Give RJ Barrett his flowers. He deserves the bouquet.
No Knick this season has been more scrutinized and dissected than Barrett, who was burdened by higher expectations in his fourth year and largely floated under them.
On the team hierarchy, Barrett’s shooting struggles left him, without question, a third and unreliable option behind Jalen Brunson and Julius Randle. After Barrett missed 19 of his 25 shots in the first two games against Cleveland, Stephen A. Smith told his immense audience on ESPN’s First Take, “RJ Barrett, you might need to sit him down. He might need to sit down for this series.
“Every series ain’t for everybody,” Smith added. “The great ones, the really, really good ones, they can play in any series. But there are others – you just don’t have that kind of game. And RJ for this series, he don’t need to be seeing the floor. He ain’t made for this series. He just don’t have that kind of game.”
Ouch.
To his credit, Barrett never loses his confidence. He’s always ready to drive to the basket again. Or shoot. It might feel detrimental when he’s jacking up shots at an inefficient clip, but the Knicks absolutely needed his attempts in this series given Randle’s disappearance.
Barrett understood that.
“I think I missed some shots I’m comfortable taking,” he said after the Game 2 defeat.
Then the series shifted to Madison Square Garden, and Barrett emerged as a force worthy of picking up Randle’s considerable slack. He attacked the rim and finished, pressuring the Cavs in transition. He scored 10 points in the fourth quarter of Game 4, which the Knicks emphatically won to take a 3-1 series lead.
The crowd repeatedly chanted, “R.J. Bar-rett.” It didn’t matter that he missed all six of his 3-point attempts Sunday. Barrett was 9 of 12 on 2-pointers and 8 of 13 from the foul line.
“Super aggressive,” Tom Thibodeau said.
It was an important counter to Cleveland, which had been focused on Brunson and was daring anybody else to beat them.
Barrett obliged.
“A lot of times they were doubling Jalen so I was able to get the ball and kind of make the play,” Barrett said.
Until this season, the 22-year-old largely had an unscrutinized existence in New York. But then he signed a four-year, $107 million extension in the summer – representing the first Knick draft pick to sign a second contract with the franchise since Charlie Ward – and the temperature turned up.
Barrett’s extension was announced in September not long after news leaked that Donovan Mitchell was traded to Cleveland instead of New York, a transparent PR attempt to present Barrett as a consolation prize. That didn’t hold up well in the regular season.
But now the Knicks are one victory away from burying Mitchell and the Cavaliers, with Barrett as a big reason why.
“Don’t think about closing it out,” Brunson said. “Don’t think about closing it out at all. Just think of it like we’re going into a hostile environment. They’re going to play desperate, and we just have to be able to bring it.”