Former Knicks Star Trashes Experience in NYC

Julius Randle will be remembered as a great member of the New York Knicks. He first arrived to New York when he first started bouncing around the league, coming off a one-and-done season with the New Orleans Pelicans after spending the first four years of his career on the messy Los Angeles Lakers, making his way back to one of the NBA's biggest markets and a team looking for someone to take the scoring reins.

He responded by blossoming into one of the league's better scorers, making his first All-Star team in 2020-21 and winning Most Improved Player in his second season with the Knicks, steering his team to the first of several playoff appearances he'd help guide them to. He was an pivotal, if occasionally mercurial, member of the revamped Knicks until the day he was traded to Minnesota last year.

He doesn't seem to share in those fond memories of playing in New York, which he shared candidly with Vincent Goodwill in an interview reflecting on his past stop. "It ain't fun," he said. "You can’t really focus on the game, you’re focused on everything else other than the game itself. You’re living and dying with every single shot, every single turnover, every single loss.”

His relationship with the New York crowd and media seemed volatile even at his peak, with his body language often betraying his frustrations within the game and in his own occasional struggles.

He also wasn't granted the normal sendoff of a player coming off of two consecutive All-Star selections, traded late at night alongside Donte DiVincenzo for Karl-Anthony Towns. Jalen Brunson, who got to New York after Randle in a similarly undervalued position, quickly usurped the forward as the Knicks' cornerstone, and now stands at the precipice of the NBA Finals in his first year as the unquestionable wire-to-wire leading man.

Randle isn't doing too badly for himself, fighting for Western Conference supremacy against the favored Oklahoma City Thunder, but the kind of playoff duds he experienced in New York have started to return in the playoffs' third round.

Still, even though the Knicks gave him an opportunity to find his place as an NBA star, and he in turn gave New York the ramp to return to their current contending ways, Randle seems to just want to move on to his next promising chapter.