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| (Illustration courtesy of Terry Fan) |
With Brandon Jennings and Monta Ellis jettisoned, Knight should have no trouble getting touches, as he's the only relevant point guard on the Bucks roster. Sure, Luke Ridnour and Gary Neal are around, but the Bucks' future doesn't involve either of those guys. They're going to be a bad team this year, and they'll have all the incentive in the world to play their young guys as much as humanly possible. And it stands to reason that Knight, who got just 31.5 minutes per game last year, could receive the 36.2 minutes per game that Jennings averaged for them a year ago.
Of course, it's worth pondering just what Knight would do with that extra 4.7 minutes per game. He's joining a team that let Jennings and Ellis jack up a ludicrous 33 shots per game, so the situation is clearly pretty good for him -- at least, if the coaching staff awards him the same chucking-leniency. But there are other mouths to feed in Milwaukee. O.J. Mayo and Caron Butler are both legitimate threats to poach from his scoring average. Still, color me a fan of Brandon Knight's offense. His speed and athleticism allow him to be a good penetrator, which in turn allows him to get easy dump-off assists. The dude is quick.
The problem with Knight is that at 6-3 and 189 pounds, the dude is also pretty damn skinny. If he's not able to penetrate, he can still score via the three-pointer, which he's actually not bad at. (He's a 37.3% long-range shooter over his career.) But that's it. Unless he's able to break free from his defenders, either in the form of a wide-open three or a lay-up, he's more or less unable to score. Take a gander at his shot-chart from last year (courtesy of Basketball Reference), and you'll notice that Knight almost never scored in the middle ground between the three-point arc and the basket. Clearly, he still needs to work on scoring when the physical defender is directly in front of him.
Ultimately, what makes Knight worth targeting is his cushy ranking on Yahoo!, where he's currently lodged in the 100's around a bunch of dudes who I wouldn't be caught dead drafting (unless, of course, some Neo-Nazis put a gun to my head). Knight will probably average 16 points, 5.5 assists, 4 rebounds and 1.7 three's per game. But he's only 21 years old and the only major flaw in his game is that he sucks at shooting 15-foot jumpers, which is easily correctable. On a team without another young point guard to steal minutes -- a team that bent over backwards to let Jennings and Ellis take as many horrible shots as they wanted -- Knight could very well be one of the biggest sleepers of the 2013-14 fantasy season.
(By the way, I didn't have any art of Brandon Knight available, or even of an actual medieval knight. So the picture accompanying this article is of nighttime. You know, Knight. Night... It's a pun... Please forgive me.)