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martin
Posts: 80904
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Joined: 7/24/2001
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USA
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Balkman quietly validating the Knicks' draft gamble
New York Knicks coach and GM Isiah Thomas took all kinds of grief on draft night for selecting South Carolina forward Renaldo Balkman with the 20th overall pick.
Many NBA observers, especially the analysts who provided draft coverage on television that night, pilloried Thomas for not selecting point guard Marcus Williams of Connecticut, who had been forecast to go much higher by draft prognosticators (including me; I had Williams 13th). Williams went 22nd to New Jersey.
The analysts, including former Knicks guard Greg Anthony of ESPN, not only lamented the Knicks' passing on Williams, but also lambasted the choice of Balkman, calling him a second-round pick.
Thomas took umbrage at the time, speculating that most of the analysts had never even seen Balkman play, while Williams basked in the spotlight of the UConn program's national reputation and its concomitant weekly appearances on national TV.
A month into the season, it's becoming increasingly clear that maybe Thomas knew what he was talking about in June.
Last Friday in Phoenix, Williams scored 21 points in the fourth quarter of New Jersey's loss to the Suns, and by all accounts, he appears to be a worthy apprentice and eventual successor to Jason Kidd. But the unheralded Balkman, who has patiently waited for playing opportunities across the river, got his chance the very next night, when Channing Frye went down with a sprained ankle in the second quarter against the Bulls.
Balkman, playing more than 15 minutes for only the third time this season, helped the Knicks forge an unlikely (and ultimately unsuccessful) comeback in the second half. He finished with 10 points, 13 rebounds, three assists and three blocked shots in 24 minutes. But Balkman is more than what you see next to his name on the stat sheet.
"Balkman came in and gave us a lot of energy," Thomas told the New York Daily News. "He gave us some rebounding and some defensive stops. Those are little intangible things that you need to do to win basketball games. Until then, we didn't have much fire. We didn't have a lot of scrap."
Balkman has plenty of scrap. When he placed his name into the draft pool after his junior year at South Carolina, some wondered why a player who averaged 9.6 points and 6.3 rebounds per game would bother applying for the draft.
But at the NBA Pre-Draft Camp in Orlando in June, Balkman showed several unconventional abilities, including but not limited to starting fast breaks by rebounding and then dribbling upcourt himself with blinding speed; outworking bigger bodies for rebounds on both ends; and coming out of nowhere to block shots as a help defender. All of those hard-to-find abilities endeared him to Thomas, who is now likely to give the 6-foot-8, 210-pound Balkman a steady diet of minutes until Frye and Jared Jeffries return from injuries.
You have to see Balkman play for more than a game or two to appreciate all the "little intangible things" he does to help a team win. When I saw the way he earned MVP honors in helping South Carolina win two games at Madison Square Garden en route to the NIT championship last year, I was intrigued by the many ways he influenced the game without scoring a lot of points.
When he duplicated those efforts in Orlando against other top college stars, I was sold on Balkman as an NBA role player and contributor. That's why I slotted him as a late first-round selection before the draft.
SI.com's mock draft was the only mock draft on the Internet, and perhaps the only one, period, that correctly predicted Balkman would go in the first round. Now that Balkman's going to get some real NBA minutes, we'll see how far his non-stop hustle and penchant for always being in the right spot will take him.
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11/28/2006 7:22 AM