Enes Kanter has become a problem.

While it’s easy to point to the passive aggressive tweets, the incessant complaining, and the proclivity for airing dirty laundry to the media, the real problem runs much deeper. If those superficial issues were the only issues Kanter brought to this young Knicks team, it would be a simple fix: bench him until he asks for a buyout. Meanwhile, Kanter leaves to play for a contender, he throws some shade at the organization on the way out, and the problem is solved. This, of course, generously assumes that Kanter’s infantile behavior does not have any effect on this current Knicks roster.

The real issue with Kanter isn’t as simple. While the solution is largely the same, the problem with Kanter is how his play affects the rest of the players on the team. In a season dedicated to development and growth, Kanter represents an obstacle rather than a helpful hand. He does almost nothing to directly help the other players on this roster on both ends of the floor. And the deeper we go, the more problems jump to the surface.

It’s one thing to have a poor season. It’s a another thing to have a poor season while complaining about a deserved demotion AND proving to be an active impediment to the development of your young teammates. That’s different. That’s what we call some bullshit. So let’s take a look and explore exactly why Kanter is such a detriment to development and the culture the Knicks are trying to build.

We can start on the defensive end, where the endless memeing of Kanter’s inability to stop anyone still isn’t enough to put his issues into perspective. We know Kanter is bad at defense, but it’s important to understand why he’s bad at defense. Understanding why can show us how awful, lazy defense affects the habits of the young players surrounding him.

Kanter is a terrible pick-and-roll defender -- pretty much everyone is aware of this by now. He’s limited physically, which isn’t really his fault. His vertical leaping ability is akin to that of a cadaver and he’s got a mean ol’ case of T-Rex arms. When these limitations combine, it makes Kanter one of the least intimidating rim protectors in the NBA. Per NBA.com, Kanter contesting a shot between 0–6 feet causes his opponents to shoot 1.4 percent worse, whereas Luke Kornet makes opponents 4.5 percent less effective and Mitchell Robinson has a massive eight percent differential.

That’s a problem, but that’s not the crux of the issue. If Kanter was limited by purely physical traits, I wouldn’t be writing this. The real problem is that Kanter consistently shirks his responsibilities as a defender in the pick-and-roll.

That’s two plays from the same game that show the exact same thing. In both instances, Kanter does nothing to help the on-ball defender contain the opposing ball handler. The on-ball defender manages to nearly recover in time, but ends up about a half-second late to contest the shot. Any help from Kanter slows Malcolm Brogdon just enough for the primary defender to recover and cut off Brogdon’s drive. And, best of all, you can see Kanter jump into action once the shot goes up in the first clip — he’s chasing the defensive rebound, because of course he is.

Basketball usually isn’t that simple, but this is a special example. For both of those possessions, Kanter was matched up with Thon Maker. Yes, that Thon Maker, who is averaging five points per game, up from his career average of 4.5. Thon Maker, who is not an unstoppable above-the-rim finisher nor a sniper from behind the arc. Thon Maker scares nobody. You do not need to stay glued to Thon freakin’ Maker to maintain your defensive integrity. And yet, Kanter defends Maker like he’s prime Dwight Howard, insisting on staying between Maker and the rim at all times. Thon Maker! All Malcolm Brogdon has to do is walk to the rim for layups over and over. This makes me want to vomit.

That’s not all, though! Kanter is often late on his help rotations (or misses them entirely). His positioning is poor at best, disastrous at worst. His lack of foot speed combined with a lack of effort allows ball handlers to get wherever they want with minimal effort. His footwork and general defensive instincts are subpar. I don’t think he has a single redeeming trait on defense outside of his rebounding.

These issues creates other problems in a bunch of different areas. To start, it’s a terrible influence on the developing talent on this team. The young guys might see Kanter getting $18 million to roleplay an actual pile of shit on defense and extrapolate the wrong lesson — entirely possible. In a more direct sense, however, it’s actively messing with player development as well. Building good habits, especially on defense, is often about positive reinforcement. Giving up layups despite good defense is the absolute opposite of positive reinforcement. Take a look at this clip again, but this time, focus on Damyean Dotson:

Dotson did a pretty good job getting around the screen and recovering to his man. And yet, the effort and execution didn’t matter at all. All because Kanter refused to do his job.

