Heavy minutes for too many key players is why Knicks regular season wins will take a dip
Yahoo Sports senior NBA writer Dan Devine points to the reasons why he expects the champs to not be as fresh for the regular season. Check out the full conversation on "The Big Number" and subscribe on Apple Podcasts , Spotify , YouTube or wherever you listen .
Video Transcript
My final, under here is gonna get us back to where we started.
I'm gonna go under on 52 and a half for the New York Knicks.
And I am, I It, it, it's part of what we talked about last week, right?
In the, the champions curse, the, average of a drop-off of 3.9 wins for a team that just won the NBA championship.
The Knicks were f- 53 and 29 this past season.
They had been under 52 wins the prev- every other season in the Brunson era.
As we talked about, they are the only t- They are g- have a massive workload that they are coming, bringing with them into the new season.
They're, over the last two se- two seasons, only seven players in the NBA have played more than 6,000 minutes.
Five of them are the Knicks starters.
And so it would not surprise me- Starters?
It's, it's wild.
It would not surprise me if Mike Brown kinda slow plays the beginning of the season as, you know, gives those guys opportunities to kinda work their way in as opposed to just hitting the gas, trying to get as many wins as possible from day one.
Seeing what he has with the young guys.
I think the loss of Mitchell Robinson hurts because now we're, we're It, it's not just Mitchell Robinson, actually.
It's Mitchell Robinson and R.J. Hampton.
So now it's, you're looking for, it's, you know, Andre Drummond, and then what is your other answer at the five?
Now you don't really know.
I think that there's, there's If you were looking at just, like, playoff equity, championship odds, I think it's reasonable to say that the Knicks coming off their title and what, the way we saw them play down the stretch last season and through the playoffs would give them the highest ceiling there.
But it would not at all surprise me if they were closer to, like, 49, 50 wins than 53, 54, 55
