Knicks’ PJ Tucker relishes extremely rare playing time

DETROIT — PJ Tucker didn’t know what to expect. 

He got a text Thursday morning that he was part of the rotation for the game against the Pistons, and then, to his surprise, Tucker was the first player off the Knicks bench in a 115-106 loss. 

By the end, Tucker had logged 27 minutes — by far a season high — while mixing it up physically and scoring his first regular-season points in exactly a year on a trademark corner 3-pointer. 

“Once I got through my first wind, it was really good,” Tucker said. “I started to open up a little bit. I started to feel good, started talking, getting involved with the game and it’s like riding a bike.” 

Tucker even closed out the close game in the fourth quarter in a lineup with starters.

Still, there’s no guarantee he’ll see the court again.

Josh Hart and OG Anunoby, who both rested Thursday, should return for Friday’s game against the Cavaliers. 

Tucker relished the chance — and felt at home getting physical. 

“The plays like that, the box outs, the 50-50 balls, that stuff is that feeling,” Tucker said. “Getting offensive rebounds, it’s like, ‘Yeah, I’m back.’ It felt good.” 

The evidence shows Tom Thibodeau doesn’t actually wear down his players. 

With Thibodeau’s reputation for destroying bodies with heavy minutes as the impetus, The Guardian took a deep dive into the data starting in 2010 (Thibodeau’s first year as a head coach) and discovered “there’s no clear or consistent pattern showing Thibodeau-coached players are more likely to get hurt than anyone else.”

The graph supplied with the story showed three of Thibodeau’s five seasons in Chicago correlated with a high number of injuries, but his subsequent years with the Timberwolves and Knicks were either about average or healthier than most of the NBA. 

Thibodeau, who rested two starters in Thursday’s loss to the Pistons, shrugged off the findings because it won’t stop the opposing view. 

“I don’t worry about it because there’s always opinions,” Thibodeau said. “Any time there’s science for it, there’s science against. And then there’s opinions. And there’s the trained eye. And there’s a lot that goes into it. I always say, you prepare for what you want to do. And you have to have a mentality and the mindset is everything. I’ve been around a lot of players and I’ve learned from them, I’ve learned from different people I’ve been around. I don’t worry about any of that stuff.”