On top of that, it becomes incrementally more difficult to teach young players how to help properly when a guy like Kanter is playing big minutes. Since he’s constantly being beat, young players will instinctively help too much, because that’s what they have to do. Good defenders learn to help without overhelping — finding that balance with an absolute sinkhole manning the middle of the floor is a problem, one which is not ideal for a team filled with young, impressionable talent.

Look no further than the way the coaching staff has tried to cover for Kanter throughout the season. Early on, they tried to do more switching, which predictably did not work. Fizdale and his staff rightfully cut that idea, instead favoring the amorphous zone defense that we see from time to time. Unfortunately, when Kanter mans the middle of that zone, teams STILL go right at him; in Charlotte, Cody Zeller (!!!) cooked Kanter one-on-one in the middle of that zone defense until the Knicks were down 20-plus. When Kanter was subbed out for Luke Kornet, another big with the foot speed of an African elephant, the Knicks completed one of the biggest turnarounds in franchise history (that’s not to insult Kornet, who has been better than Kanter. It’s just to show that physical traits are not a get-out-of-jail-free card on defense).

If you’re more of a stats guy, I’ve got some juicy numbers for your... “enjoyment.” Get ready. Opponents shoot 6.2 percent better than average when Kanter is the primary defender, and his overall defensive rating is 113.4 (0.2 worse than the Knicks’ actual defensive rating, and a substantially worse figure than those of Noah Vonleh, Mitchell Robinson, and Luke Kornet). On top of that, Kanter’s presence boosts opponents eFG% by 3.6 percent, per Cleaning the Glass, which is in the sixth percentile league-wide. Ouch.

But the game is played on two ends of the floor, right? And we all know Kanter is ostensibly a valuable player on offense, which should help counteract any problems on defense. The surface-level numbers may say as much, but really, that’s not quite the case. The individual offensive numbers are certainly impressive, but they help excuse an alarming lack of team-oriented play, which should come as no surprise.

Kanter’s role on offense should be simple: set screens, roll to the rim, cause chaos on the offensive glass, and post up when the play-call demands it (or a mismatch presents itself). This season, of those four tasks, Kanter is excelling at exactly one of them — offensive rebounding. The rest has ranged from “bad” to “eject this guy into the sun”.

Let’s start with the screening, which should be the moneymaker for Kanter. After all, good screens can be oddly selfish — set a good screen, and your own defender has to help, leaving a lane open to roll to the hoop. You might even force a switch, which means you can post up a 190-pound guard rather than a 260-pound center. Good screens are a surprisingly good way to pad stats. Yet, despite that, Kanter has been wildly inconsistent as a screener, showing a propensity to set poor screens or to skip them entirely. Watch here as Kanter slips the screen and hastily rolls to the rim instead:

Slipping screens (vacating the screen early) has a place in certain contexts. When shooters slip screens, it causes chaos; roll men slipping screens can provide a counter to certain defensive coverages. That context is not reflected by this play, and it rarely is when it comes to Kanter’s efforts this season.

The same problem shows itself off the ball as well. Here, Kanter is supposed to set a cross screen (often called a flex screen) for Kevin Knox. That...doesn’t happen. He sets the laziest screen imaginable and makes zero contact, preferring to focus on sealing his defender and trying to post up without a mismatch.

This is more than bad offense. It’s a bad influence.

We can measure Kanter’s screening ability (and, in a sense, his gravity as a roll man, which we’ll get to in a second) by looking at his screen assists. Kanter averages 2.8 screen assists per game, a number matched by...Mitchell Robinson, a rookie who hadn’t played organized basketball in over a year prior to the start of the season. I’ve already talked about Robinson’s screening ability at length here and here, so let’s just say that’s not a good thing, especially when Robinson plays almost 10 minutes per game less than Kanter.

Issues with setting quality screens are compounded by Kanter’s inability to force significant pressure on a defense as a roll man. This is where the physical limitations come in again — he’s one of the least threatening lob finishers in the league due to short arms and lack of vertical burst.

