It is a problem that has tormented great minds forever, much in the same vein as the chicken or the egg conundrum.
If a shooter isn’t shooting well, at what point does he stop shooting instead of trying to shoot his way out of his shooting mess?
For J.R. Smith, he of the “somewhat” troublesome left knee — and the far less than enviable .331 shooting percentage — said recently that “one thing I’m not going to do is stop shooting.”
Well, he stopped, sort of, Sunday. Until he fired up — and clanged — a couple of missed 3-pointers in the final 11.4 seconds, Smith only had taken nine shots in more than 34 minutes of the latest Knicks disaster, a 103-99 loss to the Pelicans that also was their ninth straight defeat. Smith acknowledged this was not a normal game for him.
“Yeah unfortunately, my offense isn’t where I want it to be, it’s not where my team wants it to be,” Smith said. “It’s coming around slow so I’ve got to do more. Get rebounds, kick the ball to the hot hand, keep being vocal on the defensive end, do whatever I can other than just score to be more valuable out there to my teammates.”
Maybe he should have kept shooting. Smith did grab eight rebounds but he committed three turnovers, all leading directly to Pelicans scores. And defensively, well, suffice to say Smith kept with team policy. He struggled, particularly against New Orleans’ Tyreke Evans (24 points).
“They were pretty much scoring at will,” Smith said. “Especially my guy. I don’t know what the hell I was doing on defense.”
Smith, who in Denver on Friday admitted his surgically repaired knee was “somewhat” bothersome, immediately shot down any medical angle as an excuse.
“That’s not an excuse. I’m out there. I want to play my best when I’m out there. If I’m hurting the team I shouldn’t be out there. Point blank and period,” Smith said. “I don’t look for excuses. [Coach Mike Woodson] plays me, he has confidence in me, I have confidence in myself, my teammates have confidence in me. I just have to go out there and play like I know how to play.”
That is exactly what Woodson wants. He wants — and the Knicks need — the guy who averaged 18.1 points, shot .422 overall and .356 on 3-pointers in winning the Sixth Man Award last season. Smith is averaging 11.7 points and is down to .296 on 3-pointers. Last night, he scored 12 points, shot 3-of-8 on 3s.
“There’s always concern,” Woodson said of Smith’s knee on which he underwent surgery over the summer for a chipped patellar tendon and torn meniscus. “J.R. missed pretty much all of camp. He made the comeback the last exhibition game and I thought he played pretty well in that. But it’s been a struggle for him.
“We kind of expected that a little bit based on the fact he didn’t go through training camp and coming off the knee surgery but at the end of the day we still need him to play and play at a high level. He was such a big piece of what we did last season.”