Hart of Your World Cup: Knicks' Josh Hart Gets Another Start for USA
Hart's on fire, creating a strong desire to see him stay in the United States' men's basketball team's starting five at the FIBA Basketball World Cup.
Team USA head coach Steve Kerr announced that New York Knicks forward Josh Hart will remain among the American starters when they open second round play against Montenegro on Friday morning (4:40 a.m. ET, ESPN2). Hart previously started the team's mostly meaningless preliminary play finale against Jordan on Wednesday but apparently left enough of an impression on Kerr and Co. to keep him in the starting five over former New Orleans Pelicans teammate Brandon Ingram.
“He has a strength and a tenacity to him that sometimes overcomes a height disadvantage," Kerr said of Hart, per Joe Vardon of The Athletic. "He’s used to guarding bigger guys with all the switching that happens in the NBA, so we go into a game comfortable with Josh as the starting four.”
Hart has been one of Team USA's breakout stars on the road to a Group C victory in Manila. In just over 17 minutes a game, Hart has averaged nine rebounds, which is good for a seventh-place tie among all World Cup competitors. He has earned 23 alone over the past two games, including 12 in the aforementioned 110-62 shellacking of Jordan.
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Along with another former Pelicans pal, Jonas Valančiūnas, Hart is the only rep among the top 10 World Cup rebounders to play less than 20 minutes a game. The Americans will face Valančiūnas and Lithuania in the latter leg of second-round play on Sunday.
There is no slot for the position of "winner," a hypothetical role that Kerr felt best described Hart after he pulled in 11, including five on the offensive glass, in the previous 109-81 win over Greece on Monday. But Kerr believes that Hart is the perfect fill-in at the four with height-heavy teams coming up in round two.
“We’re going to be playing these big, strong teams this weekend, so we may, we may have to go with two bigs at times,” Kerr conceded. “But we’re also very confident that we can guard people (by) staying smaller and run them at the other end as long as we rebound.”
To Kerr's point, Lithuania is the tournament's top rebounding team by averaging a haul of 48 over its own opening trio. At 6-10, Valančiūnas isn't even the tallest player on the team, that honor instead going to former NBA vet Donatas Motiejūnas. Montenegro features the services of the similarly-sized two-time All-Star Nikola Vučević (Chicago).
Hart scored only 13 points in the opening trio but he knows that he wasn't called upon to light up the scoreboard, but rather enlisted for his defensive prowess. Whether he fulfills those duties with the first or second unit hardly matters to him.
"I’m here to play hard, play defense, rebound, give good vibes,” Hart said. “That’s my job, that’s my role, so whether I’m with the first unit or the second unit or don’t get in at all, that’s what I am supposed to do.”
With a perfect 3-0 mark and a plus-103 point differential coming in from preliminary play (not to mention a head-to-head tiebreaker with Greece), Team USA is sitting on relatively stable ground when it comes to advancement into the eight-team knockout round, which they'll clinch by place in the top two of their current quartet.
