As far as blaming Fisher for wanting to run more, we do it less than anyone else so thats a bit overbown. More importantly we scored in the paint and went to the rim less than anyone.

In the preseason the bench coming in and running teams off the court was what made people believe that this team was going places. Unfortunately Grant lost his mojo and the team stopped pushing the tempo as much. Wouldnt be a bad thing to push the tempo again if Grant gets his confidence back and starts producing.

GustavBahler wrote:I have no doubt that Rambis will do a better job, he is a much more experienced coach. Is he good enough for the job full time? Would he be a good coach in the playoffs? That remains to be seen.

As far as blaming Fisher for wanting to run more, we do it less than anyone else so thats a bit overbown. More importantly we scored in the paint and went to the rim less than anyone.

In the preseason the bench coming in and running teams off the court was what made people believe that this team was going places. Unfortunately Grant lost his mojo and the team stopped pushing the tempo as much. Wouldnt be a bad thing to push the tempo again if Grant gets his confidence back and starts producing.

agreed on the second unit - Grant, Galloway plus Williams on the wing had everyone thinking they'd be able to push the rock when they came in. Grant flying completely off the rails put that plan on hold, but i'm not opposed to it if we had a PG that could actually do it.

making Jose push the ball is silly.

If Phil left tomorrow to go back to LA and we could bring in Thibs, I would not shed a tear.

Something must have been very off behind the scenes with Fisher. I keep coming back to the fact that we played Memphis (Barnes) twice in the past few weeks. I wonder if something happened around those games that made the Fisher situation untenable.

WaltLongmire wrote:This is one Rosen wrote that is more opinion, and much more confusing, than the one you posted.

Rosen is Phil's friend, but this rather rambling article seems to have some criticism of Jackson.

Hard to figure out where he is coming from at times, but he seems critical of almost everyone at one point or another.

Can't call this a "Phil friendly" article.

Strange stuff...IMO.

todaysfastbreak.com
Rosen - How Kurt Rambis Will Change Knicks - Today's Fastbreak

It’s funny to see how quickly the sports world moves. After falling short in the Super Bowl then getting decimated for cutting his postgame press conference short, Cam Newton was let off the hot seat first thing Monday morning when the New York Knicks decided to part ways with head coach Derek Fisher.

Being the Knicks, anything that happens with them quickly turns into national news. And considering they gave Fisher a five-year contract (for A LOT of money) in the summer of 2014, it’s nothing short of a blunder to be firing him just 136 games into his tenure.

At the same time, Fisher posted a 40-96 record as the Knicks coach, with this season’s team sitting at 23-31, having lost nine of their last 10 games. Of all NBA coaches with at least 100 games under their belt, Fisher’s .294 winning percentage ranks him 17th-worst of all time.

There’s plenty to be said for a team posting that low of a winning percentage over a season and a half of basketball, but to pretend that record is solely because of Fisher isn’t really fair. It also isn’t exactly fair to hire a rookie coach with the hope that he can develop as a leader while teaching a brand new system to brand new players, give him a relatively bad roster and then get upset when the team isn’t winning games. For all intents and purposes, the 2014-15 season was a tank job, and to have expected some drastic turnaround this season when your starting backcourt is Jose Calderon and Arron Afflalo was insane.

Don’t get me wrong, Fisher made plenty of disparaging remarks as the coach of this team, his leadership was questioned plenty and his use of rotations didn’t exactly make him look like a great head coach. However, sometimes you need to let guys figure things out, and with this being Fisher’s first season with an NBA-level roster, we didn’t have a huge sample size to really judge his development.

Phil Jackson, or James Dolan, or Steve Mills, or whoever makes the big decisions at Madison Square Garden, disagrees with that sentiment, and I can’t totally fault them for it.

This is where I continue to beat a dead horse and talk about realistic expectations. The Knicks came into this season with the line being drawn for them as a 31.5-win team. They’re currently on pace to go over that line, so it’s fair to say they’re living up to what was expected of them, if not overachieving.

I understand that when you see a team win 7-of-10 games, beating Eastern Conference playoff teams like Atlanta, Chicago, Boston and Detroit and starting to come together, you begin to expect them to achieve more than you thought they were capable of. But since Jackson took over as team president back in the spring of 2014, he was all about process over results, and all things considered being that they’re one year removed from tanking, this was supposed to be another developmental season.

