Steph's Star: How Curry Convinced Donte DiVincenzo To Sign With Knicks
Stephen Curry has haunted the New York Knicks enough but anyone planning to boo the three-point master upon his arrival to Madison Square Garden on Thursday night should know he may be partly responsible for placing the team on its current optimistic path.
If not for the intervention of Curry, whose Golden State Warriors face the Knicks on Thursday (7:30 p.m. ET, TNT), Donte DiVincenzo might've stayed in San Francisco or moved elsewhere. Instead, DiVincenzo, a one-year Warrior, has become one of the breakout stars of the Knicks' 2023-24 campaign as a starting five staple and one of the few left relatively unscathed by the team's recent rash of injuries (missing just one of the Knicks' 59 games to date).
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On paper, Manhattan was the ideal destination for DiVincenzo, an NBA journeyman whose professional momentum has been often stifled by injuries and roster shifts. The move back east would reunite him with college teammates Jalen Brunson and Josh Hart and his lingering defensive prowess would certainly endear him to head coach Tom Thibodeau.
Curry helped drive those points home, recalling the free agency process in a feature from Fred Katz and Anthony Slater of The Athletic.
“(The Knicks) were already a playoff team, starting to trend in the right direction," Curry said. "Then (there is) his familiarity with their players from college. That made it so he’d have the opportunity to go in and do exactly what he did for us. He’s a smart, high-IQ basketball player who plays defense.”
Curry was destined to be a metropolitan problem from the second he made his NBA entry, as he was chosen by the Warriors right before the Knicks went on the clock at the 2009 draft (New York took Jordan Hill instead). When he inevitably reached the top of the NBA's all-time three-point leaders' list, he broke the record against the Knicks at MSG in 2021.
Yet, the Knicks have one of their hallmarks of both the present and future thanks to the expertise of Curry, who left quite an impression on DiVincenzo despite only one year of Bay Area collaboration.
“Ultimately, he said it,” DiVincenzo said. “It was on my mind. You know, I’m a grown man. I make my own decisions, but to have somebody of that stature to almost voice the opinion that I’m thinking. It makes you feel good about the decision you’re making, rather than if he says something way out of left field and you kind of start to question things."
"He reinforced what I was thinking about New York.”
Curry's words hold even further weight as Katz and Slater's report reveals that DiVincenzo "didn't want to leave" the relatively sterling situation he had in San Francisco. But after talking with Curry, DiVincenzo joined the Knicks on a four-year, $46.8 million deal that looks like a bargain with each passing day.
The "Michael Jordan of Delaware" commandeered a starting five spot from Quentin Grimes by December and is averaging a career-best 13.9 points. The 184 successful three-pointers DiVincenzo has sunk this season currently rank third in the NBA ... behind only Curry and Luka Doncic of Dallas.
If DiVincenzo's game resembles Curry's, that's part of the plan: shortly after the Warriors' season ended in the Western Conference Semifinals, DiVincenzo further etched Curry's impact into his psyche by partly attempting to emulate the two-time MVP's famous stroke from deep.
“I used to think feet squared, shoulders squared, release and everything had to be aligned and everything,” DiVincenzo said. “I get he’s almost an anomaly. But what’s so much different is as long as his shoulders are good, he doesn’t care about anything else.”
That often-imitated by rarely-duplicated skillset has come up big for the Knicks, who have had to withstand the loss of several regulars as they try to solidify their postseason foundation. In Tuesday's loss to New Orleans, for example, DiVincenzo was one of only seven dressed Knicks and wound up leading the team in scoring with 23 points in a 115-92 defeat.
DiVincenzo's efforts have not gone unnoticed as the Knicks (35-24) continue to work without OG Anunoby, Julius Randle, and Mitchell Robinson for the long term.
"He came into the season shooting really well. He got off to a great start and I thought that was a byproduct of the work he put in during the summer. He hit the ground running and hasn’t stopped," Thibodeau lauded, per Steve Popper of Newsday. "He’s really grown during this stretch, this is probably his best stretch of basketball and he’s doing it on both sides of the ball.”
In that game, DiVincenzo became just the second Knick to try at least 18 three-pointers in a single game, joining JR Smith. By hitting eight, DiVincenzo now has 48 successful triples in the ending month of February ... placing second behind a familiar face: Curry has 71 entering Thursday's game.
