really hard. But now it’s time for what we’ve been waiting for — the game. We’re all excited and super-focused for tomorrow."
"I think everybody’s excited," Dennis Smith Jr. said. "We’ve got a couple [players] that are returning from the team last year and we haven’t played since March and we’ve got a lot of new guys come in, so everybody’s excited to get some action . . . We haven’t played in 10 months or however long it’s been. Guys are going to come out, knock some rust off and try to make plays and try to win."
Just what the Knicks will look like remains a mystery. Even for a meaningless preseason game, Thibodeau was not going to tip his hand on what the starting lineup will be or who might sit out this game. But it will mark the first opportunity to see what kind of impact Thibodeau and his staff can have on the team after an abbreviated training camp without the benefit of summer league or group scrimmages through the fall.
Some teams have been hampered by COVID early on, but Thibodeau indicated that the only player who likely will be unavailable is Austin Rivers, who has been working his way through a groin injury.
"We’re still mixing and matching and evaluating," Thibodeau said of the initial lineup he will deploy. "So I’m going to meet with coaches and we’re going to use a larger rotation in this first game. But we’ll use all four preseason games and probably some games in the regular season as well before we settle on a final rotation. But we’re mixing and matching right now, so we’ll see how it unfolds.
"I think any first game, particularly with the preseason, it gives you a baseline and lets you know exactly where you are. If you’re going against a different opponent, obviously, when you’re scrimmaging and going against your teammate, it’s a little different. And as much as we try to replicate the intensity of the game, we know we can never quite get there. So it’ll be a good measure to let us know where we are conditioning-wise and in terms of execution and take some of the things that we’ve been working on and carry them over into a game.
"Of course, a preseason game is not quite as intense as a regular-season game. There’s different levels of intensity. But it’ll give us a chance to really evaluate."
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.
