Welcome to New York, Andrea!
The Knicks won, but Bargnani lost Wednesday in Milwaukee. His reputation as a robotic player with a low basketball IQ has now come south across the Canadian border courtesy of the last two games.
Bargnani is not the reason the Knicks are 8-17. J.R. Smith, Raymond Felton and Iman Shumpert have had significantly worse seasons. Bargnani has at least stayed healthy. But there is nothing more frustrating and bitter than watching him play on a daily basis — a 7-foot walking, talking enigma. The Italian Scallion, if you will.
Some nights his jumper is pure as gold, looking like the finesse secondary scorer Carmelo Anthony desperately hoped to add in the offseason. Sometimes his post defense is solid, with contested and blocked shots.
And then there were the last two games against Washington and Milwaukee. That’s when you want to pull the hair out of your head as some guys on the Knicks bench looked to want to do Wednesday night in the final seconds of the first overtime.
Mike Woodson, coaching to save his job, would have torn out the hair in his head, too, if he had any. Woodson said on his ESPN New York radio show Thursday he didn’t say a word to Bargnani after the play, but planned on discussing the matter soon.
“I think you can feel his frustrations walking off the floor,’’ Woodson said. “The timing wasn’t right. The kid feels bad enough, me beating him over the head, I’m going to have a conversation with him sometime [Thursday] about what was you’re thinking.’’
After 25 games in New York, it’s no surprise to see why Bargnani became the poster boy for Toronto’s failures the last five seasons. The Knicks, knowing Amar’e Stoudemire was hit and miss, were desperate this offseason to give Anthony some major scoring help in Melo’s contract year.
A desperate James Dolan took a gamble, with the blessing of CAA, the superagency that represents Anthony, J.R. Smith, Chris Smith and Mike Woodson. It’s not as if the Knicks gave up a king’s ransom: Steve Novak has fallen off the map in Canada; Marcus Camby is all but retired; Dolan can buy back two second-round picks if he wants. And it will be three years before Raptors general manager Masai Ujiri knows what he’s got with the Knicks’ 2016 first-round pick.
But Dolan wants to know what they have and still doesn’t. The Knicks are trying to exorcise the demons from Bargnani’s Toronto stint and this week proved they haven’t.
Woodson, who bragged over the summer he would turn Bargnani’s career around, has a ways to go. Assistant coaches Jim Todd, Herb Williams and Darrell Walker have been in Bargnani’s ear as well.
Bargnani got a free pass for Monday’s timeout fiasco. Woodson got raked over the coals, but if Bargnani had executed the defensive rotation and trapped a driving Bradley Beal, there may have been no need for a timeout.
There was no escaping the wrath from fans after Wednesday’s miscue, despite the double-OT win. After Tyson Chandler grabbed that offensive rebound off Anthony’s miss and flung it back to the big Italian with the Knicks up two, Bargnani, his mind in Milan and not Milwaukee, mindlessly launched a 3-pointer with 13 seconds left despite a new 24-second clock.
Chandler ran over and barked at him before realizing that wasn’t the best strategy for the sensitive big man. Then he told him his teammates they will get the win for him.
Bargnani called it “a mistake’’ three times after the game but didn’t expand. It’s not in his reserved nature.
The display showed Bargnani’s head is not in the game entirely. He’s not a thinking man’s basketball player. His quotes to the press usually lack any insight. There are nights he can’t get his jumper to fall and he passes up open looks to drive into traffic, but he’s not a finisher around the rim. After Bargnani misses an open look, his teammates sag on defense in the ensuing possession. The Wall Street Journal found 60.3 percent of Bargnani’s misses outside the paint result in scores on the other end — third-highest in the NBA.
Bargnani’s standard offensive numbers — 14.8 points per game on 44.8 percent shooting — are not bad. He hasn’t missed a game. But there’s something missing, and Woodson’s coaching staff can’t figure it out.
Chandler has already made a big difference in one night with an outstanding return in Milwaukee — making every key defensive play in the first overtime before Bargnani’s goof. This column should be about Chandler and the impact he has already made. Instead, it’s about Bargnani, who in eight days visits Toronto for his first regular-season game there as a Knick. Those Raptors fans can tell you he may forever leave you wanting for more.