http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/basketball/knicks/story/274042p-234690c.html

You don't have to like what Isiah Thomas has done with the Knicks in the last 13 months, because there's no law that says you do. You don't have to like the money he has spent or the young players he has brought to the Garden, including Stephon Marbury.
You are allowed to think there has been too much change since Isiah got to town, even if that means you have developed complete amnesia about the basketball team he inherited from Don Chaney, and the Garden he inherited from Scott Layden.

But Isiah is right to want a new coach, and want one right now. If he wants to go for another Social Security-eligible coach next time, it better be Larry Brown.

The other day Lenny Wilkens, still sounding pretty stubborn about hanging onto his job, said, "I know what I can do." That's not quite right. Wilkens knows what he used to do.

Chuck Daly didn't win as many games as Wilkens in the NBA, but he won two championships with Isiah's Pistons, and then he coached the Nets after that and did a good job, and finally took one last job with the Orlando Magic. He was 41-41 his first season in Orlando. By the next season, a lockout-shortened season in 1999, Daly was 69. The Magic was 33-17 before losing in the first round of the playoffs. And even then it looked as if Chuck Daly still had the ability to coach the modern NBA player - and outcoach the guy at the other end of the gym - as well as anybody.

Until the day after that season when he walked in and told his bosses there that he couldn't do it anymore.

"It was that short season," he was saying Thursday afternoon from Florida. "So we were playing three and four games a week, and all of a sudden all the games, after all the years, had turned into a grind. I'd take a shower and get ready for the game about 5 every afternoon, and then I'd look into the mirror and say the same thing: 'Just let me get through tonight.'

"Then the game would start. And I would be fine when the game started. I'd feel as excited about coaching as I ever did. Then it would be over and the air would come out of me and it would be 5 the next afternoon somewhere and I'd be looking in that mirror again and telling myself I just wanted to get through the next night's game."

Daly laughed and said, "I finally got tired of having that conversation with myself."

Then Daly said that even now, he watches games on television and thinks he can do a better job of coaching than some of the younger guys he is watching.

Lenny Wilkens, who turns 68 this year, will probably feel the same way, as he tells himself none of this was his fault at the Garden, it was all Isiah's fault, even if he walks away with a pile of money for one season's worth of work. Wilkens will tell himself that he is the same coach he was last year, and with the Hawks, and all the way back to when he won his NBA championship more than 25 years ago with the Sonics.

Only he is not.

If you have watched the Knicks this season and don't think so, then you are only seeing the season you want to see. You certainly weren't at the Garden last Monday and watching the fourth quarter, and watching how the game would have gone if Scott Skiles had been coaching the Knicks instead of the Bulls.

Is it always the coach's fault when a team loses a close game? Of course not. But doesn't Wilkens get some of the blame for a season that could look so much different right now if the Knicks had just won a few more fourth quarters than they have?

Is all of this Lenny Wilkens' fault? Of course not. But it is time for him to go the way it was time for Hubie Brown to go in Memphis. Health reasons were cited with Brown, coming off a Coach of the Year season. Here is a better reason: Brown was not the same coach this season. It was as if he had one more run in him, and Jerry West knew he had already seen it in Memphis, and wanted somebody else. The way Isiah wants somebody, Herb Williams in this case.

You have to root for Williams, one of the best guys in the league, to get the Knicks turned around somehow. If he can't, you find out after the season if there is any way to get Brown out of Detroit. Brown isn't much younger than Wilkens. But he was also a better basketball coach winning the championship than he has ever been, which is saying something plenty. There is nobody better than Brown, who has thought about coaching the Knicks for only about 50years.

If you can't get Brown, you go after Phil Jackson.

Everything Thomas has done since he got to the Garden will be covered as a complete failure now, because that is the way things go around here. Only I don't think it is a failure, even if the Knicks keep going in reverse, take a big step back. I think Marbury can play and Jamal Crawford and Trevor Ariza and Nazr Mohammed and Michael Sweetney, and think there are more like them coming.

A young team tries to save its season under a new coach now. The old coach heads for the door. Maybe nobody can save this season. It was still time for Lenny Wilkens to go.

[Edited by - rvhoss on 01/23/2005 08:45:27]

I would agree with most of it except one thing, Lenny was a bad hire to begin with. Isiah was negotiating with fratellos agent, and when it fell apart, the agent suggested lenny. Shotgun time, Isiah was desporate to make a politically good move. Threw a boat load of money at it, typical Knick move, and boom, it blows up down the road.

This team should be doing not much over .500 except building chemistry and ingraining a system to build an identity! Instead, we have a group of coaches not hand picked by the coach and a GM who really sets the tone of the organization. What was the goal of the team, win? or develope? If you can't win, then develope? With Divas like Marbs and Anfernee, thats tough. With a dysfunctional SF who can't keep it together (TT), and a disgruntled Shandon whose only crime was signing a big contract (with houstan) and getting traded for, and the team trying to make him into more than he is, and then dissed by Isiah in front of his family, was bought out too late to even keep Andre Barrett!

Isiah needs to tighten up his reigns and follow a blueprint. Seems like the same old, same old around here. We praise activity as some great effort, but its results that count, and there is nothing that definitive that says we are making signficant progress!

Hopfully Isiah makes a run for phil jax, but lets be real, if we don't change our ways, can we only imagine a bad ending to that if he is not given a roster to work with? All good intentions, but its the execution, not just words!

This team will be in "transition" until Allan Houston's contract is gone. Allan Houston is done.

I agree 95% with Lupica's take.

And, while Wilkens wasn't the BEST pick last year, I still feel he was better than Fratello if only because Fratello and Marbury would have clashed and Wilkens and Marbury got along. I think Larry Brown would be a solid coach for this team, though I wish we could get a guy like Carlyle (the Indy coach sp?) or O'Brien.