Donte DiVincenzo Next to ‘Step Away’ from Knicks ?

Donte DiVincenzo appeared in 72 games last season with Golden State, averaging 9.4 points per game.

Donte DiVincenzo has agreed to a four-year, $50 million deal to join former Villanova teammates Jalen Brunson and Josh Hart with the New York Knicks, per multiple reports.

DiVincenzo spent last season with the Golden State Warriors before deciding to move across the country and sign with New York.

The Knicks won a playoff series for the first time in a decade last season after signing Brunson in the summer and acquiring Hart from Portland during the season. Brunson and DiVincenzo were part of two NCAA championship teams with the Wildcats, with Hart joining them on the first one.

DiVincenzo also won an NBA championship with the Milwaukee Bucks in 2021, though he played in just their first three playoff games before tearing a ligament in his left ankle.

After the reported move, Hart and Brunson took to Twitter to comment on it, as well as their former Wildcats teammate, Brooklyn Nets swingman Mikal Bridges.

The first-round pick of the Bucks in 2018 was then dealt to Sacramento as part of a four-team deal at the trade deadline in 2022 before signing with the Warriors last July. DiVincenzo went on to play in a career-high 72 games for Golden State last season, starting 36, and averaging 9.4 points.

Stephen Curry has haunted the New York Knicks enough but anyone planning to boo the three-point master upon his arrival to Madison Square Garden on Thursday night should know he may be partly responsible for placing the team on its current optimistic path.

If not for the intervention of Curry, whose Golden State Warriors face the Knicks on Thursday (7:30 p.m. ET, TNT), Donte DiVincenzo might’ve stayed in San Francisco or moved elsewhere. Instead, DiVincenzo, a one-year Warrior, has become one of the breakout stars of the Knicks’ 2023-24 campaign as a starting five staple and one of the few left relatively unscathed by the team’s recent rash of injuries (missing just one of the Knicks’ 59 games to date).

On paper, Manhattan was the ideal destination for DiVincenzo, an NBA journeyman whose professional momentum has been often stifled by injuries and roster shifts. The move back east would reunite him with college teammates Jalen Brunson and Josh Hart and his lingering defensive prowess would certainly endear him to head coach Tom Thibodeau.

Curry helped drive those points home, recalling the free agency process in a feature from Fred Katz and Anthony Slater of The Athletic.

“(The Knicks) were already a playoff team, starting to trend in the right direction,” Curry said. “Then (there is) his familiarity with their players from college. That made it so he’d have the opportunity to go in and do exactly what he did for us. He’s a smart, high-IQ basketball player who plays defense.”

Curry was destined to be a metropolitan problem from the second he made his NBA entry, as he was chosen by the Warriors right before the Knicks went on the clock at the 2009 draft (New York took Jordan Hill instead). When he inevitably reached the top of the NBA’s all-time three-point leaders’ list, he broke the record against the Knicks at MSG in 2021.

Yet, the Knicks have one of their hallmarks of both the present and future thanks to the expertise of Curry, who left quite an impression on DiVincenzo despite only one year of Bay Area collaboration.

“Ultimately, he said it,” DiVincenzo said. “It was on my mind. You know, I’m a grown man. I make my own decisions, but to have somebody of that stature to almost voice the opinion that I’m thinking. It makes you feel good about the decision you’re making, rather than if he says something way out of left field and you kind of start to question things.

“He reinforced what I was thinking about New York.”

Curry’s words hold even further weight as Katz and Slater’s report reveals that DiVincenzo “didn’t want to leave” the relatively sterling situation he had in San Francisco. But after talking with Curry, DiVincenzo joined the Knicks on a four-year, $46.8 million deal that looks like a bargain with each passing day.