Josh Hart admits to nerve issue in hand after breakout game - ESPN

NEW YORK — After Josh Hart had what easily was his best game of the season thus far for the Knicks — scoring 14 points to go with 9 rebounds and 3 assists — in a 128-113 New York win over the Chicago Bulls on Sunday night, the do-it-all forward admitted there's one thing he can't do at the moment:

Get full feeling in his right (shooting) hand.

«Yeah, my nerve hasn't fully gotten back to what it was before,» Hart said at his locker after the game. «So it's a little bit of tingling, a little bit of numbness in part of my hand.

»Hopefully, at some point, that nerve will get back to where it was. Hopefully sooner rather than later, but right now it's a process."

It's a process that has caused Hart to get off to an extremely slow start to this season for the Knicks (3-3). After missing the first game of the season with a back issue — one that caused him to miss the final few weeks of preseason after a brief cameo in New York's exhibition opener in Abu Dhabi — Hart scored a combined 11 points on 4-for-19 shooting overall (and 1-for-10 from 3-point range) through his first four games for the Knicks.

But Hart said that his mentality coming into Sunday's game against Chicago was to try to set all of that to the side and focus on what has made him such a fan favorite in New York: playing hard and with energy.

«For me, I'm going through some adversity myself, physically and mentally, so my biggest thing today was going out there and playing with energy,» Hart said. «Just getting back to being myself.»

Although the shooting remains an issue — he went 1-for-4 on 3s Sunday night — the energy and hustle were on full-display Sunday.

«I saw Josh Hart,» teammate and close friend Jalen Brunson, who led the Knicks with 31 points, said after