A critical New York Knicks star has suffered a significant injury setback prior to the start of the 2025-26 NBA season.
New York is angling to contend for its first championship since 1973 this year, and the club finds itself in probably the most optimal position it’s occupied within the Eastern Conference in a quarter century.
After finishing with a 51-31 record and the No. 3 seed in the East, the Knicks advanced all the way to the Eastern Conference Finals last spring, ultimately falling to the Indiana Pacers in six games.
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The Knicks made a bold move, opting to fire fifth-year head coach Tom Thibodeau, despite the 2021 Coach of the Year having been, by far, the team’s best coach this century. New York instead brought in Mike Brown, known to be a player-friendly coach.
With the Pacers and Boston Celtics slated to be missing their best players — two-time All-NBA point guard Tyrese Haliburton and five-time All-NBA power forward Jayson Tatum — due to Achilles tendon tears, the Knicks and Cleveland Cavaliers seem ideally positioned to emerge as the class of the East.
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Unfortunately, one of New York’s top six players is going to be playing with an ailment for much of the year.
During a media day presser this week, shooting guard Josh Hart revealed that he has now reinjured a right finger ailment he tried to repair with a June surgery, per SNY.tv and Tim Bontemps of ESPN.
“I’m just trying to get used to it, and then get through the season with it,” Hart said. “I don’t want to go into too much detail, but I obviously got a procedure on it and then kind of reaggravated it somewhat recently. So probably just rock out with a splint this season and try to fix it again next summer.”
Playing with a splint could impact Hart’s shooting efficacy.
Choppy Waters Ahead for Hart?
While struggling with the initial finger issue, his shooting took a significant hit during the last four games of New York’s second-round semifinal series against the Boston Celtics. In that run, the Villanova product connected on a lowly 38.5 percent his 9.8 field goal attempts a night. By the third game of the East Finals, Thibodeau had demoted Hart (with Hart’s recommendation) to the bench in favor of center Mitchell Robinson.
Across 77 healthy regular season games, Hart averaged 13.6 points on .525/.333/.776 shooting splits, 9.6 rebounds, 5.9 assists, and 1.5 steals. Can he stabilize the 3-point shooting this year while wearing a splint?
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