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misterearl
Posts: 38786
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Joined: 11/16/2004
Member: #799
USA
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It's the End of the World as the Knicks Know It
By HARVEY ARATON
Published: May 11, 2008
The sentiment was understandably strong for the slick-passing and smooth-talking Mark Jackson, out of Queens, N.Y., and St. John’s University and Madison Square Garden. But here is what Donnie Walsh, himself of the Bronx, had to be thinking once it was apparent that Mike D’Antoni, late of the Phoenix Suns, was also in play, available for hire as the coach of the Knicks:
Why not get the guy who has been around, and not just around the Midtown block? Time to bring this anachronistic franchise into the new world of professional basketball, the whole wide world that D’Antoni has lived in as much as anyone born into the game in the United States.
Much as they were absent a coach, the Knicks have been lacking a vision. They needed to open themselves up to the way the sport is not only played but administered in more open-minded and successful N.B.A. cities. As the general manager in New York until December 2003, Scott Layden was rooted in a 1980s mentality. As team president, Isiah Thomas never could get his head out of his own hometown, Chicago.
Globalization took root in the N.B.A. years ago, but somehow eluded one of the great melting pots. With the signing of D’Antoni to replace Thomas, Walsh makes a statement that the Knicks will no longer play the paradoxical role of 21st century hicks.
A marginal N.B.A. player after a college career at Marshall, D’Antoni drifted over to Italy, where he became a star guard, an icon in Milan, a boyhood hero of a future prodigy, the gifted son of another American who had drifted overseas. Kobe Bryant always said his first Lakers jersey, No. 8, was worn in tribute to Mike D’Antoni.
Later, D’Antoni became a top coach in the Italian league, twice coach of the year. He had a brief and unsuccessful coaching fling with the Denver Nuggets, returned to Italy, then was hired as an assistant in Phoenix in the fall of 2002.
There was a night that season when D’Antoni, in Denver with the Suns, stepped out for dinner at a sushi restaurant with a Nuggets rookie named Nikoloz Tskitishvili. I was with them, working on a story about the influx of international players, focusing on the Georgian-born Tskitishvili, who had played the previous season for Benetton Treviso, under D’Antoni.
When the subject turned to the evolving basketball world, D’Antoni spoke passionately about how much the American game needed to open up, distance itself from the hand-to-hand combat that too many control-freak coaches had allowed it to become. He marveled about the abilities of the big men overseas to handle and shoot the ball, play outside the paint, open up the court.
He promised that if he ever got another opportunity to be an N.B.A. coach, he would embrace a freewheeling, up-tempo style, not just because it would be an aesthetically pleasing contrast, but because he believed the global effect on the American game was going to re-emphasize athleticism and fundamental skills. D’Antoni soon after delivered on his vow, although not until Thomas was nice enough to take Stephon Marbury off his hands and Steve Nash hit town.
D’Antoni’s Suns blew through the league like a cool desert breeze, even if they never did reach the finals. The unsold critic could retrospectively call them a gimmick made to be exposed in the playoffs. The kinder, gentler one might say that San Antonio, another team with a strong foreign influence that changed stylistically with the times, had Tim Duncan as the difference maker.
In his own defense, D’Antoni could certainly argue that the Suns might well have been the defending champions this season had the league not horrendously suspended his players for leaving the bench in the playoffs last spring after they were baited by the Spurs’ Robert Horry.
However you remember his Suns, whatever system D’Antoni installs in New York, the Knicks won’t be winners until Thomas’s roster is turned over, until better and more coachable players are found. D’Antoni is the latest to hit the Dolan family jackpot, but he will work and suffer and lose aplenty for the extra money Chicago apparently wouldn’t pay him if Eddy Curry, Zach Randolph and the rest of the career underachievers are still in the house.
The heavy lifting around the Garden will first happen in the front office. Maybe Walsh has a job there in mind for Jackson, who played for him in Indiana, whom Walsh was once ready to draft 21 years ago until Reggie Miller was suddenly in his lap, the way D’Antoni materialized last week.
It wouldn’t hurt Walsh to have another savvy New Yorker on his new management team. Better to make his first Knicks hire a basketball man of the world.
once a knick always a knick
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5/10/2008 7:57 PM
