It’s only one preseason game, a total nothing that will be forgotten as soon as feet hit the floor for the real thing. But if Miles McBride has a second-year leap in him, it was a start of some kind.
The 22-year-old West Virginia product will need to force himself into the conversation for backcourt minutes in Tom Thibodeau’s Knicks rotation, but he played on Tuesday night very much like a product of Bob Huggins’ Press Virginia — 23 minutes and six steals. That is indeed a way to force yourself into the conversation when it comes to Thibodeau, a coach whose be all and end all is defense and effort.
“I always want to bring a defensive presence first,” McBride said following Tuesday’s 117-96 victory over the Pistons. “I feel like that gets my offense going. Obviously I was able to get some steals and turn it into buckets. So I feel like me bringing energy is going to help everybody else, bringing energy to the defensive side.
“I wanted to run my game in a mature way, a lot of pace, adding that to my game and being smarter on the court with making better decisions.”
Miles McBride is making his case this preseason amid a stocked Knicks roster.Corey SipkinMcBride, who also scored seven points with two assists on 3 of 7 shooting, was an intermediate presence on Broadway last season, playing 40 games with the big club between stints in Westchester. The stats, mostly, are that of a second-round pick finding his way — an inconsistent shot, some good games, some bad, a process in progress. There were two starts, and a particularly memorable performance in Houston in which he scored 15 points and played a season-high 35:49 off the bench.
Still, beyond McBride’s own development, there is the obvious issue of the depth chart — in which Quentin Grimes, RJ Barrett, Jalen Brunson, Evan Fournier, Derrick Rose and Immanuel Quickley are all set in stone above McBride in the backcourt and on the wing, assuming good health (plus potentially Cam Reddish as well). That complicates things. If he can be a difference-maker defensively, though, McBride could change that conversation.
“He’s a pest,” Barrett said after the game. “You saw it out there today.”
“Adds a lot,” Quickley said. “Especially defensively. You can see him getting out in passing lanes, steals. You know he can do that. And he’s added a lot to his game offensively.”
“He can do that,” Brunson said. “I’ve known that. That’s been on scouting reports, and he has that capability. So seeing that [Tuesday] with what he did was just special.”
As for the person whose opinion matters most, Thibodeau sees a difference in McBride entering his second season.
“The more experience you get, you know your opponent a lot better, you know the guys you’re going against,” Thibodeau said. “But his gift is his defense, physicality, competitiveness, anticipation, seeing things early.”
New York Knicks guard Miles McBride (2) defends as Detroit Pistons guard Jules Bernard (24) dribbles.AP PhotoThe second unit for much of the night consisted of Quickley and McBride in the backcourt, a combination that accounted for 300 total minutes over 31 games last season. If McBride proves worthy of a rotation spot, then that could become a regularity.
That, though, is still some ways off being reality.
“Being around the game for a year, it feels like you learn so much, so quickly,” McBride said. “Sometimes it can be a little bit too fast. But over the summer I was really able to watch a lot of games and watch a lot of guys and what they did defensively and really just pick up those little tendencies.”
On Tuesday, that work showed out. The real test will be in whether it continues to do so.