At least according to Fisher:

Is this what doomed Fisher’s tenure? That he came out and said things like he isn’t focused on the team making the playoffs? Or was it the fact that he tried to incorporate more pick-and-roll into the offense and began straying away from solely running the Triangle? It seemed when Calderon and Anthony were healthy earlier in January the Triangle was beginning to look a lot better, but with those two hurt and more minutes for the likes of Jerian Grant, Langston Galloway and Derrick Williams, maybe it made sense to deviate from the system and run more plays that are catered to your capabilities.

I digress. At least when it comes to discussing the Triangle and how it fits with THIS roster.

However, I’ll come back around to realistic expectations, specifically how they can be applied moving forward.

And I’m stumped.

What do the Knicks do from here? Who do they bring in who can A) help them win games now B) coach the Triangle and C) help make them a viable destination for free agents moving forward. It doesn’t seem like there’s a single viable option when it comes to having all three of those qualities, which are likely the main things that Jackson and Dolan are looking for moving forward.

Let’s start with the first quality the Knicks are clearly looking for in a head coach, and that’s someone who can win now. This means in spite of the Knicks’ roster, who are some coaches who’ve proven they can lead a team to meaningful wins? The first names mentioned will undoubtedly be Jeff Van Gundy and Tom Thibodeau, neither of whom have any connections to the Triangle, which makes me think they’re as good as ruled out. I doubt Jackson was given a $60 million contract to sign a coach who will want to implement their own philosophies, which is sad considering how much success both Van Gundy and Thibs have had as head coaches, as well as how much Thibodeau has expressed interest in the Knicks job.

When you look at quality B, experience coaching the Triangle, you immediately negate quality A. Here’s a list of available coaches who’ve tried to implement the Triangle over the last decade: Brian Shaw, and Knicks assistants Jim Cleamons and Kurt Rambis. Shaw was an absolute disaster in his lone job as coach of the Denver Nuggets, mainly because he failed to connect with his young roster. One of Fisher’s biggest knocks was that players just didn’t respond to him, so I can’t imagine Shaw coming in to save the day would yield positive results.

Rambis has already been named interim head coach, but considering he has a lower winning percentage than Fisher in his 145-game sample, I don’t think he’s the guy you fire your coach for and hand the keys over to. Keep in mind Rambis had the luxury of coaching a Los Angeles Lakers team with Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant back in the lockout-shortened 1998-99 season, only making his record (which again, was deplorable) look better:

Other names that are sure to surface because they once played for the team are Mark Jackson and Patrick Ewing, but considering neither know the first thing about the Triangle and Jackson doesn’t seem like Phil’s cup of tea, at all, I think we can dismiss them both pretty quickly.

The other name that you’re going to see brought up a bunch is Luke Walton, who after leading the Golden State Warriors to a 39-4 record while Steve Kerr was recovering from back surgery, will be one of the hottest head coaching candidates next offseason. Walton played for Jackson’s Lakers for seven seasons, and beyond his relationship with Phil, as the son of Hall of Famer Bill Walton, undoubtedly has some background knowledge on Eastern philosophy, which Jackson incorporates into his teachings.

Walton has plenty of experience at the very least practicing the Triangle, and with Kerr and Jackson as two of his biggest teachers, there’s plenty of reason to think he could turn out to be a great head coach one day. Personally, I can’t really buy into him being the reason the Warriors, who had one of the five best seasons in NBA history last season, getting off to such a hot start, and I think it’s insane to use that as the reason the Knicks should throw everything at him. There’s a difference between coaching the defending NBA champions with the reigning MVP and coaching a team that won 17 games last season, and you’re expecting too much if you ask Walton to be the guy to turn things around in the Big Apple.

So here’s where I go back to realistic expectations. As OK as I am with the idea of cutting ties with someone you don’t think is the long-term answer, it’s hard to fully support firing a coach in the middle of a rebuilding season, when you weren’t expected/ing to make the playoffs and when you had plenty of options to choose from when you signed him to a five-year deal to begin with. Of course it’s better for the Knicks to abort mission with Fisher at this stage than hang on for too long, but I don’t think they have a better option than him unless they look outside the Triangle, and it feels like a panic move coming after a horrible stretch of basketball.

