Jordan Clarkson is now a member of the New York Knicks. While die-hard Utah Jazz fans are no doubt going to miss watching him play, they also know that Knicks fans are soon going to come to a realization: that although Clarkson is an excellent scorer, he simply isn't a one-size-fits-all solution.
What I mean by that is this: if your team is set up to where you're expecting Jordan Clarkson to come in and provide a solid scoring punch off the bench in a 25 minutes per night role, you're going to be operating in the sweet spot. It's when you get outside of that where you might start to run into problems.
There's a reason Clarkson has finished in the top seven for Sixth Man of the Year voting three times in his career, and why two of those instances have come in the last five seasons. The guy is a fantastic go-to scorer when he's a secondary option. He thrives most when he can fire away from three without the pressure of carrying an entire offensive unit on his shoulders.
Jordan Clarkson is best as a secondary offensive creator
The issue comes when a team tries to stretch him beyond that role. Clarkson is not the type of player who can single-handedly stabilize a struggling second unit.
He's realistically not going to consistently elevate the play of four other bench players who aren't great at creating their own high-quality looks. It shouldn't be controversial to say that if Jordan's role is larger than necessary, his streaky efficiency and other flaws in his game will become more noticeable.
Now, that's not to say that he's not going to elevate the Knicks quite a bit, because he will. Jazz fans know as well as anyone that Clarkson can get on the kind of heater few other bench players in this league can. But for New York, the key is going to be avoiding the mistake Utah sometimes made of asking Jordan to be more than what he's supposed to be.
Basically the way I think of it is that Jordan Clarkson is truly maximized when he's viewed by his coaching staff as an ancillary offensive piece to complement the primary offensive guys. If the Knicks end up leaning on him too much instead, it could end up diminishing his usefulness.