Josh Hart has a choice in front of him and all three options are bad. He laid them out himself, and the way he said it tells you everything about how the Knicks season is going to go.
“I guess it’s either wrap it till I retire,” Hart said, “or cut it off, either joint replacement, let it go, or amputation.”
He is going with wrap it till I retire.
The finger needs a joint replacement he cannot have
Hart’s right ring finger now requires a full joint replacement, a procedure that is incompatible with playing professional basketball. So he will spend this season in splints and wraps and put the surgery off until he is done.
The detail he gave to Fred Katz of The Athletic about why makes it concrete.
“You can’t have the banging, repetitive motion,” Hart said. “Grabbing a rebound, palming it, shooting, catching the ball, doing all that: You can’t do that.”
There is nerve damage involved, which is why it is unpredictable from one morning to the next.
“Some days, it’ll be good. Some days it’ll hurt to catch the ball. It varies,” he said. “I wish I could tell you when I wake up, what’s gonna be good, what’s gonna be bad. Some days it’s good, like a regular functioning finger; and other days, it hurts to just close my hand, to make a fist.”
How it got this bad
The original injury came in the 2025 Eastern Conference Finals against Indiana. Hart had surgery that offseason. Then he reaggravated it guarding his own teammate, Mikal Bridges, in a team scrimmage.
That is the whole arc. A playoff injury, a repair, and a practice-gym collision that undid it.
The Knicks need him more than they would like to admit
Hart is 31 and entering his 10th NBA season. He is signed for $43.3 million over the next two years, including a $22.4 million team option for 2027-28.
He is also coming off the most efficient shooting season of his career. He hit a career-high 41 percent from three and posted his best effective field goal percentage ever. A wing who finally became a real floor spacer while already being the team’s connective tissue and best rebounding guard is not a player you can replace in a rotation.
And New York is in transition. Mike Brown is in his first season as head coach and has been redesigning the offense to lean less heavily on Jalen Brunson. That kind of change needs players who can catch, pass and make quick decisions without the ball. Hart is one of the few Knicks built for it, and he is doing it with a finger that may or may not close into a fist on a given Tuesday.
What has not been said
The Knicks have not issued a medical statement. No preseason or regular-season absences have been announced. There is no reported plan for managing his workload, and no indication the team has limited what he can do.
Philadelphia visits for a preseason game Monday, and nobody has said whether Hart will be in it.
Our take
This is the part of the sport people romanticize and probably should not. Hart is choosing years of future hand function to keep playing now, and he is clear-eyed about the trade. He is not framing it as toughness. He is framing it as a list of three options, all of which cost him something permanent.
Respect the decision. Just stop pretending it is free.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.