The arena literally shook and the hanging scoreboard swayed the last time R.J. Barrett and the New York Knicks faced Zion Williamson. An earthquake was the culprit then, on opening night in the 2019 Las Vegas Summer League.
Wednesday night in New Orleans, Williamson was booming and thundering all over as the Pelicans’ point guard, and sure, you could say Barrett wilted against his old Duke roommate, but the Knicks didn’t buckle or flinch or crack or (enter any other earthquake metaphor you have here).
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“He’s a tough matchup, man,” said Julius Randle, who was, once again, the best player on the court Wednesday — with maybe Williamson as the second. “He doesn’t settle, he gets to the paint, he finishes well, and when teams collapse he makes the right plays. He doesn’t really force anything.
“It’s a challenge playing against him. You’ve got to show him a lot of bodies. … It’s sort of similar to guarding Giannis (Antetokounmpo) — it’s a team effort, and you’ve got to try to wall him off.”
He really is 6-foot-7, and the Pelicans list him at 284 pounds, but Williamson is heavier than that. He would be a tank playing point guard, except tanks can’t jump so that their eyes are even with the rim.
The Pels’ experiment of putting the ball in the 20-year old’s hands carried on Wednesday night in the Knicks’ 116-106 victory, because three of their guards (Lonzo Ball, Josh Hart, and Nickeil Alexander-Walker) are hurt and they don’t seem to want Eric Bledsoe doing the job.
Williamson was great, and for comparison’s sake, Barrett was most certainly not, but the Knicks limited Williamson to just four of his 25 total points in the fourth quarter. They smothered him, forced him to give up the ball and otherwise kept him from trucking his way into the paint for bucket after bucket, where he leads the NBA with 19.5 ppg.
All 10 of Williamson’s buckets came in the lane, but he was just 1-of-4 shooting in the final quarter.
“When you deal with special players, you’re going to have special rules,” Knicks coach Tom Thibodeau said. “The thing is he’s a shot maker. There’s many times you think you have him bottled up pretty good, and he still can figure it out. He knows how to use his body, create space and get shots off, and he’s a quick second jumper in terms of following his misses, so that puts enormous pressure on his misses.”
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The Knicks did something New Orleans’ three previous opponents could not — keep Williamson under 30 points. They did it without starting center Nerlens Noel, who was a late scratch with a sore right ankle. Randle (much more on him, momentarily), Taj Gibson and Norvel Pelle held their ground. That silly summer league opener was the only time Williamson and the Knicks had played at all — he was still out following knee surgery when the Knicks and Pels played in January 2020, and their second meeting was wiped out by the pandemic. These two teams play again Sunday in New York, for Williamson’s first game at Madison Square Garden as a pro.
Barrett can redeem himself then. Taken No. 3 overall by the Knicks in 2019, two slots after Williamson, Barrett finished with just six points Wednesday on 2-of-10 shooting. The Knicks were outscored by 13 points in his 28 minutes.
Before the game, Thibs said playing opposite the fellow Duke alum would be no problem for Barrett. The details were hard to understand, given the way Thibs said it, but apparently the Knicks coach had multiple conversations with Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski, and during those talks it came up that Barrett “has a very positive relationship with Williamson because of the fact that they’ve played together.” A stunning revelation.
The Knicks have won four straight for the first time this season. They trail the Heat by one-tenth of one percentage point for sixth in the East — the top six don’t have to fiddle with this play-in tournament rigmarole that Mark Cuban and Luka Doncic have everyone so worked up about.
Thibs has a reputation for grueling, three-hour practices (can’t really do that in the COVID-19 era) and for playing his best players huge minutes, all season long (Randle played 42 of them Wednesday), so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that he doesn’t share Cuban’s sentiment that having a play-in tournament — in a year where the schedule is already condensed, which puts more stress on players’ bodies — was a bad idea.
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“I think we have to let it play out first and then assess it again, but I think a lot of teams being involved in important games, I think that’s good for the league,” Thibodeau said. “I think you’re always concerned about (wear and tear), and so we’ll see how it plays out. The initial thought of it I think is very good.”
The Knicks beat the Pelicans behind 32 points (on five 3s), eight rebounds, and five assists from Randle, who hung 30-plus points in consecutive games against his two former teams. He spent the first four seasons with the Lakers, and then pasted them with 34 points in a win Monday night. He was with the Pelicans for the 2018-19 campaign before joining the Knicks.
“I always circle the Lakers, I always know when we’re playing them,” Randle said. “But as far as back to back against former teams, there was no added juice or motivation for this game. I enjoyed my time thoroughly in this city (New Orleans). I had a lot of fun.”
Alec Burks scored 14 of his 21 points in the fourth quarter.
“I’m not in this to be popular,” Burks said, in a quote that, yes, is pretty out of context but was nonetheless brilliant if you know him from quieter days with the Jazz, or Cavs, or Warriors, or if you know he now plays for the New York Knickerbockers, or that he poured in all those points in the fourth quarter, helping to steal a game before Williamson could lower the boom.
(Photo: Sean Gardner / Getty Images)
Joe Vardon is a senior NBA writer for The Athletic, based in Cleveland. Follow Joe on Twitter @joevardon
