For the second time this season, a member of the New York Knicks launched a shot late in the game that showed no regard for how much time was remaining, the score, or the game’s overall situation. And the team’s head coach, Mike Woodson, wants to pin at least part of the blame for this most basic of mistakes on someone other than the shooter.
The play unfolded like this: The Knicks were tied with the Rockets with under a minute remaining, and New York inbounded the ball with 16 seconds left on the shot clock. After a miss from Beno Udrih, an offensive rebound from Tyson Chandler and a reset of the offense, Udrih got it back and kicked it to J.R. Smith at the top of the three-point arc with 21 seconds left.
What’s supposed to happen, here, is that Smith holds for the game’s final shot, where the worst case scenario is a miss that sends it into overtime. But Smith immediately launched a three, similar to what Andrea Bargnani did a few weeks earlier in Milwaukee.
Smith was happy to take the blame afterward, posting to his Twitter account that any “slander” directed at him for the error was indeed well-deserved. But Woodson felt others should share in the responsibility for Smith’s mistake, and said as much at his team’s shootaround on Sunday.
From Frank Isola of the New York Daily News:When Woodson was asked about it on Sunday he said: “Again, I’ve been around this a long time and you think you’ve seen it all and something creeps in throughout the course of a ballgame and you shake your head and say ‘wow.’ But it happens. It happens in all sports no matter what level it is. Unfortunately, he went blank. What are you going to do? You can’t go back and get it.” ...
“The bottom line is you look at his shot but did Beno have to throw him the ball?” Woodson added. “You gotta look at that.”
The implication is that Udrih, as the point guard, should have known to hold the ball for one shot as opposed to passing to a wide open player in position to shoot. On the Knicks last possession, Udrih missed a potential game-tying shot at the buzzer.
This, quite honestly, is completely ridiculous. But in the dynamic the Knicks have created in the Woodson-Smith pairing, it was almost a predictable response.
Smith is believed to be a fragile talent that needs to be coddled to a certain extent to gain maximum results, and Woodson to his credit has had a knack for doing so, seeing J.R. play himself into a Sixth Man of the Year award last season.
But while Udrih certainly has his issues, passing the ball to an open teammate in an end-of-game situation isn’t one of them. Smith should have known the score, and this gaffe is all on him no matter how Woodson has chosen to spin it in the days that have followed.