To blame the Knicks’ shortcomings on Fisher seems misguided, but that isn’t to say he deserved to stick around. For a team that doesn’t look like a playoff team, doesn’t have its own first-round pick in the upcoming draft and has at least six new rotation players from last season to this season, it just looks like the Knicks have no idea what they’re doing moving forward.

Is this Phil admitting it’s time to abandon the Triangle and bring in a coach who can get the most out of the roster right now/moving forward? I highly doubt it, but I doubt fans would be too upset with that idea:

I don’t see a coach out there who improves this team enough immediately to get them into the playoffs, so I suppose you start looking for a moral victory hire, someone who can attract players to the team. This is a pretty crazy idea, as you don’t typically see players sign with teams to be paired with a coach, but I can think of one guy the Knicks brought into the fold recently because he supposedly had that power.

When Jackson became team president, it was reportedly because he was a big name who’d be able to attract big talent. Outside of re-signing Anthony, we’ve yet to see Jackson’s presence persuade any big free agents. With players like Kevin Durant, Russell Westbrook and even guys like Al Horford and Mike Conley hitting free agency over the next year or two, maybe having Jackson as the coach would help the team with this unrealistic quick turnaround that they were apparently expecting.

Or, Jackson sticks to his guns, continues to have no interest in coaching, and sets up another one of his cronies to experience the same failure that Fisher did.

Either way, writing out scenarios seems like a fruitless exercise, especially when the vast majority of them seemingly end with the same results. A team that’s stuck in the mud because they don’t currently have enough talent, don’t have a draft pick to continue to rebuild with, yet somehow think they have a roster that should be competing isn’t going to go anywhere as long as Jackson follows results over process.

To this point I’ve had no problem preaching patience to Knicks fans, but when the organization begins to go back on that, without any direction to clearly steer in, it’s worrisome. What they do from here seems like a huge mystery, without any encouraging hints.

dacash wrote:

THIS ARTICLE WAS NOT WRITTEN BY ROSEN BUT BY SOME GUY CALLED JARED MINTZ
I THINK U GOT MIXED UP SOME HOW
[url]http://www.todaysfastbreak.com/nba-east/new-york-knicks/column-knicks-turn-firing-derek-fisher/[url]

Wow...Thanks for picking that up- and you can tell that I was confused, but how did I end up with the heading I got when copying it? Was tired at the time, but I was going to start an F'n thread based on what I thought was a Rosen article (I'm not drunk or high, by the way).

WaltLongmire wrote:This is one Rosen wrote that is more opinion, and much more confusing, than the one you posted.

Rosen is Phil's friend, but this rather rambling article seems to have some criticism of Jackson.

Hard to figure out where he is coming from at times, but he seems critical of almost everyone at one point or another.

Can't call this a "Phil friendly" article.

Strange stuff...IMO.

todaysfastbreak.com
Rosen - How Kurt Rambis Will Change Knicks - Today's Fastbreak

It’s funny to see how quickly the sports world moves. After falling short in the Super Bowl then getting decimated for cutting his postgame press conference short, Cam Newton was let off the hot seat first thing Monday morning when the New York Knicks decided to part ways with head coach Derek Fisher.

Being the Knicks, anything that happens with them quickly turns into national news. And considering they gave Fisher a five-year contract (for A LOT of money) in the summer of 2014, it’s nothing short of a blunder to be firing him just 136 games into his tenure.

At the same time, Fisher posted a 40-96 record as the Knicks coach, with this season’s team sitting at 23-31, having lost nine of their last 10 games. Of all NBA coaches with at least 100 games under their belt, Fisher’s .294 winning percentage ranks him 17th-worst of all time.

There’s plenty to be said for a team posting that low of a winning percentage over a season and a half of basketball, but to pretend that record is solely because of Fisher isn’t really fair. It also isn’t exactly fair to hire a rookie coach with the hope that he can develop as a leader while teaching a brand new system to brand new players, give him a relatively bad roster and then get upset when the team isn’t winning games. For all intents and purposes, the 2014-15 season was a tank job, and to have expected some drastic turnaround this season when your starting backcourt is Jose Calderon and Arron Afflalo was insane.

