Written by danielcoughlin at The Lottery Mafia
The New York Knicks have a history of making highly questionable and highly scrutinized draft picks over the years. Enter Kristaps Porzingis, a towering 20-year-old Latvian, selected with the No. 4 overall pick in the 2015 NBA Draft. Over the first 9 games of the NBA season, Porzingis has roared to life and returned warmth to the most unlikely place – the hearts of New York basketball fans.
When the New York Knicks were set to make the fourth pick in the draft this past summer, there were a lot of familiar names still on the board: Frank Kaminsky, Justise Winslow, Stanley Johnson, and Willie Cauley-Stein. Throwing a curveball like only the Knicks can, the team opted for a 7’3” power forward from Latvia who had been playing in Spain.
Flash forward to the first handful of games in the 2015-16 season. Carmelo Anthony has been a shadow of his normal self, shooting below 40 percent through the season’s first 9 games, a career low.
Despite the less than hot start to the season for the team’s biggest star with its biggest contract, the Knicks are finally looking like the best team in the city, something that the Brooklyn Nets had claimed for quite a while without their New York counterparts putting up much of a fight over the past few seasons. The reason? I’d like to say it is due to the meteoric rise of one Langston Galloway, but it isn’t.
The buzz in the Big Apple is due to the emergence of their young prospect, Kristaps Porzingis. The freakishly tall forward has flashed defense, a good shot with range and a whole bunch of putback dunks.
One thing that a lot of basketball people will point out about Porzingis’s numbers per game: he is only playing 24.7 minutes right now. When you project his numbers out to 36 minutes, they get better. And better for a rookie of his caliber might better be phrased as great.
You see Porzingis, like most rookies and first-year European imports, is far from the finished product. The skills he is demonstrating figure to improve over time, making him more than the high-upside exciting rookie that he has quickly become.
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