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If the Knicks are committed to running the triangle offense, they need to move the ball better.

Ball sticking is a major issue with New York; though it's not easy to measure.

At first blush, the Knicks seem to share the ball just fine. According to NBA.com, they pass 324.5 times per game, third-most in the league. The problem is their passing isn't resulting in many shots; they're just 16th in potential assists at 44.0.

Even more problematic is that they're tied for third-worst in the league in assist-to-pass percentage.

This kind of disparity is something you expect to see when there are a lot of what I call "fake passes" happening. By that, I mean the ballhandler is passing the ball with the intent of getting it back immediately once his dribble gets stopped.

The goal of that type of pass is to reset the play, not make the ball pop. The ball gets passed twice—to the ballhandler and back again—but the ball didn't actually move if it just came back to where it started. Both Carmelo Anthony and Derrick Rose do a lot of that.

Even when they pass, they're black holes.

So how can you tell how much the ball is sticking to see if this is just confirmation bias or if there's substance to the observation?

Looking at "touch" stats provides a way. By combining "Seconds per Touch" and "Dribbles per Touch," per NBA.com, we can estimate a stat we'll call "Dribbles per Second." Since there's no appreciable difference in how long an actual dribble takes, we can conclude that the fewer dribbles there are, the more of that time is spent holding onto the ball.

The Knicks average 0.715 dribbles per second, the fewest in the league. The Lakers are second at 0.723, which is a considerable gap. The bottom line: The Knicks have players with sticky hands.

Excluding post players (who by default aren't going to dribble as much, as a large chunk of points in the post are assisted) here are the 10 stickiest hands in the NBA, based on dribbles per second:

Rank Player Touches Dribbles per game TOP (in Seconds) Dribbles per Second 1 Carmelo Anthony 50.2 105.9 141.1 0.751 2 Gordon Hayward 56.3 144.9 177.3 0.817 3 Devin Booker 50.8 142.1 161.0 0.882 4 Nicolas Batum 52.8 109.5 121.4 0.902 5 Jimmy Butler 59.5 234.9 254.1 0.925 6 DeMar DeRozan 58.7 253.4 272.4 0.930 7 Kawhi Leonard 50.3 167.6 177.1 0.947 8 Giannis Antetokounmpo 64.8 221.9 233.3 0.951 9 Derrick Rose 70.4 300.2 310.5 0.967 10 LeBron James 69.9 286.2 290.8 0.984

Note that the players ranked first and ninth are also the Knicks who are first and second respectively on the Knicks in usage percentage (Anthony's is 28.9 percent, and Rose's is 25.7 percent), per Basketball-Reference.com. It's not hard to ascertain from that why the Knicks have issues. When your two most frequent ball-handlers are human Stickum, you're going to have problems.

Two things are evident from this.

The Knicks have no business re-signing Derrick Rose, and Carmelo Anthony shouldn't be part of the future. If they can work a trade for him, the Knicks need to get that done. They need to worry less about what they're getting back for him and more about the cost of keeping him.

With where New York is, he's just in the way of the future. Anthony has acknowledged he needs to take a back seat for the rest of the season, telling Ian Begley of ESPN:

I see the writing on the wall. I see what it is. I see what they're trying to do, and it's just me accepting that. That's what puts me at peace. Just knowing and understanding how things work. I'm at peace with that.

But both Anthony and the Knicks need to make sure that's permanent ink they're writing with on the proverbial wall.

Stats courtesy of NBA.com unless otherwise noted.