Don’t get me wrong, Fisher made plenty of disparaging remarks as the coach of this team, his leadership was questioned plenty and his use of rotations didn’t exactly make him look like a great head coach. However, sometimes you need to let guys figure things out, and with this being Fisher’s first season with an NBA-level roster, we didn’t have a huge sample size to really judge his development.

Phil Jackson, or James Dolan, or Steve Mills, or whoever makes the big decisions at Madison Square Garden, disagrees with that sentiment, and I can’t totally fault them for it.

This is where I continue to beat a dead horse and talk about realistic expectations. The Knicks came into this season with the line being drawn for them as a 31.5-win team. They’re currently on pace to go over that line, so it’s fair to say they’re living up to what was expected of them, if not overachieving.

I understand that when you see a team win 7-of-10 games, beating Eastern Conference playoff teams like Atlanta, Chicago, Boston and Detroit and starting to come together, you begin to expect them to achieve more than you thought they were capable of. But since Jackson took over as team president back in the spring of 2014, he was all about process over results, and all things considered being that they’re one year removed from tanking, this was supposed to be another developmental season.

At least according to Fisher:

Is this what doomed Fisher’s tenure? That he came out and said things like he isn’t focused on the team making the playoffs? Or was it the fact that he tried to incorporate more pick-and-roll into the offense and began straying away from solely running the Triangle? It seemed when Calderon and Anthony were healthy earlier in January the Triangle was beginning to look a lot better, but with those two hurt and more minutes for the likes of Jerian Grant, Langston Galloway and Derrick Williams, maybe it made sense to deviate from the system and run more plays that are catered to your capabilities.

I digress. At least when it comes to discussing the Triangle and how it fits with THIS roster.

However, I’ll come back around to realistic expectations, specifically how they can be applied moving forward.

And I’m stumped.

What do the Knicks do from here? Who do they bring in who can A) help them win games now B) coach the Triangle and C) help make them a viable destination for free agents moving forward. It doesn’t seem like there’s a single viable option when it comes to having all three of those qualities, which are likely the main things that Jackson and Dolan are looking for moving forward.

Let’s start with the first quality the Knicks are clearly looking for in a head coach, and that’s someone who can win now. This means in spite of the Knicks’ roster, who are some coaches who’ve proven they can lead a team to meaningful wins? The first names mentioned will undoubtedly be Jeff Van Gundy and Tom Thibodeau, neither of whom have any connections to the Triangle, which makes me think they’re as good as ruled out. I doubt Jackson was given a $60 million contract to sign a coach who will want to implement their own philosophies, which is sad considering how much success both Van Gundy and Thibs have had as head coaches, as well as how much Thibodeau has expressed interest in the Knicks job.

When you look at quality B, experience coaching the Triangle, you immediately negate quality A. Here’s a list of available coaches who’ve tried to implement the Triangle over the last decade: Brian Shaw, and Knicks assistants Jim Cleamons and Kurt Rambis. Shaw was an absolute disaster in his lone job as coach of the Denver Nuggets, mainly because he failed to connect with his young roster. One of Fisher’s biggest knocks was that players just didn’t respond to him, so I can’t imagine Shaw coming in to save the day would yield positive results.

Rambis has already been named interim head coach, but considering he has a lower winning percentage than Fisher in his 145-game sample, I don’t think he’s the guy you fire your coach for and hand the keys over to. Keep in mind Rambis had the luxury of coaching a Los Angeles Lakers team with Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant back in the lockout-shortened 1998-99 season, only making his record (which again, was deplorable) look better:

Other names that are sure to surface because they once played for the team are Mark Jackson and Patrick Ewing, but considering neither know the first thing about the Triangle and Jackson doesn’t seem like Phil’s cup of tea, at all, I think we can dismiss them both pretty quickly.

The other name that you’re going to see brought up a bunch is Luke Walton, who after leading the Golden State Warriors to a 39-4 record while Steve Kerr was recovering from back surgery, will be one of the hottest head coaching candidates next offseason. Walton played for Jackson’s Lakers for seven seasons, and beyond his relationship with Phil, as the son of Hall of Famer Bill Walton, undoubtedly has some background knowledge on Eastern philosophy, which Jackson incorporates into his teachings.

