Even with that big, big window the Knicks have opened for LeBron James, Dwyane Wade or Chris Bosh, there still has proven to be plenty of wall left for Danilo Gallinari to hit.
“He’s 21 years old,” Knicks coach Mike D’Antoni said. “When you have a team that’s not real powerful, everything is magnified and you want him to have 20 points and play good defense and win every game, and I just don’t think that’s realistic right now for anybody.”
A bunch of Knicks who aren’t going to be here next year couldn’t follow one win in Washington on Friday with another last night. They lost 120-109 to Memphis with Gallinari, one of the few guys certain to return, finishing with 11 points, his highest total in five games.
In foul trouble all night, Gallinari hit his only 3-pointer of the game to tie the score with 4:04 to go, then didn’t score again — not that anybody other than David Lee (one basket) did either.
“You have to be emotionally invested in the team or otherwise your game suffers,” D’Antoni had said about Gallinari on Friday. “This game is too hard.”
A day later, apparently the coach decided that was hard on Gallinari, too, just not as hard as watching game after game slip away for lack of somebody stepping up in the end.
Certainly, it’s a long NBA season for a guy going through his first full one after being limited by a back disk problem to just 28 games in 2008-09. It gets longer by the day for the Knicks, who have a surgically repaired former star, Tracy McGrady, out of gas, and a potential star like Gallinari unable to find his pedal.
“The questions you have [are]: Can [Gallinari] play defense? Is he tough enough?” D’Antoni said. “I think he’s really tough.
“He’s been off with his shot . . . but I don’t think its anything to be alarmed about. People with good intentions tell him he can’t be just a 3-point shooter. But if his strength is shooting from the outside, that’s what he should do.
“If they come out and play him, he shouldn’t be programmed that ‘I gotta drive’ or ‘I have to post up.’ Sometimes I think he’s thinking too much about the game, instead of just playing and reacting.”
Gallinari, who played in an Italian League that didn’t have this kind of in-season player movement, has been reacting badly to the trades of 10 days ago.
“I don’t know, could be many reasons,” Gallinari said, asked why he has stopped shooting. “It’s a new team, this could be a reason — I don’t know.”
Harder to know is why that’s a credible excuse, because his last 20-point game was 16 games ago.
McGrady was on the bench for the fourth quarter and overtime Friday night while Gallinari was totaling 41 minutes, and didn’t play after halftime last night. The kid’s not being denied any time by the trades that so shook him up.
Jordan Hill, the 2009 first-round pick, is gone, as is the 2010 first-round pick, as is the 2012 top pick, while the flip-flopped 2011 pick with Houston will be the lesser of the two. That means Gallinari, taken sixth overall in 2008, will be the best thing the Knicks get out of a draft over a five-year period, a problem if they don’t hit the jackpot in free agency or maybe a problem filling out a strong rotation regardless.
There is a lot riding on this kid showing he’s going to be a lot better than this.