The Knicks 100: No. 74 - Derrick Rose

Good morning! I’m back! I’ll have a travel update later in the week, but for right now, let’s get to the tiny bit of news that happened while I was away…

First of all, big thanks to the Knicks for not doing anything newsworthy while I was in the Bahamas for the last week. We did, however, get another departure from the championship squad, with Jeremy Sochan signing a one-year deal with the Portland Trail Blazers.

Sochan never caught on in New York, but I did wonder whether he’d be in the mix for the 14th roster spot, if only because he could offer some theoretical versatility as both a third big and a backup wing. Apparently whatever the Knicks saw since signing him in February wasn’t enough for them to pencil him into their future plans.

Thus, the roster remains at 13 players - the only team in the NBA to have so few, as Jeremy Cohen noted last week. The attempted Moussa Cissé signing was two and a half weeks ago, and since then…crickets. There was some thought around the league that once LeBron James picked his team, there would be a second wave of summer transactions, but so far that hasn’t been the case. Is the front office waiting for a certain domino that hasn’t fallen yet? I suppose we’ll find out soon enough.

The other issue that remains unresolved pertains to Karl-Anthony Towns and his potential contract extension. There’s been some reporting surrounding his desire to stick around, but thus far nothing concrete. I’d be very, very surprised if something didn’t get done before the season, but I’m also assuming KAT is willing to work with the front office on a deal that everyone can live with. We’ll see if I’m proven right.

For 937 minutes in the 2020-21 season, Derrick Rose transformed the Knicks from a fun story into the best team in basketball.

That’s not hyperbole. At least not according to the numbers.

Before Rose’s Knick return (we’ll get to his first go ‘round shortly), New York had outpaced expectations, but with a record of 11-14 and a negative scoring margin, the spunky upstarts were still fighting for a play-in spot. No one viewed them as a legitimate team.

That all changed following the D.Rose trade.

After the former Bull made his debut, the Knicks went 24-11 in games he played - a 69 percent winning clip that trailed only Utah and Phoenix that season. Their net rating in his 937 minutes was a positive 10.6, well above the best mark in the league. In the minutes he didn’t play, they were outscored.

In the playoffs, as Julius Randle was turning into a pumpkin, Rose was turning back the clock. Before he finally ran out of gas in Game 5, the 2011 MVP averaged 23 points on a 50/50/100 slash line in 37 minutes over the first four games. Along with New York’s two other oldest rotation players, Taj Gibson and Alec Burks, Rose was responsible for the only signs of life we saw against Atlanta. Randle may have made All-NBA, but for the last three months of the season, D.Rose was New York’s most important player.

And then, just like that, it was over.

Rose played 53 more regular season games as a Knick, none of which were particularly memorable.1 Nor, for that matter, were any of his first 64 games in New York - the result of Phil Jackson’s ill-fated attempt to reunite the Rose/Joakim Noah tandem that had such success in Chicago2. Those stints helped Derrick climb up the franchise leaderboards (88th in points, 65th in assists), but that’s not why he’s here. If anything, his first stint was a demerit most remembered for Rose briefly going AWOL amidst an unraveling season.

No, Derrick Rose is here because of #WeHere, the team that really got this thing out of the muck and above sea level. Leon Rose signed Jalen Brunson to get the Knicks back on track after a down season, but ‘21-22 was only down because ‘20-21 was up.

Would Jalen have been as willing to come to the Knicks if he was staring at nine consecutive years of futility? #WeHere was a reminder that, yes, it is possible to play winning basketball in New York. More importantly, it confirmed that if you gave a starved fan base something to cheer for, they will consume it with the voracity of pride of lions.

None of it happens without Derrick Rose, who Knick fans surely have deeper affection for than the three players immediately above him on this list:

So…I’ve been pre-writing these pieces to give myself a bit of a break this summer, which I’m telling you to preface the following true story:

Several days after I wrote the newsletter you’re now reading, I woke up at 4:30 in the morning with one name on my mind: Charles Smith. I was tormented by the fact that I put him on this list at all, let alone as high as I did. This is a player who I know full well not a single person reading this has an ounce of affection for. He was a disappointment almost as soon as he got here, and that was before the thing that happened in Game 5 of the 1993 Eastern Conference Finals. You know…the thing that no longer torments us but we would still be wise not to bring up in polite company. That thing.

Smith represents the folly of making this list in the first place. As a Knick, he’s 21st in postseason minutes, 26th in scoring, 24th in rebounding and 30th in win shares. There is no universe where someone with those accolades can be left out in the cold. That win shares ranking is a smidgen behind Mikal Bridges (27th), who for much of the last two years stood to go down in history as the unfortunate bearer of Smith’s torch, not because of a single play, but because of a larger unfulfilled promise.

Bridges righted his ship in spectacular fashion this postseason and helped the Knicks win a title. Smith never had any such redemption arc following his incident against the Bulls, but he was more than respectable during their ‘94 finals run. Does that count for nothing? I struggled with the answer.

Put another way, if any one of those four shots goes in (or, for that matter, if Starks’ three doesn’t get tipped by Hakeem in Game 6), Smith is a top-50 all-time Knick, no questions asked. Can one five-second sequence really make that much of a difference?

Expending the conversation to Davis and Childs, I’d understand anyone who argues that none of the three should be anywhere near a ranking that places “Greatest” and “Knicks” in the same sentence. Childs was supposed to be the long awaited answer at point guard who wound up starting just 68 of 303 games and never beat out incumbent Charlie Ward. Davis is most famous for a blown call that went the Knicks way, but never had a “moment” of his own.

And yet, like with Smith, they’re also deserving.

Davis remains the all-time franchise leader in 3-point marksmanship at 45 percent, with a respectable 37.3 percent hit rate in the playoffs. As a second-year pro, he started the first seven games of the ‘94 Finals run for an injured John Starks and did a decent enough job in place of an All-Star guard. He still ranks inside the top 50 for all-time postseason scoring.

As for Childs, he’s 19th in playoff minutes as a Knick, which by itself warrants some respect. He was a tough player who fit well with that group. The ‘99 Finals will always be a blight on his resume (23 percent shooting, yikes), but he’s far from the only player on this list who struggled in a big spot.

That brings us to the top 70, which we’ll tee off later this week with my favorite Leon Rose-era Knick who wasn’t on hand for the championship run.

🏀

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”