Walton has plenty of experience at the very least practicing the Triangle, and with Kerr and Jackson as two of his biggest teachers, there’s plenty of reason to think he could turn out to be a great head coach one day. Personally, I can’t really buy into him being the reason the Warriors, who had one of the five best seasons in NBA history last season, getting off to such a hot start, and I think it’s insane to use that as the reason the Knicks should throw everything at him. There’s a difference between coaching the defending NBA champions with the reigning MVP and coaching a team that won 17 games last season, and you’re expecting too much if you ask Walton to be the guy to turn things around in the Big Apple.

So here’s where I go back to realistic expectations. As OK as I am with the idea of cutting ties with someone you don’t think is the long-term answer, it’s hard to fully support firing a coach in the middle of a rebuilding season, when you weren’t expected/ing to make the playoffs and when you had plenty of options to choose from when you signed him to a five-year deal to begin with. Of course it’s better for the Knicks to abort mission with Fisher at this stage than hang on for too long, but I don’t think they have a better option than him unless they look outside the Triangle, and it feels like a panic move coming after a horrible stretch of basketball.

To blame the Knicks’ shortcomings on Fisher seems misguided, but that isn’t to say he deserved to stick around. For a team that doesn’t look like a playoff team, doesn’t have its own first-round pick in the upcoming draft and has at least six new rotation players from last season to this season, it just looks like the Knicks have no idea what they’re doing moving forward.

Is this Phil admitting it’s time to abandon the Triangle and bring in a coach who can get the most out of the roster right now/moving forward? I highly doubt it, but I doubt fans would be too upset with that idea:

I don’t see a coach out there who improves this team enough immediately to get them into the playoffs, so I suppose you start looking for a moral victory hire, someone who can attract players to the team. This is a pretty crazy idea, as you don’t typically see players sign with teams to be paired with a coach, but I can think of one guy the Knicks brought into the fold recently because he supposedly had that power.

When Jackson became team president, it was reportedly because he was a big name who’d be able to attract big talent. Outside of re-signing Anthony, we’ve yet to see Jackson’s presence persuade any big free agents. With players like Kevin Durant, Russell Westbrook and even guys like Al Horford and Mike Conley hitting free agency over the next year or two, maybe having Jackson as the coach would help the team with this unrealistic quick turnaround that they were apparently expecting.

Or, Jackson sticks to his guns, continues to have no interest in coaching, and sets up another one of his cronies to experience the same failure that Fisher did.

Either way, writing out scenarios seems like a fruitless exercise, especially when the vast majority of them seemingly end with the same results. A team that’s stuck in the mud because they don’t currently have enough talent, don’t have a draft pick to continue to rebuild with, yet somehow think they have a roster that should be competing isn’t going to go anywhere as long as Jackson follows results over process.

To this point I’ve had no problem preaching patience to Knicks fans, but when the organization begins to go back on that, without any direction to clearly steer in, it’s worrisome. What they do from here seems like a huge mystery, without any encouraging hints.

WaltLongmire wrote:

dacash wrote:

THIS ARTICLE WAS NOT WRITTEN BY ROSEN BUT BY SOME GUY CALLED JARED MINTZ
I THINK U GOT MIXED UP SOME HOW
[url]http://www.todaysfastbreak.com/nba-east/new-york-knicks/column-knicks-turn-firing-derek-fisher/[url]

Wow...Thanks for picking that up- and you can tell that I was confused, but how did I end up with the heading I got when copying it? Was tired at the time, but I was going to start an F'n thread based on what I thought was a Rosen article (I'm not drunk or high, by the way).

WaltLongmire wrote:This is one Rosen wrote that is more opinion, and much more confusing, than the one you posted.

Rosen is Phil's friend, but this rather rambling article seems to have some criticism of Jackson.

Hard to figure out where he is coming from at times, but he seems critical of almost everyone at one point or another.

Can't call this a "Phil friendly" article.

Strange stuff...IMO.

todaysfastbreak.com
Rosen - How Kurt Rambis Will Change Knicks - Today's Fastbreak

It’s funny to see how quickly the sports world moves. After falling short in the Super Bowl then getting decimated for cutting his postgame press conference short, Cam Newton was let off the hot seat first thing Monday morning when the New York Knicks decided to part ways with head coach Derek Fisher.

