Knicks' rookie Kevin Knox is going through a bit of a rough patch, but head coach David Fizdale is experimenting some new strategies with him.
The 19-year-old rookie has a .321 shooting percentage in his last seven games and has seen his minutes diminish of late, but showed some renewed promise in Monday's loss to the Kings.
Knox was 4-for-6 from the field with a couple of those buckets coming from his play in the post.
"One thing I was happy with, he had a couple of nice post-ups," Fizdale said, per Marc Berman of The Post. "That's something we're going to start looking to do down the stretch these last 18 games, to start growing that into the summer and getting him more comfortable about the block and the elbow area, but it was very promising the couple of possessions that he had down there."
Knox showed that promise on the first possesion of the game when he got the ball on the block and hit a fadeaway jumper over Bogdan Bogdanovic.
"Guy a little smaller than me in the post, he wanted me to pretty much go at him," Knox said. "Give me the ball in the post, got a good bucket, had a couple baskets in the post. So that's something that I've really been working on after practice, some post work, trying to expand my game."
Despite showing some improvement on Monday, Knox was still resorted to the bench in the fourth quarter and Fizdale does not sound as if he is ready to bring him back out into crunch time late in the game just yet.
"We thought about it, but I want to force him through this right now," Fizdale said. "This is from a lesson standpoint for Kevin is not to reset him, to force him to play through all of these struggles and all of this pain right now and fight his way out of this.
"So that's why I want to keep him in that lineup, keep him against starting threes as much as possible and let him go through the bumps and the bruises. ... the lessons that he's going to learn this year are going to carry into that eighth year. That's how I'm prioritizing it with him and he'll fight his way out of it."
