Doing more with less key to Knick success
HERE is the worst cop-out in all of professional basketball:
“How much difference does a coach really make in the NBA? If you have the talent, you win. If you don’t, it doesn’t matter how pretty your X’s and O’s look, you won’t.”
Look, talent matters. And if you’re going to win a championship, talent rules the day. It isn’t an accident that the game’s best player, LeBron James, has been to seven straight NBA Finals with two different teams. It isn’t an accident the league’s deepest collection of talent, Golden State, has won two of the past three titles.
It was no accident that Phil Jackson had Michael Jordan at his right hand for the first six of his championships, and Kobe Bryant at his left for the final five.
But when we are discussing the Knicks, in the here and now, in the foreseeable future, we really need to stop talking in the context of championships. The Knicks are so far away from being in that kind of conversation it’s almost as if they play in a different league, in an entirely different sport.
What the Knicks need — what Knicks fans have to crave — is relevance, is improvement, is the sense that the culture is changing, that the man who is most visibly in charge — the head coach — knows what he’s doing.
Ultimately, the problem with Jeff Hornacek was that most of us wanted him to be a better coach than he really was. He was a good, smart player. He’d had a nice run with his first team in Phoenix. He certainly could talk the game out. But the results simply weren’t there.
Before the season fell fully into ruin, when the Knicks were flirting with .500, there were simply too many games lost against teams like the Hawks, Magic and Bulls, almost always outplayed and outmaneuvered in the fourth quarter. There were so many blown leads. And so many nights the Knicks were at a sizeable strategic disadvantage.
Hornacek’s defenders would scream: “Look at the talent! Look at the roster!”
And that will be the biggest challenge for the new coach, too. But it is possible to take a substandard roster and be competitive in the NBA. Can we please agree that doing that, while also trying to draft better and acquire better players, is the better dual-track tandem than simply tanking and hoping for the best? How did that plan work for the Knicks, post-Porzingis this year? After all that carnage the best they could do was the
ninth-worst record. It can happen. The NBA proves it. You can have a team with sketchy overall talent, with limited ceiling, and still develop the players you have, still coach them up — way up, in some cases — and still present a product that is better than the standard-issue Knicks teams of the past 18 years while also building for tomorrow. You just need to find the right coach, and hire him.
You need to find the next Erik Spoelstra, the next Quin Snyder, the next Terry Stotts. None of those guys were considered must-haves when they were hired by the Heat, Jazz and Blazers, respectively. All of them endured plenty of grumbles along the way. And all have shown that if you know what you’re doing as a coach, you really can have a profound impact on a team’s fortunes.
Spoelstra’s 2016-17 Heat started 11-30, finished 30-11, missed the playoffs by a game, and this year enter the postseason as the sixth seed in the East with a roster loaded with role players who perform those roles expertly. Maybe Pat Riley can entice a fresh wave of elite imports at some point, maybe he can’t, but in the interim Miami has a team it can watch without blindfolds.
Same deal in Utah, which lost its franchise player (Gordon Hayward), picked a jewel in the draft last year (Donovan Mitchell), sat at 19-28 on Jan. 22 — and finished 48-34, No. 5 in the West. Somehow Snyder developed this team on the fly, did what truly gifted coaches do: maximize what’s in front of you.
Stotts? “I always want to play hard for him,” Portland’s Ed Davis once said of him. “That’s one thing I can say: Everybody on this team can play for Coach, and it’s not like that on every team.”
It’s not. It’s also no surprise that the Blazers rode, in essence, a three-man core of Damian Lillard, C.J. McCollum and Jusuf Nurkic, along with a gaggle of glad-to-behere supporting players, all the way to the West’s No. 3.
Will any of those teams win a title this year? No.
If you’re a Knicks fan would you trade spots with all of them in a heartbeat?
Unless — until — they hire their own Spoelstra, their own Snyder, their own Stotts. That guy is out there somewhere. It’s on Steve Mills and Scott Perry to find him.