Being the Knicks, anything that happens with them quickly turns into national news. And considering they gave Fisher a five-year contract (for A LOT of money) in the summer of 2014, it’s nothing short of a blunder to be firing him just 136 games into his tenure.

At the same time, Fisher posted a 40-96 record as the Knicks coach, with this season’s team sitting at 23-31, having lost nine of their last 10 games. Of all NBA coaches with at least 100 games under their belt, Fisher’s .294 winning percentage ranks him 17th-worst of all time.

There’s plenty to be said for a team posting that low of a winning percentage over a season and a half of basketball, but to pretend that record is solely because of Fisher isn’t really fair. It also isn’t exactly fair to hire a rookie coach with the hope that he can develop as a leader while teaching a brand new system to brand new players, give him a relatively bad roster and then get upset when the team isn’t winning games. For all intents and purposes, the 2014-15 season was a tank job, and to have expected some drastic turnaround this season when your starting backcourt is Jose Calderon and Arron Afflalo was insane.

Don’t get me wrong, Fisher made plenty of disparaging remarks as the coach of this team, his leadership was questioned plenty and his use of rotations didn’t exactly make him look like a great head coach. However, sometimes you need to let guys figure things out, and with this being Fisher’s first season with an NBA-level roster, we didn’t have a huge sample size to really judge his development.

Phil Jackson, or James Dolan, or Steve Mills, or whoever makes the big decisions at Madison Square Garden, disagrees with that sentiment, and I can’t totally fault them for it.

This is where I continue to beat a dead horse and talk about realistic expectations. The Knicks came into this season with the line being drawn for them as a 31.5-win team. They’re currently on pace to go over that line, so it’s fair to say they’re living up to what was expected of them, if not overachieving.

I understand that when you see a team win 7-of-10 games, beating Eastern Conference playoff teams like Atlanta, Chicago, Boston and Detroit and starting to come together, you begin to expect them to achieve more than you thought they were capable of. But since Jackson took over as team president back in the spring of 2014, he was all about process over results, and all things considered being that they’re one year removed from tanking, this was supposed to be another developmental season.

At least according to Fisher:

Is this what doomed Fisher’s tenure? That he came out and said things like he isn’t focused on the team making the playoffs? Or was it the fact that he tried to incorporate more pick-and-roll into the offense and began straying away from solely running the Triangle? It seemed when Calderon and Anthony were healthy earlier in January the Triangle was beginning to look a lot better, but with those two hurt and more minutes for the likes of Jerian Grant, Langston Galloway and Derrick Williams, maybe it made sense to deviate from the system and run more plays that are catered to your capabilities.

I digress. At least when it comes to discussing the Triangle and how it fits with THIS roster.

However, I’ll come back around to realistic expectations, specifically how they can be applied moving forward.

And I’m stumped.

What do the Knicks do from here? Who do they bring in who can A) help them win games now B) coach the Triangle and C) help make them a viable destination for free agents moving forward. It doesn’t seem like there’s a single viable option when it comes to having all three of those qualities, which are likely the main things that Jackson and Dolan are looking for moving forward.

Let’s start with the first quality the Knicks are clearly looking for in a head coach, and that’s someone who can win now. This means in spite of the Knicks’ roster, who are some coaches who’ve proven they can lead a team to meaningful wins? The first names mentioned will undoubtedly be Jeff Van Gundy and Tom Thibodeau, neither of whom have any connections to the Triangle, which makes me think they’re as good as ruled out. I doubt Jackson was given a $60 million contract to sign a coach who will want to implement their own philosophies, which is sad considering how much success both Van Gundy and Thibs have had as head coaches, as well as how much Thibodeau has expressed interest in the Knicks job.

When you look at quality B, experience coaching the Triangle, you immediately negate quality A. Here’s a list of available coaches who’ve tried to implement the Triangle over the last decade: Brian Shaw, and Knicks assistants Jim Cleamons and Kurt Rambis. Shaw was an absolute disaster in his lone job as coach of the Denver Nuggets, mainly because he failed to connect with his young roster. One of Fisher’s biggest knocks was that players just didn’t respond to him, so I can’t imagine Shaw coming in to save the day would yield positive results.

