Evan Fournier is still young — and not just young in life years, but young on the basketball spectrum, too.
At 31 years old, Fournier considers himself still in his best playing years. The Knicks disagreed, hence why they valued his salary cap hit more than his production.
Fournier’s $19 million salary made a trade deadline day deal for Bojan Bogdanovic and Alec Burks possible.
For a Knicks team in need of quality scoring help, the deal was a no-brainer.
Fournier believes he is still just that — quality scoring help — and while the French forward couldn’t buy playing time from Tom Thibodeau on Amazon Prime, he’s been taking advantage of the opportunity he’s been given in Detroit.
An opportunity to remind the NBA — and prove to himself — he isn’t a dinosaur. He can still be productive in a league only getting younger, faster, more skilled and more athletic.
“Bro I’m 31, I’m not 40,” Fournier said during Pistons shootaround at The Garden Monday afternoon. “I’m in my best years, literally.”
This is why Fournier wanted to be traded — “hoped” a trade would happen before the Feb. 8 deadline.
It became clear the Knicks viewed him more as a trade chip than an impact player.
Fournier never lost sight of it himself, even back during Knicks training camp in Charleston, S.C.
“To be honest — I might be dreaming — but to me, I can help the team,” he said back in October. “I’m a good player. I can f—— g play. I can bring stuff that this team doesn’t have, too. I have hope to play.”
The hope to crack Thibodeau’s rotation was short-lived and fruitless, so the energy shifted toward a way out of New York.
“I was hoping for a trade and it happened, so it worked out,” he said. Fournier has a funny story about the moment he learned he’d been traded to Detroit: “I had no idea. I was actually in the steam room and Josh came in storming in like Yo Ev! That’s how it happened.”
His numbers are better early on with the Pistons — but of course there’s a caveat. A reason Fournier has found a rhythm since arriving in Detroit.
The Pistons are bad. They owned the league’s worst record last season, own it again this season and could very well pull off the hat trick next year, too.
Detroit hasn’t logged more than 23 wins in a season since 2019. It’s Doomsday-level bad with the Pistons.
Scoring numbers tend to get inflated when the wins come few and far between.
Fournier couldn’t get time on a playoff-bound Knicks team and didn’t do much in the limited opportunities he received in New York before the mid-season trade.
So far in Detroit, he’s scored at least 10 points and made at least two threes in each of his first four games.
Fournier said there’s no extra juice in his first game back against the team that dealt him even though history says he likes to stick it to the team passing him up.
After the Boston Celtics signed-and-traded the Frenchman to the Knicks in 2021, he scored 32 points and hit six threes in a double-overtime season-opening victory. He scored 32 against the Celtics again that season, then hung 41 in 42 minutes in their third matchup.
He shot 55.4 percent from the field in those games combined.
“I want to play well. At this point in my career I truly don’t care [if I’m playing my former team],” he said. “I feel like I’m being myself again. Help these young guys and grow. I actually never felt like that [having ill will towards an old team]. I remember my first year when I was playing well against Boston, I never really cared to be honest.”
Then things turned sour. Fournier doesn’t want to re-live the fallout. He’s focused on revitalizing his career in Detroit and expressing gratitude for the good moments he had in New York.
Not to mention Fournier currently holds the Knicks franchise record for most threes made in a single season.
That was before Thibodeau relegated him to a bench role last season when he moved Quentin Grimes into the starting lineup.
“It was obviously one of the hardest times in my career, but as a person, it was probably my best time,” he said. “My second son was born here. We always wanted to live in New York, my wife and I, and we did. We had the time of our life in the city. Playing at MSG every night was a privilege. And there’s moments that you’ll always cherish: that first game against Boston was special. Breaking the franchise record was special. I had really high moments that I will never forget.”
Fournier knows his reign atop the Knicks three-point leaderboard will be short-lived.
He eclipsed Julius Randle’s mark of 218 threes with 241 made treys in the 2022 season.
Donte DiVincenzo has 172 threes through 56 games and is averaging a career-best 3.1 made threes per game.
With 25 more games on the schedule, DiVincenzo needs to make 69 threes to tie or 70 threes to set the new record — an average of 2.8 threes per game needed to dethrone Fournier.
“I saw that. I saw that,” said the former Knick. “To be honest, that season I really understood that I could break the record late in the season. Donte is a heck of a shooter. I’m pretty confident he’s going to break it for sure.”
That’s the way the cookie crumbles: Younger players come in and make the old heads an afterthought.
But Fournier is on a mission to prove he’s not quite an old head just yet. He’s off to a good start in Detroit. The Pistons own the team option on the final year of Fournier’s deal, which is worth $19 million, meaning they can either waive him ahead of the season to clear cap space or keep him to trade as an expiring contract next season.
The carousel continues. So does the opportunity.
As for why things went sour in New York other than Grimes replacing Fournier in the rotation, the Knicks’ former French forward is looking forward not backward
“I don’t know and I don’t really care for it if I’m being honest,” he said. “You should ask Thibs that.”