Posted by JohnWallace44:

Honestly, what is the point of worrying about the coach?

If you rank everyone in the organization from most credible/proven to least, I'm pretty sure Mike would be waaaay up on top.

Notice that the teams who are winning every year aren't changing coaches left and right. Those things go hand in hand.

The guy has won consistently, let's let the system run. They just have to get the players in here.

That's my point he hasn't. I already given you the situations where he hasn't. I keep hearing that we have to get the players here. But sometimes that doesn't translate into winning. What's the benchmark for rating a coach? That's why I threw out the Mike Brown question. No one seemed to address that.

Posted by JohnWallace44:

These players all know that they're stop gap guys, so beyond the fact that they are limited talent wise, and playing without a center, I'm shocked that they've been as motivated as they have.

The slate needs to be completely wiped.

In 2010 Curry will be in jail, or fat camp, and we'll be able to restart with the Mayor, the Rooster, and Jeffries who is limited, but he's got the right attitude and doesn't really matter to the overall team.

Nate and Lee have to go because we need the Mayor, the Rooster, and these players that we draft this year to know that its their team to lead. Not Al's, not Hughes'. These players that have the right attitude, they need to know that its on them to lead.

Being stop gap players doesn't fly as an excuse since they all have new contracts to play for and jobs on other teams to play for.

Posted by Paladin55:

Posted by Pharzeone:



Riley had Ewing competing in what is probably described one of the best times in recent memory for the Eastern Conference. BTW, I am not just talking about championships. I am talking about what a coach can do with the roster he has in front of him. Be competitive, improvement and serious threat.

Just with Ewing, Riley was able to put up 50 wins and take his team within Game 7 of upsetting the NBA champions. Riley had no use for Mark Jackson but was able to coach him in system. Jackson with only Pipen but a Bulls team that he coached up to the Knicks to game 7 Semi-Eastern Conference and depending on who you ask actually won the series. All I saying that D'Antoni needs a lot of help and needs conditions to be perfect to have success. He isn't on that level until he learns how to adjust to his players.

He got rid of Jackson after one year. Now why do you think that happened??

That Jackson/Pippen team was a battle tested group with the same core (minus Jordan) +Kukoc, 25, a major Euro Star. You have to be kidding me if you discount this fact. They all knew his system, almost nobody had to learn a new system except Kukoc, who was no 20 year old rookie. He did not have to start over from scratch with that group.

We don't have the players on this team to win on a regular basis at this point. You are smart enough to know this. Maybe a healthy and slim Curry and an uninjured Gallinari would have made a difference, but the guys we are putting out now are going to have to pay for tickets to the games if they want to be at championship game.

Nobody is saying that MDA is a better coach than Riley or Jackson, but if you can't see the difference in the guys we have now and the players Riley and Jackson have won with, you might want to take a closer look and get back to me.

Who is asking the Knicks to win the way Riley and Jackson's teams did?!?

I don't know how many times I have to say this but it's not about wins and losses this year.

The trades we made were 1st to clear cap space and 2nd to fill needs as a stop gap. How can u hold it against MDA that the additions weren't enough to really push us to playoff contention. We added guys that weren't really figuring into the rotation of the team they left. If it worked great but the odds were never high, no matter who the coach is.

The better coaches in the league will do more with good talent than the lesser coaches, but u still need real talent.

There is ultimately no coach that we could bring in here that would be beyond reproach. That's the point I get here.

VanGundy - we can't win the title, get him out
Lenny - he falls asleep, get him out
Larry - too much defense, its a conspiracy, get him out
MikeD - too much offense, get him out

The coach IS NOT OUR PROBLEM. We run out a tiny mis-matched team every night. What do you want, honestly.

Give Mike all the time he needs to assemble talent into a real team because if you kick him out, you're the Clippers. You kick him out, you have zero, zero credibility as a franchise. This guy is revered by other coaches, and all of the recent olympians so go ahead Knicks fans, kick him out. That'll really change things up around here.

Posted by islesfan:

Let's pretend that you didn't know Isiah was replaced with Walsh and D'Antoni. Watching how the team is playing to finish this season, would you have any reason to believe that anything had changed and Isiah wasn't still running things?

The cap-clearing moves alone are enough to mark a very notable difference in how the team is being run. If Isiah the GM had made the in-season moves that Walsh did, we would all be flabbergasted.

However you are correct in pointing out that there is little or no tangible difference in the results this year. The team has had better stretches of play, more consistently this season, but the end result is not many more wins, and a ton of collapses and horrible play. So your checklist is mostly right, but I would not say that the team is the same type of team. There is a better feeling about the team, and a sense that it is going somewhere. Likely totally psychological at this point, but it has some effect nonetheless. Last year the team was a bunch of talent rotting away, disconnected and rudderless, with everyone quick to cover their own ass. The players are more invested in the team concept this year, though they haven't learned to be effective as a team yet.

But given the circumstances of major alterations to the roster, and the leftovers we were unable to trade, and the huge nightmare that was having Marbury on the team, did you really expect or want Danto to be doing much better than he is? This year was always going to be terrible on the court. Let's see how it pans out in two years or so. I agree that Walsh can have a Great, Good, or Really Bad offseason after this year.

Posted by Pharzeone:

Posted by nixluva:

The trades we made were 1st to clear cap space and 2nd to fill needs as a stop gap. How can u hold it against MDA that the additions weren't enough to really push us to playoff contention. We added guys that weren't really figuring into the rotation of the team they left. If it worked great but the odds were never high, no matter who the coach is.

The better coaches in the league will do more with good talent than the lesser coaches, but u still need real talent.

Wait so when you said at the beginning of the season that you thought there was very good talent on the team and this was a playoff team under D'Antoni, you strictly meant only if Zach and Crawford were on the team?

How can you expect me to know how the team would turn out after trades when we don't even know who we'd get back and how long it would take to try and get them adjusted? We might have seen this team reach the playoffs with no major changes, but then that would be stupid since we were able to play well enough early to allow trades to be made then instead of having to wait for the deadline or offseason.

MDA did a good job early, in fact better than they expected and that gave Walsh the edge he needed to move the contracts we did and clear future cap space. You can't hold that against him later when the team doesn't workout and make it to the playoffs. He does a better job than expected early, which benefits the teams ability to move albatross contracts and now guys want to blast him for not being able to get the team to the playoffs?

It's your right to do that, but I give him credit for doing enough with what he had to allow us to move really tough contracts and give us a hope for the future. Once we moved ZBo and JC the shift was about 2010. No matter what they said or what we hoped for this year, the real deal is the cap space in 2010. In that regard MDA did his job very well early on.

Now give the guy a real Center, PG and SG and I think we'll have something.

Posted by Marv:

i really gotta say, the amount of whiny anal crybaby need-to-grow-a-pair postings on this board is astounding. that's right, i'm name-calling. if you’re reading this and it applies to you, then wear it proudly.

how's this for a sign of "progress" - the great majority of games this year featured a competitive, inspired, often exciting effort from our players, a far cry form recent years. if you can’t see the progress in that, then go help yourself to more whining, crying and thumb-sucking. cheers.

I demand that Marv be banned for ridiculing these people who are not like me, are not associated with me and who I have nothing in common with, but whom I will stand up for and defend against big tyrannical bullies like Marv.

I think the dysfunction is gone and the cap situation has improved. I am not a big D'Antoni fan and I don't think teams can win anything significant with his style. I do think D' may help in luring free agents because players do like playing for him.