Steve Popper: What position does the Knicks' Josh Hart play? 'He plays winner'
Knicks guard Josh Hart looks toward San Antonio Spurs guard De'Aaron Fox after a foul during the second half of Game 1 of the NBA Finals on Wednesday in San Antonio. Credit: AP/David J. Phillip
SAN ANTONIO — Josh Hart ambled up to the stage, a hood covering his head, and rubbed his eyes, looking like a teenager being forced to get up for school. It's understandable if he was tired Thursday afternoon, little more than 12 hours after he’d conducted his usual Tasmanian devil style of play.
The focus in the NBA Finals mainly has been on the otherworldly talents of Victor Wembanyama, the 7-4 “Alien” who is so unique with his size and skill, but maybe it’s just as difficult to prepare for Hart. Sound odd? Sure, but consider what he brings to the court.
At 6-4, he grabbed a game-high 15 rebounds in 26:47 and did it by simply wanting it more than the face of the NBA future, who towers a foot taller with an eight-foot wingspan and a 9-7 standing reach.
“It doesn't surprise me,” Jalen Brunson said. “I learned that that's just who he is. I mean, he was our leading rebounder in college for I think my final two years, whatever, something like that. Or his final two years. That's just who he is.
"Yeah, his energy is just relentless. It doesn't stop. I mean, he eats candy all the time. That tells you who he is. He's a big kid with an absurd amount of energy.”
Hart's performance, which helped the Knicks through the ups and downs of Game 1 before they emerged with a 105-95 win, may have been a classic example of what he brings to the team and why Brunson was so excited about when the trade was swung to bring him to New York, but it also was a typical performance.
He scored only three points, shooting 1-for-5 and 0-for-3 from beyond the arc, but he had as big an impact as anyone on the Knicks as they drew first blood, coming back from a 14-point third-quarter deficit and scoring the final 11 points of the game. He grabbed the 15 rebounds — 11 in the second half — and had six assists and four steals.
“I talked to him after the game, and just reading his stat line, I think it was like three, 15, six, four steals, something like that,” said Mikal Bridges, the third Villanova alum on the roster. “It's a crazy stat line. Shows how much you're impacting. I think even that sheet doesn't even show what he was doing.”
This is nothing new. When Hart was a part of Team USA, Steve Kerr said, “People ask, ‘What position does he play?’ He plays winner. I don’t know what position he plays, but he gets loose balls and guards anybody. At one point [Erik Spoelstra] turned to me and said, ‘Some people get 50-50 balls, but he gets the 30-70 balls.’ ”
Hart’s way is to do what is needed. It's sometimes playmaking, sometimes shooting, often defending and always energy. The energy is the constant, even if the role shifts. Sometimes, as was the case in Game 1, he finds himself with a different assignment than the one he’d prepared for.
“I think all the questions that I was asked the last three days about Victor guarding me, doing all those kind of things,” Hart said with a smile. “We’re going through stuff for that, and obviously the first period of the game, I'm bringing the ball up and [Julian] Champagnie is guarding me. I was about to call a timeout and tell him to switch. I was like, hold on, that's not how it's supposed to be.”
The Spurs are a team that features young stars, notable for the fire that they play with, but Hart is another level. Like Wembanyama, it’s something that you can’t prepare for in practice.
There was one sequence with just under three minutes left and the game in the balance when Wembanyama missed a shot in the paint and Hart swooped in between Wembanyama and another Spur, securing the rebound with his feet nearly touching the baseline under the basket. He then started a sprint to the other end, and when Landry Shamet misfired on a three-pointer, Hart accelerated to another gear, outracing two Spurs to the rebound, grabbing it on one foot just inbounds, 94 feet from where he’d started the play, and while off-balance, saving it back inbounds to a teammate.
“It takes humility and just a willingness to sacrifice,” Hart said. “We're in the NBA Finals; there's millions of people watching. It's easy to get wrapped up in human nature of wanting to get recognition, wanting to score the ball, wanting to show people what you can do on the biggest stage. That's not everyone's calling and not everyone's assignment. I know for me, that's not really my assignment.
"It takes a little bit of time to find that humility. For me, I found that with prayer and my faith. But that's kind of what it is, those two things, prayer and humility, because it's easy to get wrapped up in human nature, especially at this level, when you want to show people what you can do.
"But when you have that willingness to sacrifice . . . when you have a group of guys that have that willingness to sacrifice and that humility, that breeds a championship culture.”
“You know what Josh is going to do,” Karl-Anthony Towns said. “He's going to play hard. He's going to be a dawg. He's going to go out there and find a way to get the job done. He's going to do it at a high energy level and with a lot of physicality and determination. You never want to tell Josh to not do something . . . We understand what Josh is going to do. When the game came down to it and you look at the stat sheet, he led us in rebounds, and it was something that just came with his pure effort. His ability to push the pace for us and be impactful in so many other ways than needing to score the ball is a huge reason why we're here in the NBA Finals.”
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.
