This has been a trying month for Frank Ntilikina, with his French hometown of Strasbourg making international headlines for all the wrong reasons.
Ntilikina’s mother, Jacqueline, flew to New York earlier this week to be with her son and watch him play on Christmas Day at the Garden against the Bucks. The terrorist attack on Dec. 11 at the tourist enclave called the “Christmas Market” in his hometown had shaken him.
But in an odd maneuver, Knicks coach David Fizdale put a lump of coal into Ntilikina’s Christmas stocking, as the Knicks’ 2017 lottery pick received his season’s fourth DNP.