The New York Knicks are hoping to carry over momentum from their 2023-24 season which saw them go 50-32, into the upcoming campaign, and one NBA analyst believes they’ll do better than that in 2024-25, much better at that.
Kendrick Perkins predicts the Knicks will finish with the best record in the NBA next season
Former Boston Celtics champion and current ESPN NBA analyst Kendrick Perkins is sold on the Knicks finishing as the best team in the regular season next time around. He gave them the nod out East and over all the other 29 teams, as The Strickland shared on Instagram on Aug. 12 via the NBA on ESPN (h/t: Sportsnaut’s Jason Burgos via MSN):
The Knicks may need to win 60-plus games to finish with the NBA’s best record next season
The Knicks do have a hill to climb in order to triumph over the field in 2024-25. For one, they’ll have to outpace the defending NBA champion Boston Celtics in their own conference. Boston finished with a staggering 64 wins last time out and is bringing back their championship core next season.
New York did finish No. 2 in the East last season, but overall they finished tied with the Dallas Mavericks for the sixth-best record in the league. There were three other teams that finished with at least 56 wins, including the Oklahoma City Thunder and Denver Nuggets (57 wins), and the Minnesota Timberwolves (56 wins).
How the Knicks roster fares from a win shares perspective
The question that will validate Perkins’ bold take is, how many wins can Mikal Bridges swing for the Knicks next season? New York had other strong offseason additions including Cam Payne, Marcus Morris Sr., and Keita Bates-Diop, but they likely won’t foster a seven-game improvement by themselves, let alone a whopping 14 games.
Bridges finished with an underwhelming 0.70 win shares per-48 minute average for the Brooklyn Nets in 2023-24. Albeit, the Nets were a struggling team and he remained the league’s Iron Man, which will pay huge dividends for a Knicks team that was slammed with injuries last time around.
The Knicks have already lost Isaiah Hartenstein to the Thunder this offseason. Hartenstein finished with the 11th-best win shares per 48 minutes among all players last season (.204 WS/48).
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Jalen Brunson finished one spot below him on the year (.198 WS/48). To compensate for Hartenstein’s departure, New York will get Julius Randle and OG Anunoby back for the upcoming campaign. Randle missed the final 36 games of the year with a dislocated shoulder and Anunoby was banged up for a large portion of the tail end of the previous campaign from the end of January onward.
Randle finished with the 54th best metric in that category (.113 WS/48) and Anunoby came nowhere near the top 60, but his historic plus/minus to start his Knicks tenure coupled with Randle’s return to form could elevate the Knicks by multiple games alone next time out.
The Knicks will also need to overcome a stronger Atlantic division in 2024-25
Add to all of that the fact that the Knicks have a heavy national television slate and tougher competition to deal with in the Atlantic division, and it appears that head coach Tom Thibodeau’s troops will flirt with north of 55 wins in 2024-25, but will need to go out there and prove that they can eclipse 60-wins to unseat the Celtics and any other surefire contenders that will put their foot on the gas from the onset.
