Visits: 3
GREENBURGH, N.Y. — For the first time since February, Kristaps Porzingis is back in a Knicks uniform. But it may still be a while before he sees game action.
Nearly eight months after tearing the anterior cruciate ligament in his left knee, Porzingis had a starring role Monday at media day, each N.B.A. team’s annual festival of unbridled optimism before the start of training camp.
Porzingis, now in his fourth season in New York, said he was excited — about his strides in rehabilitation from surgery.
“Making progress every day,” he said, though he declined to offer a timetable for his return and did not rule out missing the season entirely. “Obviously, I’m getting itchy and I want to be out on the court as soon as possible. But it won’t happen until I am 110 percent and I’m medically cleared.”
The Knicks are preaching patience (again) as they build around a young core — one that will feature the 23-year-old Porzingis eventually — but they are also undefeated, at least until their season opener against the Atlanta Hawks on Oct. 17. The players who addressed reporters at a news conference here on Monday were uniformly upbeat.
“We’ll try to win every game,” Mario Hezonja said.
“The culture is different,” Courtney Lee said.
“Everybody’s ready to go,” Tim Hardaway Jr. said.
The Knicks, of course, said a lot of the same stuff before the start of last season. And the season before that. And the season before that. So much good feeling, with so little to show for it: five straight playoff-free seasons and counting. But the Knicks are banking on David Fizdale, their new coach, along with young players like Kevin Knox and Frank Ntilikina, to begin building some momentum.
“I know that he’s going to make sure that we’re ready,” Lance Thomas, the veteran forward, said of Fizdale. “The workouts that we’ve been doing, we’ve been getting after it. He wants us to be one of the best conditioned teams in the league, and I’m pretty sure no other team has been running like we’ve been running.”
In Brooklyn, the Nets are sticking with a similar script of cautious optimism after four straight losing seasons. But the team has improved consistently under Coach Kenny Atkinson, and General Manager Sean Marks has taken a methodical approach to rounding out the roster, namely by acquiring draft picks and promising players.
Both teams want to be active next summer, when a slew of top-tier players are due for free agency. Among them: Kevin Durant, Kyrie Irving and Jimmy Butler, all All-Stars who could immediately push either team firmly into the Eastern Conference playoff race.
For now, executives from both teams have said that they will be painstaking in their approaches to the future and avoid the temptation of quick fixes.
There is no obvious rush for the Knicks, who will be a work in progress for the foreseeable future — especially given the absence of Porzingis, who averaged 22.7 points, 6.6 rebounds and 2.4 blocks in 48 games before his injury last season.
Porzingis said his goal was to make incremental improvement every day. At this stage, he has graduated to light jogging and some shooting drills. His team of medical specialists has taken a conservative approach to his rehab, he said.
“I’m hungry, and I want to be back on the court as soon as possible,” he said. “So it’s good that I have a good team around me, good people around me, who are holding me back when I need to be held back and telling me to be patient when I need to be a bit more patient.”