What is Josh Hart? If you had never watched his tenure with the New York Knicks and had to reconstruct the player from box scores, season averages, and the sauced utterances of people milling around outside Madison Square Garden, it would be a puzzling task. OK, so he's 6-foot-5, but teams can guard him with centers, or with no one at all, and he doesn't score much anyway. Fans are yelling the words "hard-nosed," "hustle," "intangibles," and so on. On paper, he's one of the all-time great "rebounding guards"; in reality, he's more of an itsy-bitsy power forward who moonlights as a guard on the fast break. He shot 41 percent from three in the regular season, but that's misleading because it was on low volume, and when you actually see him catch the ball gloriously open at the arc, he turns his butt to goal and starts to dribble-handoff to a nonexistent teammate. He's a savvy passer who can't ever really separate from his own defender. He's a versatile defensive player who will switch onto anyone, poke the ball out of passing lanes, and also get blown by constantly. He is irreplaceable, and yet fans constantly call for his replacement.
Late in Thursday's Game 2 of the Eastern Conference Finals against the Cleveland Cavaliers, these frustrations and contradictions began to smooth out, and suddenly there stood Josh Hart, essential shooting guard for the Knicks. Emphasis on the "shooting." Like so many past defenses, the Cavaliers threw extra attention at Knicks point man Jalen Brunson and dared Hart to do what he hates most: take open shots. The bashful shooter bricked his first three three-point attempts, which had him chewing his jersey and slamming the ball at the hardwood, and had fans in the Garden chanting "Landry Shamet"—the sniper lower in the rotation, who helped the Knicks claw back in their previous win. Hart had hit two threes by halftime and New York led 53-49, but at that point the Cavaliers probably still felt secure in their decision to throttle Brunson and force an unhappy Hart to keep chucking.
In the second half, Brunson continued to dutifully distribute the ball as the coverage dictated, and Hart began to punish Cleveland's gamble. He hit a string of threes during an 18-0 run in the third quarter that would prove decisive. By the end of the night, he had gone 5-for-11 from three, plus one comical late-clock, spinning, fading floater. The Knicks won 109-93 as Hart finished with a playoff career-high 26 points, plus four rebounds, seven assists, and two steals. The fact that the below video exists says a lot about how unusual his night was; he's a player whose excellence typically sits in the exact negative space of a highlight reel.
In the postgame press conference, Brunson was asked whether he felt responsibility to keep feeding Hart the ball to build his confidence while being defended that way. "Um, I'm really not trying to look for him. He just happens to be open," he said of his old friend. "So I gave him the ball." Later on in the conference, Hart said that in practice he'd been taking smaller batches of shots with more focus on the details, as opposed to jacking up 500 threes with his mechanics slipping.
Even after Thursday's performance, Hart is now shooting 30.4 percent from three in the postseason, lest any Knicks fans get carried away by the notion that they've found a permanent resource of buckets. But New York, which became just the 13th team ever to win nine straight playoff games, has held serve at home, and has left the Cavaliers with a new grain of doubt about how to guard them. It seems you can't even let Josh Hart get hot.
