IT'S WORTH THE EFFORT
When given the chance to hire superstar coach, you gotta try
YOU CAN apply logic and reason and every ounce of rationality to this, and you can come up with an easy argument for the Giants not to figure out a way to make a marriage with Bill Belichick work.
Start with this: He’s under contract for next year, so there would have to be compensation involved (and Bob Kraft probably won’t see parking vouchers and free hot dogs for the 2018 season as a suitable return). There’s also the strong likelihood the Patriots will be playing for another month. Can the Giants afford to be without a coach for that long, even if it’s waiting for that coach?
And there’s this: Whatever unhappiness Belichick may or may not have accrued the past few years in Foxborough, he is a smart, shrewd fellow. No sane person can look at what he has in New England, and what he’d be inheriting in East Rutherford, and think that’s a smart swap. And this: Kraft saying yesterday in a report that he “absolutely” believes Belichick will coach the Pats next year.
OK. So reasonably, it makes little sense to even try. But the Giants have to try. Because even in a time when the owners and front-office chiefs who run professional sports try to minimize and marginalize the importance of the men who coach and manage their teams, one of the smartest bets in sports remains this one: When you can identify the very best, and you can coax them to work for you, only good things are going to happen.
Kraft knows this as well as anyone. He ultimately allowed Bill Parcells to go work for the Jets 20 years ago, and though Parcells never did add a second Lombardi Trophy to the team archives, he engineered and orchestrated the most interesting threeyear stretch the team has enjoyed since Namath, and left behind a winning cul- ture that actually outlasted his tenure by a decade.
Knicks fans know this. Once upon a time, Pat Riley was sitting and stewing in an NBC television studio, a coach without a team before Dave Checketts zeroed in on him. Again, there were no NBA titles destined for that time (though if Riley had merely been given what he wanted after four years, there’s a 100 per- cent certainty that would’ve happened eventually), but he engineered and orchestrated the most interesting stretch that team has enjoyed since Clyde and the Captain.
And is there a Rangers fan alive who isn’t eternally grateful that Mike Keenan stopped by the Garden for a year on his ever-peripatetic coaching journey, the sport’s best coach at the time hanging around just long enough to engineer and orchestrate the hanging of a banner 54 years in the making, and the waiting?
It isn’t always that simple. It isn’t always that easy. Timing plays a huge part in it. Before George Steinbrenner had ever danced with Billy Martin, he actually hired Dick Williams for two weeks in the winter of 1973-74 — but then A’s owner Charlie Finley demanded compensation, sued the Yankees and loused the deal. The Mets had a chance to hire Joe Maddon after the 2014 season when the Rays let him talk to other teams. But they were already managed by Terry Collins, and 10 months later when Collins’ Mets made the World Series, they did so by sweeping Maddon’s Cubs. Of course, Maddon
win a title a year later, so draw your own conclusion how that turned out.
And the Knicks never could find the right time to hire Phil Jackson, immortal coach, settling instead for Phil Jackson, rookie executive. It wasn’t nearly the same thing.
The bottom line? There’s only a few people who qualify for the kind of elite status Belichick occupies. The stars have to align properly and a perfect storm usually has to break out before any of this is remotely possible. But if they do, and if it does?
The question then changes. You no longer wonder if the Giants should take a shot at this. You have to then ask: How can they not?