Knicks need more from Most Improved Player Julius Randle to succeed in NBA playoffs

A good hour and a half before the biggest game of his professional career, Julius Randle was the lone Knick player on the court.

Randle took shot after shot with Knicks assistant coach Kenny Payne sometimes pushing on him physically and sometimes challenging him mentally. This is something the two do before every game, though this time the routine seemed to take on a new sense of urgency and intensity.

That’s because Randle had to know that if his team was to have any chance of winning their first-round series, he was going to have to forget about his shockingly poor showing in the Knicks’ Game 1 loss to the Hawks.

For a good part of 72 games, Randle carried the Knicks on his back. His eye-popping improvement over last year is the reason Knicks fans are watching their team in the playoffs instead of talking about the lottery and mentally sifting through college players looking for the team’s next savior.

Nobody does what Randle did. Nobody wins the Most Improved Player seven years into their career. At that point, any significant professional growth is supposed to have already happened. At that point, you are what you are.

Yet, Randle believed he could be something bigger. It’s the reason he came to the Knicks in the first place, when other players rightfully didn’t want to deal with the non-stop drama that has been the hallmark of the franchise for the past 20 years.

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After a disappointing first year with the team in ’19-20, Randle emerged as an All-Star this season and was rewarded with the NBA’s Most Improved Player award, after averaging 24.1 points, 10.2 rebounds and six assists. All career highs. His improvement was so startling that he was a runaway winner for the award, garnering 98 of 100 first-place votes.

Knicks fans had every reason to believe that Randle was going to come up big in Game 1 against the Hawks on Sunday. In their three regular-season meetings, Randle averaged 37.3 points per game while shooting 58.1% overall and 50.0% from three-point range.

So what happened Sunday? Why did Randle shoot 6-for-23 from the field, 1-for-5 in the fourth quarter, miss a potential go-ahead three in the final seconds and get outplayed by Trae Young in the 107-105 loss?

Randle admitted he was pretty hyped up by the excitement of playing his first playoff game in front of a rabid Garden crowd, especially after playing most of the season in empty arenas or severely restricted crowds.

“It’s hard (to slow down), man,” Randle said. “Your adrenaline is going so crazy. By the time the second half came, I was done. My energy was crashed.”

Veteran point guard Derrick Rose said that Randle, like many of the young Knicks, simply needed to get used to the intensity of playoff basketball

“That was his first one. That was his first series, right?” Rose said after Wednesday’s shootaround. “Right now, we have to be patient. I remember going through that. Everybody has it in different stages of their career. Mine, I got all of that out the first year of my career.

“(It’s about) just calming yourself down, staying in the present and not trying to overthink everything. All the hard work he did this year and in the summer to get to this point, he has to keep playing his game and trusting his game like he’s been doing.”

In other words, he has to be the leader he has been all season.

By Barbara Barker @meanbarb

Barbara Barker is an award-winning columnist and features writer in the sports department at Newsday. She has covered sports in New York for more than 20 years.