The pass from Knox on this play isn’t great, but we all know Mitchell Robinson yams this shit to the high heavens. More revealing than the result of the play is how Thon Maker defends Kanter (which, ironically, is exactly how Kanter should have defended Maker in the plays I dissected earlier). Maker is almost ignoring Kanter entirely; while Enes has a nice touch and uses craftiness to make up for his lack of athleticism, his lack of offensive explosion limits his finishing potential, which means defenses don’t have to give him any extra attention. That means Kanter’s defender can roam around like a free safety, disrupting the rest of the Knicks’ offense when the opportunity arises.

Can you imagine a team giving that kind of space to Anthony Davis, or Clint Capela, or Rudy Gobert? Enes Kanter is basically the polar opposite of the modern rim-running center (although, in fairness, that play isn’t solely Kanter’s fault; regardless, it does show how little respect he garners from defenders).

Enes is a solid-to-good player out of the post, but even then, he has limitations and contextual issues that cause his numbers to overstate his overall impact. He is excellent posting up weaker defenders, and he’s a fantastic offensive rebounder, which does help counterbalance the way defenses play him. But the drawbacks are heavy. As Jonathan Macri noted in his excellent piece, Kanter has the second-highest turnover percentage on post-ups among players with any kind of significant post-up volume. He only trails Kevin Love, who has played in four games. Even worse, among the same sample, Kanter has the second-lowest assist percentage. So he’s turning the ball over at a high rate, and it can’t be explained away by a higher-than-average rate of assists. Kanter can be an effective post player, but it usually comes with a ton of turnovers and a complete dearth of ball movement. He rarely gets to the free throw line to boot. Not exactly a modern offensive profile for a big man.

There’s also a more nebulous price to pay for Kanter’s post-up passions: he screws up the team’s offensive spacing. Look at how Kanter ducking in for the post-up blocks Kevin Knox from driving to the rim despite getting a half step on DJ Wilson with the rip through:

Kanter does this all the time, and you can tell he’s the one deciding to post up (rather than the coaching staff) because nearly 100 percent of the designed post-ups in this offense are preceded by a cross screen on the baseline. That’s not happening here, which tells me Kanter is probably going off on his own. This kind of thing has been all too common this season, and it is the antithesis of modern offensive principles. It kills the spacing, it neuters the offensive flow, and it encourages poor habits on a team-wide level. Once again, Kanter is disrupting others in favor of his own self interest.

And again, if the eye test isn’t enough, there’s plenty of numbers that say Kanter isn’t as good on offense as his numbers imply. In fact, the Knicks are statistically far superior on offense when Kanter isn’t on the floor. As per Basketball Reference, the Knicks’ offense is substantially more efficient with Kanter on the bench (46.8 eFG% with Kanter on the floor, 51.6 eFG% with Kanter on the bench). His offensive rating comes in at a measly 102.8, as per NBA.com, and the Knicks have an offensive rating of 111.6 when he isn’t out there.

There’s a major theme here — Kanter doesn’t provide support for his teammates on either end of the floor. In fact, it often hurts them. Getting Frank Ntilikina to be more aggressive is a substantially more difficult proposition when Enes Kanter, and his defender, are plopped right in the middle of the paint. Teaching Kevin Knox how to probe as a pick-and-roll ball handler is more difficult when Kanter sets poor screens and doesn’t draw defensive attention. So on, so forth.

It’s clear Kanter’s box score numbers are the sole beneficiary of the way Enes Kanter has played this season, and that’s the real problem. Kanter is prioritizing stats and personal accomplishments over team basketball and the development of the surrounding talent. He may even be an active detriment to that development, whether it is process- or results-oriented. He does this while complaining — on Twitter and to the media — when he is deservedly benched, despite coming off the bench for the majority of his career. He is a detriment to the culture that the Knicks’ top brass wants to build.

Does this mean Kanter is useless? Not necessarily. Paired with certain perimeter players, Kanter can slide into crevices the Knicks can’t create and feast on the glass. He’ll even have strong nights every now and again in the orange and blue. But strong individual performances change nothing — look no further than Kanter’s career average of 15 minutes per game in the playoffs. Even on an OKC team featuring two future MVPs, Kanter couldn’t play when it really mattered.

Enes Kanter is a problem, and the smartest and easiest solution is to simply get rid of him. A buyout is a win-win situation, and I pray that it is the ultimate conclusion of this absurdist saga. It’s only a question of how long it takes Kanter to come to the same conclusion.