Making his point
THE Knicks’ emotional leader doesn’t just get his extra edge from natural adrenaline. Enes Kanter also uses his phone. The Knicks center, like any functioning millennial, finds his information on social media. So sometimes he’ll scroll on Twitter and see LeBron James playfully tossing a water bottle on the Garden court (Kanter really hated that). Or, sometimes a fan will send him a stat that really riles him up.
“I read Twitter comments and I saw we did not win a game against the Clippers since 2012,” Kanter said. “Those are the things that just fire me up before the game.”
Kanter and the Knicks ended that drought Monday, when they pummeled the Clippers at the Garden and the 25-year-old was in usual workhorse form — 12 points, 16 rebounds and a handful of quotables in the locker room. Kanter is rapidly becoming a New York fan favorite, and the fact that he’s openly inviting fans to rile him up only adds to his reverence.
On Tuesday, Kanter played to those emotions again while further explaining his issue with LeBron’s bottle-flipping antics at the end of Cleveland’s blowout victory last season. Kanter wasn’t on the Knicks at the time, but he took it more personally than any anybody on the roster.
“I saw that last year and I was like, ‘That’s just disrespectful,’ ” Kanter said. “It doesn’t matter. I know I was not here. But I saw that, I just got so (ticked). I was like, ‘C’mon, you cannot do that. It doesn't matter who you are, you cannot do that. That’s really disrespectful.’ ”
Kanter has managed, somewhat miraculously, to make everybody forget that Willy Hernangomez doesn’t play much anymore. He has made Joakim Noah’s albatross contract easier to see on the inactive list.
And in the biggest upset, Kanter has been a very capable defender. Not surprisingly, he found outside motivation to reach that level.
“Defense was my focus coming out here because there were all these comments, that, ‘Oh, he can score the ball. Offensively he’s at an All-Star level but defensively he’s bad,’ ” Kanter said. “I just wanted to prove all the haters wrong. My thing was coming here and being really focused on defense because I knew I was going to score the ball.”
Kanter isn’t short on enthusiasm or opinions. As LeBron said about him: “He’s always got something to say.”
The personality works great so long as he continues to produce — and the Knicks continue to win.