The Knicks' Depth Strategy Is 0-for-2 This Offseason. Drummond Is What's Left.

Start with 8.3. That's how many rebounds per game Mitchell Robinson averaged across 61 games last season, doing it on 69.6% shooting — the kind of interior efficiency that doesn't get replaced with a phone call and a one-year minimum. Robinson is gone, now a Celtic on a three-year, $47.4 million deal. The Knicks' answer was a two-step plan: sign Andre Drummond to a one-year, $3.9 million stopgap, then use a two-year, $4.7 million offer sheet on Moussa Cisse to give the frontcourt some actual depth. Dallas matched within 48 hours. The two-step plan is now a one-step plan, and the one step is a veteran big on a contract that expires the moment it becomes inconvenient.

The number that makes this genuinely alarming isn't the Robinson rebounding gap — it's the home-road split sitting underneath the whole championship narrative. New York went 30-10 at Madison Square Garden last season and 23-19 on the road, a 20.2-point win-percentage gap that I flagged earlier in the summer as the quiet vulnerability in this title run. Championship teams get tested away from home in April and May. The Knicks won the title, but they did it leaning hard on a building that tilts in their favor. Drummond integrating into a new system, with a point guard recovering from wrist surgery, on a road floor in February — that's where the math gets uncomfortable.

And then there's the offensive trend that preceded all of this. Over their final 10 regular-season games, the Knicks averaged 111.2 points per game, down 5.3 points from the 116.5 they'd been putting up in the 20 games prior. Brunson was already managing the wrist that eventually required surgery, and the offense showed it. The concern heading into next season isn't whether Brunson can eventually return to 25.6 points per game on 46.6% shooting — it's whether he can do it from opening night, or whether the Knicks spend the first two months of the season running a diminished version of an offense that was already cooling before he went under the knife.

What the front office did well this offseason deserves acknowledgment before I bury the lede further. Locking in depth pieces like Landry Shamet on a four-year, $24 million deal and Jose Alvarado on a three-year commitment reflects a real understanding that championship rosters require continuity in the margins. Shamet shot 43.3% across 57 games last season; Alvarado provides the kind of disruptive defensive energy that playoff teams need off the bench. Those moves were correct. The problem is that they were the easy part. The hard part — replacing a center who rebounded at 8.3 per game and shot nearly 70% from the floor — required either spending real money or finding a creative workaround. The Knicks tried the workaround. Dallas made one phone call and kept it.

My read is this: the Cisse rejection didn't just cost the Knicks a backup center. It exposed the structural ceiling of the cost-conscious replacement strategy. When you're defending a title on a compressed budget, the restricted free agent gambit is essentially your only lever — and the incumbent team will almost always pull it back. The Knicks knew that risk going in. What they may not have fully priced is the compounding effect: a frontcourt now dependent on Drummond's one-year deal, a Finals MVP whose wrist is on a surgeon's timeline, and an offense that was already trending down 5.3 points per game before any of this happened. That's not a championship defense. That's a roster hoping the injury report stays clean and the calendar cooperates.