The Game Turned Late
It hasn't been an easy season for Josh Hart. He opened the season coming off the bench for the New York Knicks. His role waxed and waned based on circumstance.
"There was moments I went home and I'm like, damn, am I ass?" Hart said before Game 1 of the NBA Finals. "Do I suck as a basketball player?"
The matchup already has enough history; the job is to keep the reading list shorter than the tension.
The answer was never yes, and Game 1 provided emphatic proof. The Knicks won 105-95, stealing home-court advantage in the NBA Finals.
Hart finished with 15 rebounds, six assists and four steals. He didn't make a single triple, connecting on just one field goal — a layup roughly three minutes into the game. Yet he was arguably the most impactful Knicks player on the floor.
The Small Details Added Up
When Hart sat, the Knicks were outscored by 12 points in 21 minutes and 13 seconds. They won his minutes by 22 points.
The strategy opponents used against him was familiar. Earlier this season against the Spurs on March 1, Victor Wembanyama served as Hart's primary defender. Hart played 30 minutes, and the game was tied in those minutes. In the 18 minutes he sat, the Knicks outscored the Spurs by 25 points.
The ignore-Josh-Hart approach worked in that game. In the finals, it didn't matter.
Hart was everywhere defensively, guarding Stephon Castle on the ball and creating turnovers. He pulled in one-third of the Knicks' total defensive rebounds. His biggest sequence came in the final third-quarter possession when the Spurs abandoned him in the corner. He drove, found Miles McBride, and McBride knocked down the game-tying 3-pointer.
The Table Looks Different
After falling down by 14 in the quarter, that shot ensured the Knicks entered the fourth quarter with a blank slate.
"We just got a lot of tough guys, a lot of guys that don't quit," Hart said after the win. He's not wrong, and he's one of the players who helped build that culture. He openly volunteered to come off the bench last postseason. He's every cliché about winning and sacrifice rolled into one player.
A player who openly questioned himself because of his weakness in the highest-profile skill in his profession just led his team to its most important victory this millennium by doing everything except scoring. He's an enormously unconventional one. But as Game 1 of the Finals proved, even if he's not making his shots, that's all the Knicks really need him to be.