Toppin starting to know his role with the Knicks
The only proper place to start is with a confession:
I didn’t want the Knicks to draft Dayton’s Obi Toppin.
Not “I wanted the Knicks to draft a particular player instead of Obi Toppin,” but “I wanted the Knicks to draft anyone but Obi Toppin.”
It was almost as if his being the consensus top player in the country ceased to matter; as if 20 points per game on ridiculous efficiency, with passing and shooting to boot, never even happened.
And the worst part? Like a lot of people who follow the Knicks, I was being dismissive of a hometown kid — the one whose mom would call him the Mayor because he couldn’t stop chatting it up with Brooklynites whenever she walked him around the neighborhood.
I couldn’t focus on the good, especially when all the draftniks applied the same damning praise to Toppin.
He’s a safe pick. Great selection for a GM who wants to look good right now. He’ll look fantastic ... on offense. Limited upside because of his defensive deficiencies.
That’s what many of us came to believe, at least. It’s how I arrived at “anyone but Toppin.”
But then a funny thing happened. I stopped listening to the people who watched him from afar and started listening to those who were there for the real thing. The people who witnessed his impact on his team and his adopted Dayton community first-hand.
People like Larry Hansgen, the voice of the Flyers for four decades who, after witnessing Toppin’s magnetism up close, told me he thought Obi could have a Derek Jeter-like impact on the Knicks.
And people like David Jablonski, who covered for this newspaper every college game Toppin played and told me about how the young man would stop and ask about kids whenever they had a moment to chat. A+ player, A++ human.
By the time I got done talking to the people who had been there for the entire ride at Dayton, it was clear that the imprint Toppin left behind was even more indelible than the dunk that put that poor GW kid in the basket right along with the ball.
Those indelible qualities matter, perhaps even more than — gasp — whether or not someone’s hips turn with the ideal level of fluidity on the defensive end of the floor.
And here’s the crazy part: those hips have been turning just fine in the pros. Toppin now suits up for as uncompromising a coach as there is in the league. If you don’t defend, you don’t play. For all the fears about whether the eighth overall pick would be able to guard at this level, New York’s third-ranked defense is even stingier with Toppin on the court than when he’s off. That probably overstates his impact, but the fact remains that he has more than held his own.
The offense? It’s coming. Right now, we’ve only seen flashes of the monster that dominated the Atlantic 10 last season. That’s partially because the Knicks have yet to use him in an ideal role, instead sending him to the corner on most possessions as New York’s other rookie, Immanuel Quickley, navigates the pick and roll with another big. It’s also because for Toppin, as he admitted recently, the game is only just now starting to come to him.
“I feel like the game is starting to slow down a little bit more for me,” Toppin said before the All-Star break. “I’m starting to know my role of when I get into the game what I need to do to help the team win, and it’s just continuing working every single day to get better.”
He said this, of course, with a huge smile, because when does Toppin not have a huge smile? He’s coming up on double-digit Zoom sessions since becoming a Knick, and in every one, he looks as overjoyed to be living his dream as he did the night he got drafted. And judging from how much fun this frisky Knicks team seems to be having on many nights, his exuberance is contagious. No player elicits more excitement from the bench when he has a positive play than Obi.
There’s some irony there, of course. For as much as he always has a smile on his face, Toppin is deathly serious from baseline to baseline. Once the full impact of his game is felt on the same level as that of his personality, he may get that childhood nickname back once more.
That is the next part of his journey — to showcase his true ability on the greatest stage in sports.
And from Dayton to Downtown Manhattan, we’ll all be watching.