Rambis has already been named interim head coach, but considering he has a lower winning percentage than Fisher in his 145-game sample, I don’t think he’s the guy you fire your coach for and hand the keys over to. Keep in mind Rambis had the luxury of coaching a Los Angeles Lakers team with Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant back in the lockout-shortened 1998-99 season, only making his record (which again, was deplorable) look better:

Other names that are sure to surface because they once played for the team are Mark Jackson and Patrick Ewing, but considering neither know the first thing about the Triangle and Jackson doesn’t seem like Phil’s cup of tea, at all, I think we can dismiss them both pretty quickly.

The other name that you’re going to see brought up a bunch is Luke Walton, who after leading the Golden State Warriors to a 39-4 record while Steve Kerr was recovering from back surgery, will be one of the hottest head coaching candidates next offseason. Walton played for Jackson’s Lakers for seven seasons, and beyond his relationship with Phil, as the son of Hall of Famer Bill Walton, undoubtedly has some background knowledge on Eastern philosophy, which Jackson incorporates into his teachings.

Walton has plenty of experience at the very least practicing the Triangle, and with Kerr and Jackson as two of his biggest teachers, there’s plenty of reason to think he could turn out to be a great head coach one day. Personally, I can’t really buy into him being the reason the Warriors, who had one of the five best seasons in NBA history last season, getting off to such a hot start, and I think it’s insane to use that as the reason the Knicks should throw everything at him. There’s a difference between coaching the defending NBA champions with the reigning MVP and coaching a team that won 17 games last season, and you’re expecting too much if you ask Walton to be the guy to turn things around in the Big Apple.

So here’s where I go back to realistic expectations. As OK as I am with the idea of cutting ties with someone you don’t think is the long-term answer, it’s hard to fully support firing a coach in the middle of a rebuilding season, when you weren’t expected/ing to make the playoffs and when you had plenty of options to choose from when you signed him to a five-year deal to begin with. Of course it’s better for the Knicks to abort mission with Fisher at this stage than hang on for too long, but I don’t think they have a better option than him unless they look outside the Triangle, and it feels like a panic move coming after a horrible stretch of basketball.

To blame the Knicks’ shortcomings on Fisher seems misguided, but that isn’t to say he deserved to stick around. For a team that doesn’t look like a playoff team, doesn’t have its own first-round pick in the upcoming draft and has at least six new rotation players from last season to this season, it just looks like the Knicks have no idea what they’re doing moving forward.

Is this Phil admitting it’s time to abandon the Triangle and bring in a coach who can get the most out of the roster right now/moving forward? I highly doubt it, but I doubt fans would be too upset with that idea:

I don’t see a coach out there who improves this team enough immediately to get them into the playoffs, so I suppose you start looking for a moral victory hire, someone who can attract players to the team. This is a pretty crazy idea, as you don’t typically see players sign with teams to be paired with a coach, but I can think of one guy the Knicks brought into the fold recently because he supposedly had that power.

When Jackson became team president, it was reportedly because he was a big name who’d be able to attract big talent. Outside of re-signing Anthony, we’ve yet to see Jackson’s presence persuade any big free agents. With players like Kevin Durant, Russell Westbrook and even guys like Al Horford and Mike Conley hitting free agency over the next year or two, maybe having Jackson as the coach would help the team with this unrealistic quick turnaround that they were apparently expecting.

Or, Jackson sticks to his guns, continues to have no interest in coaching, and sets up another one of his cronies to experience the same failure that Fisher did.

Either way, writing out scenarios seems like a fruitless exercise, especially when the vast majority of them seemingly end with the same results. A team that’s stuck in the mud because they don’t currently have enough talent, don’t have a draft pick to continue to rebuild with, yet somehow think they have a roster that should be competing isn’t going to go anywhere as long as Jackson follows results over process.

To this point I’ve had no problem preaching patience to Knicks fans, but when the organization begins to go back on that, without any direction to clearly steer in, it’s worrisome. What they do from here seems like a huge mystery, without any encouraging hints.

Realistically big name guys are going to get max money wherever they go and more from their current team. The only reason they'll leave their current team is because they feel the new gig gives them a better chance to win more or win it all. And if they don't feel that way you don't want them.

Phils job was to create a winning culture. I'd also like to think his job is to bring great value in non-max players.

I think he's doing a great job. I think fisher was let go in part because he was not following that grander plan