The French Connection

Described as a “No-mistake” player, 18-year-old point guard frank Ntilikina has the type of game that could make him the franchise point guard the knicks have been searching for.

- Yaron Weitzman

SPEAK TO ENOUGH prospects in the leadup to the draft and the conversations start blending into one another. Everyone is super competitive and eager to learn. Also, they’re super confident and all the weakness that you’ve heard about—yeah, those have been fixed, or they’re just a product of the player being misunderstood.

The same goes for international prospects, only they usually mention how they’re nervous for their interview, too. English, after all, isn’t their first language. They then share how they’ve spent the past five years honing their speaking skills by imbibing every piece of American pop culture they can get their hands on. For Knicks rookie Frank Ntilikina, the 18-year-old guard out of Strasbourg, France, that meant binge-watching TV shows like How I Met Your Mother and Empire (interesting combination, no?) and devouring every piece of music put out by Drake and Meek Mill.

But also: “I read a lot,” he says over the phone from France about two weeks before the NBA draft.

OK, so that’s a bit different. But is he talking War and Peace or Instagram captions?

“I love basketball books,” he says. “Phil Jackson’s Eleven Rings,”—a morsel that will certainly get play in New York, the city Ntilikina now calls home—“a biography on Michael Jordan, [and] now I’m reading a book by [longtime NBA trainer] Tim Grover.”