For most of the regular season, Landry Shamet was one of the best minimum contracts in the league.
Recently, though, he’s playing … well, like a player on a minimum contract.
His rough end of the regular season has now bled into the start of the playoffs. In the first two games of this first-round series against the Hawks — which is tied 1-1 heading to Atlanta — he shot 1-for-6 from 3-point range and 1-for-7 overall.
In Monday’s 107-106 Game 2 collapse at Madison Square Garden, he did not score, and the Knicks were outscored by six points in his 10 minutes on the court.
It got so bad that coach Mike Brown opted to give Jose Alvarado — who appeared to be out of the playoff rotation — some playing time over Shamet in the second and fourth quarters.
Shamet’s shooting slump has endured. In the 16 games he played from the start of March to the end of the regular season, he shot just 30.4 percent from deep, while also missing five games due to a knee injury.
In the 35 regular-season games he played prior to March, he shot 42.9 percent from 3-point range.
One thing that has been noticeable so far in these playoffs is the Knicks’ lack of a backup point guard behind Jalen Brunson. Brown has said he is comfortable with Shamet and Miles McBride there, but neither is a natural point guard, and both have struggled.
They acquired Alvarado ahead of the deadline, but despite a hot start to his Knicks tenure, he has largely not looked capable of owning that role.
There was a brief period in the middle of the season when it seemed like Tyler Kolek was cementing himself in the role, but he subsequently fell out of the rotation.
McBride and Shamet have shared the court for 23 minutes across the two games.
The Knicks have a minus-1.9 net rating in that time.
What’s happening on and off the Garden court
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If their struggles continue or worsen, the Knicks bench suddenly looks thin.
CJ McCollum said he doesn’t view himself as a villain, even though the MSG crowd treated him like one with obscenities and boos.
But his teammate thinks he’s embracing it. They all are, too.
“CJ, that got him going,” Jonathan Kuminga said after Game 2. “I think he enjoyed that. The crowd shouldn’t really do that or say that. I think that really got him going and got all of us going — just the energy.”
