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crzymdups
Posts: 52018
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Joined: 5/1/2004
Member: #671
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so that's Donnie Walsh and Jeff Van Gundy thinking we'll do well. I take more stock in their opinion than the pundits.
On Knicks’ Sideline, a Survivor Faces a Stern Test
By HOWARD BECK
Published: November 1, 2006
On the playgrounds of the west side of Chicago, where Isiah Thomas sharpened his basketball skills and his survival instincts, push inevitably came to shove. Thomas, a short kid with a pit-bull demeanor, always shoved back.
“We lived it every day,” recalled Mark Aguirre, Thomas’s childhood friend and now an assistant on the Knicks’ bench. “If you wanted a fight, then you picked one, because he’s going to fight you. He’s not going to give it up, he’s going to fight you.”
Aguirre lost track of how many times Thomas had to fight for respect, but he offered a rough estimate.
“Oh, geez,” he said, “hundreds.”
The image of Isiah Thomas as a street fighter and a survivor is well-cultivated by Thomas himself, nearly to the point of self-caricature. But it is the image that will serve him best in the coming months as his Knicks career — and perhaps his future in the N.B.A. — rests on the Knicks’ ability to rebound from last season’s 23-59 disaster.
For nearly three years, Thomas has shaped the Knicks’ roster as the team president. Four coaches, including two Hall of Famers, have failed to win with Thomas’s players. Now it is Thomas’s turn. The Knicks open the season tonight in Memphis.
In June, Thomas was ordered to coach the team, and given a vaguely worded ultimatum: He is to show “significant progress,” in the words of Madison Square Garden chairman James L. Dolan, or lose his job at the end of the season. Both of his jobs.
It seems trite to compare this career crisis to Thomas’s life-and-death struggles growing up in a poor and violent Chicago neighborhood. But the survivor mentality is deeply ingrained in his DNA, and every conversation about his predicament inevitably evokes references to his rough upbringing.
Mention pressure and Thomas will talk about the pressure to pay the rent, pay for food and avoid getting shot. Refer to the almost universal doubt that Thomas can turn the Knicks into winners, earn a playoff berth and save his job, and Thomas again turns defiant and autobiographical.
“If I would have listened to that thought, then Isiah Thomas from the west side of Chicago never would have made it,” he said. “Just wouldn’t have made it if I would have listened to the odds that were against me. If I would have paid attention to that, I never would have went to college, I never would have went to school. I would have just said, ‘Why bother showing up?’ ”
As a player, a team executive, a television commentator, a coach, a league owner, a team president and now a coach again, Thomas has turned survival into an art form. He has seamlessly segued from one basketball job to the next over the past decade. Results have been mixed, but another job always seems to be waiting for him.
As a point guard, Thomas led Indiana University to the national championship in 1981 and the Detroit Pistons to N.B.A. titles in 1989 and 1990. He has found considerably less glory after his playing career.
A part-owner and executive with the Toronto Raptors, Thomas abruptly left that franchise in 1997 after a failed bid to buy out the majority owner. After two years as a studio analyst for NBC, he bought the struggling Continental Basketball Association in 1999. A year later, the C.B.A. folded and declared bankruptcy after Thomas sold it to take a job coaching the Indiana Pacers.
In this 10-year odyssey, Thomas has famously burned relationships, notably in Toronto and in the C.B.A. But he engenders loyalty and respect from the players he coached in Indiana and the executive for whom he worked, the Pacers’ Donnie Walsh.
While columnists and ESPN analysts invariably pick the Knicks to finish near the bottom of the Eastern Conference, Walsh provides a rare bit of optimism.
“I wouldn’t bet against Isiah,” Walsh said. “I think he’s a very capable, talented man. I think he’ll do a good job at this, I do. I think it’s kind of set up for him to do that, because he got all the players there and I think they’ll rally around the situation.”
Walsh also made a prediction that Thomas will not: “I think they will make the playoffs. They’ve got a lot of talent, and they’re playing a style and they’re starting to look good in the style.”
As team president, Thomas has pushed the Knicks’ payroll to a league-high $122 million while orchestrating a series of roster moves that, in the view of rival team executives, are at best befuddling. Since taking over on Dec. 22, 2003, Thomas has acquired 33 players — nearly the equivalent of three complete rosters. He has spent tens of millions to buy out players he no longer wanted. The Knicks’ record since he arrived is 85-133, a .390 winning percentage. The team’s follies have been lampooned by The Onion and “Saturday Night Live.”
So now it is up to Coach Thomas to justify the maneuverings of President Thomas. His future arguably depends on whether he is a better coach than an executive.
As glib as he is confident, Thomas skillfully skirted the issue when asked which job he does best.
“I am really good at basketball. How’s that?” he said with a disarming laugh.
Asked about his future in the league as a coach or a general manager, Thomas said “both,” refusing to entertain the notion that his Knicks’ tenure will some day end. Coaches often say they are hired to be fired, but Thomas demurred. “If I thought that way, I wouldn’t be here now. I’m here to enjoy it.”
It is Thomas’s three-year run as Pacers coach — his only prior bench experience — that is most relevant today. Indiana was rebuilding on the fly, with a very young lineup, when Thomas took over in 2000. He guided the Pacers to 41 victories his first season, 42 in his second and 48 in his third. They made the playoffs all three years but were eliminated in the first round each time.
The Pacers had a talented group, with young forwards Jermaine O’Neal, Ron Artest and Al Harrington flanking the veteran sharp-shooter Reggie Miller. Thomas is often faulted for not leading them farther. But the Pacers lost to the eventual Eastern Conference champion in Thomas’s first two years: Philadelphia in 2001 and the Nets in 2002. The Pacers had the best record in the East midway through the 2002-3 season before injuries derailed them. They lost to Boston in the playoffs.
Thomas was fired after that season, but not necessarily because of his performance. Larry Bird had been hired as the new team president and he chose a friend, Rick Carlisle, to coach the team. Had Bird not been hired, Thomas would have kept his job, Walsh said.
“He didn’t leave it a wreck, that’s for sure,” Walsh said. “We won 61 games the next year.”
As a player, Thomas was known to be studious, inquisitive and creative in the way he saw the game.
“I don’t know if I ever met a player that was a better leader, that people could follow,” said Chuck Daly, the former Pistons coach. “To get people to follow you, that’s the thing I saw most about him.”
In that regard, Thomas has an advantage over Larry Brown. Thomas acquired every player on the roster and is personally close to several of them, most notably guard Stephon Marbury.
While Brown constantly harped on his players’ deficiencies and repeatedly lobbied to get rid of several of them, Thomas presumably believes in them.
The roster is not lacking for talent. Marbury and Steve Francis are former All-Stars. The Knicks have promising young big men in center Eddy Curry and power forward Channing Frye, accomplished scorers in Jamal Crawford and Quentin Richardson and willing role players in Jared Jeffries and David Lee.
But it is largely the same group that lost a team-record 59 games last season. The only difference is Thomas.
It is not clear what will save Thomas’s job: a .500 record, a playoff berth or merely a more competitive look. But Thomas is likely to exit the season just as he entered it, swaggering and smiling as if he has it all under perfect control.
“He’s not going to back down,” Aguirre said of the ultimatum that will define the Knicks’ season.
As for the stress of the situation, Thomas will admit none, noting as always that he has faced much worse in his youth.
And then there is one other probable explanation for Thomas’s preternatural calm amid potential crisis. The survivor in him is sure there is another way out.
“What’s the worst that can happen?” Daly said. “He ends up with a job somewhere else.”
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