Phoenix Suns: What to expect from Brandon Knight
By Luke Swiatek
Brandon Knight has never performed well for the Phoenix Suns, but it wasn’t long ago that he was one of the more exciting young guards in the league.
Usually, rookies are the players whose performance is hardest to predict. Since rookies have never played in the league, it’s difficult to know how they’ll fare and what skills will translate.
On the Phoenix Suns, however, Brandon Knight‘s game might be more of a mystery than those of Deandre Ayton or Mikal Bridges.
Part of understanding why Brandon Knight is such an enigma starts with understanding where he came from. This video does a good job of summarizing his career arc so far, and the story starts in Detroit.
Drafted with the eighth pick, the Detroit Pistons hoped Brandon Knight could be their franchise point guard. Over the next two years, he was adequate, but nothing special.
In Detroit, Knight started almost every game when healthy, shot a solid 37.3 percent from deep, and scored 13.1 points per game in 31.9 minutes. He was more of a score-first guard who struggled with playmaking though, averaging only 3.9 assists to 2.7 turnovers.
Knight also got a reputation over his career as one of the “unluckiest” players in the NBA, seemingly always on the wrong end of a dunk or ankle-breaker. It was in Detroit where he received perhaps his worst posterization, courtesy of DeAndre Jordan.
In any event, the Pistons’ offense was built around the low-post presences of Greg Monroe and Andre Drummond, so they decided they needed more of a pass-first young point guard.
This led them to trade Knight and Khris Middleton (then coming off his rookie year) for 24-year-old Brandon Jennings. Jennings went on to average 7.6 assists per game to only 2.7 turnovers next year in Detroit, as the more traditional point guard that Knight was unable to be.
Luckily for Knight, a scoring guard was exactly what the Milwaukee Bucks needed.