As you might expect for the NBA’s most durable player, Bridges deserves consideration partly on the strength of his high-volume contributions. The 29-year-old wing hasn’t missed a game in his entire career and has played nearly 200 more minutes than any New York Knicks teammate.<\/p>\n
Though Bridges’ scoring average is down from last year, he’s been far more efficient and is drilling 39.0 percent of his 5.6 three-point attempts per game. Bridges is also averaging a career-high 4.1 assists and 4.1 rebounds to go with his 15.7 points per game, which pairs nicely with what he does on defense.<\/p>\n
Only six players in the NBA have played as many minutes as Bridges while logging a higher average matchup difficulty<\/a>. All-Star games may not care much about defense, but it’s impossible to ignore Bridges’ elite two-way contributions for a Knicks team good enough to deserve a second All-Star after no-brainer inclusion Jalen Brunson.<\/p>\n The counting stats made Towns the easy second pick among Knicks, but his 19.7 points and 11.9 rebounds per game overstate his impact. A purported threat from three, Towns is only attempting 4.5 long balls per game and hitting them at just 35.3 percent. Paired with a career-low 51.6 percent conversion rate on two-pointers, KAT is easily having the least efficient season of his career.<\/p>\n Opponents are shooting 63.8 percent<\/a> on attempts inside six feet when Towns is the designated defender, one of the worst figures in the league among bigs. New York has had to tweak its coverages to shield him from downhill drivers.<\/p>\n Mash all that up with advanced metrics like EPM<\/a> that give the edge (among Knicks) to Bridges, Towns’ penchant for ill-advised fouls and previous reports<\/a> that teammates were frustrated with his failure to execute schemes, and it’s not that hard to conclude Bridges should be the choice if the Knicks are getting a second All-Star.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As you might expect for the NBA’s most durable player, Bridges deserves consideration partly on the strength of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":482464,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[574],"tags":[64,63,726,85],"class_list":["post-482463","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-basketball","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-basketball","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/482463","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=482463"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/482463\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/482464"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=482463"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=482463"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=482463"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}