David Fizdale’s assessment of the most complete player on the Knicks’ roster right now might be surprising to some.
Noah Vonleh was a top-10 pick by Charlotte in 2014, but the Knicks already are his fourth team in five NBA seasons. But the 6-foot-10 power forward out of Indiana looks as if he’s possibly finding a home in New York, doing a little bit of everything in starting 17 of the Knicks’ first 24 games.
“It’s the versatility, man. I didn’t realize how versatile he was,” Fizdale said Sunday. “[General manager] Scott Perry just kept saying it to me. ‘Coach, when this kid was in high school, man, this kid could do everything.’ He said, ‘I’m not telling you to have him do everything, but see if you can pull some of that stuff out of him.’
“The first day Noah got here, I was playing pickup with our guys and the first thing I told him was: ‘If you rebound the ball, you’ve got to push it. I don’t want you outletting the ball.’ And his eyes lit up and I think from there he saw that I was going to have a lot of confidence in him to try some stuff. Now he’s shooting the 3, he’s posting. He does everything. I think I’ve said it before, he’s our most complete player.”
The 23-year-old Vonleh is averaging 8.3 points and 8.1 rebounds in 25.0 minutes per game; he made all six of his shots (15 points) in Saturday’s overtime win over Milwaukee and played tough defense against Giannis Antetokounmpo before fouling out in OT.
“I think Scott Perry showing belief in him, he felt that, too, saying ‘We want you here.’ A lot of times that’s how you need to hear it,” Fizdale said. “The fact that he came in and really took to everything we asked of him about his diet, his nutrition, his conditioning, he was just an open book, man, and he let us do what we do. The results have really come.”
Guard Trey Burke has been ruled out of Monday’s game with a sprained right knee suffered on an awkward landing following a layup attempt in Saturday’s first quarter.
Fizdale said Courtney Lee didn’t get off the bench Saturday after being activated off the injured list (neck) because he “was just kind of waiting for an opportunity to get him in there, but I thought I’d be putting him in a bad spot to just throw him out there in that situation. Maybe next game.”