Getty RJ Barrett seems like he has hit a wall.
The New York Knicks are stuck in mediocrity so far this season, and they’ve fallen below .500 and will have to battle back to get there.
Expectations for the team weren’t too high this season, but it’s still tough to see a season like this as a fan, especially when Jalen Brunson solved the team’s point guard problem.
RJ Barrett signed a contract extension in the offseason and we’re now into year one of Julius Randle’s, so there’s a lot of money tied up between the three players with no clear path on how to get better.
New York Daily News writer Stefan Bondy believes the Knicks have some options they can look at, and floats a “nuclear option” as one of them.
Blow It All Up?
With the way the roster is constructed, getting better is reliant on the young talent continuing their development, but that’s far from guaranteed.
After improving each season in the league, Barrett has looked like he’s hit a ceiling, and it’s not clear if he’ll be able to keep on rising. His field goal percentage is hovering around 40 percent, far from where you’d want one of your top scorers to be, and his three-point percentage is a career-worst at 28.1 percent through 22 games.
With all of this money tied up, the “nuclear option” would see the Knicks attempt to offload that money and enter a true rebuild.
“Hit the reset button,” Bondy writes. “Trade Randle and/or Barrett and/or Robinson and begin a rebuild in earnest. At this point, it’s hard to imagine either player returning much value on their respective contracts. It would require an admission of massive failure from Rose, who signed Randle and Barrett to nine-figure deals in the last 18 months.”
Barrett came up in the Donovan Mitchell trade talks, but the Knicks ultimately decided to hang onto him and give him an extension. Trading him now would essentially be team president Leon Rose admitting he made a mistake with Barrett, but it could end up being the best if they find a way to get a star to New York. It doesn’t seem like the most likely scenario for the Knicks, but it could be something they think about.
“But trading the pair serves a purpose of clearing the cap sheet — if not for next summer, then maybe in 2024,” Bondy continued. “It also clears a path to playing time for rookies Immanuel Quickley and Obi Toppin, both of whom are eligible for extensions after the season.”
Barrett is a fan-favorite player, but fans can’t be patient forever, and if he doesn’t get the efficiency up, he could find himself doing so on another team.
Let Toppin Flourish
The biggest thing that would happen in any potential Julius Randle trade is it’d free up minutes for former lottery pick Obi Toppin.
Toppin has flashed a lot of potential in his limited playing time, but he’s always found himself stuck coming off the bench because of Randle being ahead of him in the depth chart. Because of that, it’s hard to gauge just what type of player he can become, and a nightmare scenario would be seeing him realize his potential on another roster.
His high-flying acrobatics have already won him a dunk contest championship, and he shows off those moves in-game, but he can also hit threes when the time calls for it. He always bring a spark of energy when he checks into the game, so the Knicks should certainly find a way to figure out if he could ever become a starter, but it’ll be hard with Randle in town.