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Choose Your Own Adventure: You and Hubie Brown take Kristaps Porzingis to the end of 2015

The crowd voted and they want to give Kristaps Porzingis a modest amount of minutes. It's late December now and the Knicks are only ok. Let's check back in with Hubie to survey the landscape.

By Jonathan Schulman

New York City! Home of the Big Apple. Anytime you can make it here, I mean come on, you must be doing something right. Ok, so take a look. Hitting bang on at 63% from the voters in part one here, the decision was to give an equal distribution of the minutes to all of our frontcourt guys. What you say is, alright, Kristaps Porzingis will get his 15 minutes and if he really has something working on a particular night, you can leave him on the floor when the starters come back. What ya didn't want is to over-extend the young man. So far he's handling the pressure of Madison Square Garden exceptionally well, and playing better at home, ok, than he is on the road.

Then ya got Kevin Seraphin and Kyle O'Quinn giving ya quality minutes along with Robin Lopez, ok? Now. Carmelo Anthony has the lion's share of the playing time at both forward positions. As we know, the Knicks are trying to play more up-tempo basketball. They're looking for early offense by pushing the ball out of missed shots. If they don't find it, we see that they set up their Triangle in the half court and go to work.

What you like from Porzingis, is he pulls the defense out to the three point line, and he can still attack ya with the dribble. Alright, the first thing we tell our guys is to close out over the top of a good shooter and force them to put the basketball on the floor, ok? So, you see he's hurting ya that way! Ha-ha! What ya like to see is that he's accepting the the man that rotates on defense, and the double-teamer, and Porzingis's still getting the shot up on the rim, ok, or boom he's finding the open man.

So let's look at his statistics so far. He's connecting on 45% of his 2-point shots, 43% from the three and right at 75% from the foul line. Alright ya like to see that he's had a couple of big games, but he's only averaging 6.2 points, 3.1 rebounds, but the big concern is the turnovers at one a game and three fouls per game, ok? In a limited-minutes situation. But look, he's got great hands, a beautiful release and is showing you multiple moves with the ball in his hands. Now on the defense, he must improve on the boards. Alright, but he is still a threat for the blocked shot, averaging 0.7 a game in the short amount of time. And what ya really like to see, ok, is that anytime the young man is getting taken out of the game, he doesn't get down on himself.

Ok, this is big now -- the team is playing slightly under .500 basketball, ok? And I think ya have to look at it this way: at the power position, Derek Fisher is going with his lunch pail guys down the stretch of games. The key for Porzingis will be can he bring the in-tense-ity level up in the amount of minutes he's currently getting?

There is some interest around the league in trading for the young big man, but the platoon at the forward and center spots has limited the team's options. Basically -- if ya don't inflate the numbers, ya won't be able to burst the balloon, ok!? But you'll see -- and I've been around this league a long time now -- anytime you have a premiere jump shooting big man on a friendly contract you can generate an interest. And come on, if you give this guy any air, he's gonna knock it down .. in your face. But you haven't given anyone the type of minutes to allow a package type of deal to work out for ya. Unless you're gonna move Anthony, who, as we know, has a no trade clause in his deal. Ok, and there are some shaky situations around the league. Including Oklahoma, ok? Phoenix, as well as Sacramento.

So here we go. Porzingis is on the outside looking in for the Rookie-Sophomore challenge. Ok, it's a lot like the Knicks playoff hopes at the moment! A-ha-ha! He wants ya to have his time on the floor increased up to starter's minutes so he can be a part of that game. O'Quinn and Seraphin both want more minutes and have a chance to help push the team toward more wins if they could stay on the floor longer. Ok, also now, Seraphin is in a contract situation and wants more touches, and has been productive as your leading scorer off the bench at just about 12 a game.

Alright, it's time for you to decide.

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