For most of the season, Josh Hart's role on the New York Knicks was a moving target. The wing who once led the entire NBA in minutes found himself watching fourth quarters from the bench, his playing time slashed as Mike Brown reshaped the rotation. On the eve of the Knicks' first NBA Finals in 27 years, Hart was honest about how much that stung.
"There were moments I went home and I'm like, 'Damn, man... do I suck as a basketball player?'" Hart admitted at Finals Media Day. "Whenever your minutes have gone down, or you get benched, you have those thought processes. But for me, it was like, okay, how can I build off of it? How can I improve as a player to not put myself in that situation?"
The acceptance did not come quickly. Hart pointed to one night earlier in the year when he was pulled from the rotation entirely and could only applaud from the sideline.
"There was, what, Game 1, I got benched, and Lane was out there hooping, and I was happy about it," he said. "But that took a little bit of time and self-reflection to get to that point."
Hart credited the people around him for keeping him level through the dips. "I just think I always had great people around," he said. "When it comes to coaches or teammates, that's pretty much it -- having great people around me and just trying to always get better at whatever I'm trying to do."
He also framed the season-long adjustment as a two-way process between players and a first-year coach still learning his roster. "It's the same thing as coach figuring this out as well," Hart said of Brown. "He's come to a new team. He has what he wants and has everything laid out when he accepted the job. But sometimes you've got to be around your players, see the habits of guys and see what they're more comfortable with. It's going to take time for us with him and him with us."
If there is a thread running through this Knicks team, it is a long one. Hart, Jalen Brunson and Mikal Bridges were teammates and national champions at Villanova long before they were reunited in New York -- and Hart's version of the origin story is not exactly sentimental.
"I hated Jalen," Hart said, laughing, when asked about meeting his future co-star. "I thought he was one of them annoying five-star recruits that come in entitled. Unfortunately, he was the opposite, and we sparked a friendship, and we're still friends to this day. But yeah, I hated him to start. Hated him during his visit. Probably the beginning of his freshman year, hated him."
Now those college teammates are four wins from a championship that would mean something far bigger than any of them. New York has not won an NBA title in 53 years, and the wider city has been waiting since the Giants' 2011 Super Bowl for a major championship of any kind. Hart, characteristically, refused to get ahead of the moment.
"Obviously it's a tremendous honor," he said of the chance to end the drought. "I don't think we're really looking at it that way right now. I think we're just locked in and focused on the task at hand. Then we can look back, when everything's all said and done, and really embrace this process and this run. But we can't focus too much on the outside world."
For all the noise around him, Hart said he still finds a quiet moment in it. "Before the national anthem of every game, I kind of take a couple seconds and embrace the situation God had put me in," he said. "This is a game I get to do since I was a little kid, having fun with. It's a blessing I think about every single game. It's fun to be a Knick."
