The Knicks acquired Mikal Bridges to be the 3-and-D they’ve been missing, but his three-point shooting in the early going of the 2024-25 season has drawn concern from pundits and internet sleuths.
And his performance in the Knicks regular-season opener against the Boston Celtics Tuesday didn’t necessarily allay those concerns.
In the first half, Bridges went scoreless, shooting 0-for-5, including 0-for-4 from beyond the arc.
That came after Bridges had a rough preseason, where he went 2-for-19 from three of four preseason games including going 0-for-10 in the preseason finale against the Wizards. This led many to dissect his shot and some saying they found a change in his shooting form.
Bridges himself admitted to developing a problem from college and told the NY Post before the start of the regular season that he tried to “fix it when I was in college”.
So naturally, the topic of Bridges’ firing was brought up after the Knicks’ loss on Tuesday and Josh Hart defended his teammate.
“Mikal doesn’t care about anything else. We don’t care about all the background noise on Mikal, his shot. We don’t care about it,” Hart said. “He puts in the work every day, he’ll be good. The talk around it is silly. There is a silliness to it. At the end of the day, he was almost a 40 percent career three-point shooter. Talking about it is stupid and we will not entertain it.”
Hart is right. Entering this season, Bridges is a 38 percent three-point shooter, and while Tuesday’s game didn’t start the way he would have liked, the second half was much better for the first-year Knick.
The small forward went 7-for-8 including 2-for-3 from three in quarters three and four. Bridges finished with 16 points on 7-of-13 shooting (2-of-7 from deep) to go along with two assists.
“Just making one, that’s pretty much it. Just making one is like letting the cover off,” Bridges said of how he turned it on offensively in the second half. “Teammates keep finding me. Just stay aggressive and that’s pretty much it.”
Recent shooting struggles aside, Bridges has a proven track record of shooting the ball well and it was encouraging to see him find the back of the basket in the second half of Tuesday’s game.
Bridges and the Knicks will look to learn from and build on their loss to the Celtics when they host the Indiana Pacers on Friday night.
