National Basketball Association

Kidd making history with woes on 'O'

Published May. 16, 2013 1:00 a.m. ET

Sam Gardner

There’s no question that Jason Kidd struggled for the New York Knicks in the playoffs, but just how offensively inept was the 10-time All-Star?

Try historically.

Over the final 10 games for the Knicks, who lost to the Indiana Pacers 4-2 in an Eastern Conference semfinal, the 40-year-old Kidd failed to score a single point. In that span, the career 40 percent field-goal shooter missed all 17 of his attempts from the field, including an 0-for-10 mark from 3-point range.

According to the Elias Sports Bureau via the New York Post, Kidd’s stretch of consecutive scoreless games with at least 15 minutes - nine games, as he saw only six minutes in Game 6 - played is the longest in NBA playoff history.

But the legendary level of ineffectiveness doesn’t end there.

For the entire playoffs, Kidd played more than 246 minutes. In that time, he scored 11 points on 3-for-25 shooting. According to Basketball-Reference.com, he’s the only player in league history to play more than 235 minutes in one playoff year while scoring 11 or fewer points.

In fact, to find a player who came even close to Kidd’s level of offensive uselessness, you’d have to go back to 1982, when San Antonio Spurs center George Johnson played 175 minutes in nine games and scored just 11 points, according to Basketball-Reference.com. But Johnson took one-third the number of shots that Kidd has (eight) and still made more of them (four) than Kidd.

You could also point to Houston Rockets forward Charles Jones, an aging, little-used player during the regular season who scored 14 total points in 237 minutes over the course of 19 playoff games in 1995. But he only took 13 shots, making five, and his team won a championship.

Now, to be fair, Kidd is 40, and averaged only six points per game this season. With Carmelo Anthony and J.R. Smith supposedly accounting for most of the offense on a given night, Kidd isn’t out there to put the ball in the basket. But when you’re a point guard who’s shooting 0-fer and scoring like a couple of shot-blocking big men — and your team is getting clobbered while it happens —you’ve got a problem.

Things fell apart for the Knicks, to the point that even New York City councilmen gave up on the team. On the bright side, Kidd and his teammates won’t have to endure any more games this season.