RED HOLZMAN
Head coach (1967-77)
HE WAS a basketball lifer, firmly settled into the scout’s peripatetic world, satisfied on the periphery of the Knicks. Red Holzman certainly wasn’t looking for a promotion on the night of Dec. 27, 1967.
But as the Knicks fell behind the defending champion 76ers by 20 points, team president Ned Irish stood up from his box seat at the old Madison Square Garden, and summoned his general manager, Eddie Donovan, and Holzman, the team’s chief scout.
“Red,” Irish declared, “I’m making a change tonight.”
Dick McGuire was a beloved figure, a Hall of Fame player and a local icon. But even he admitted he was too soft on his players, too indecisive as a coach. The Knicks were supposed to be better than 15-23. When the game ended, another Knicks loss, Donovan told McGuire he’d be switching jobs with Holzman immediately.
It came as a relief to McGuire. And with sorrow for his successor. “Dick is a wonderful man,” Holzman
said. “He won’t be easy to follow.
And, look: I had something to do with this team’s record, too. I scouted every player.”
But Holzman wasn’t about to drown in his melancholy. He was a city kid, born in lower Manhattan and raised in Ocean Hill-Brownsville, Brooklyn. He played at Franklin K. Lane High and at CCNY under Nat Holman, played 10 years in the league, winning a title with Rochester in 1951. He coached four seasons with limited success for the Hawks in Milwaukee and St. Louis, going a combined 83-120.
“I was happy as a scout,” Holzman said in 1990. “But I saw what we had with the Knicks, and I knew what we wanted to do, what might be coming. And I said, ‘If the job is mine, I might as well do things my way.’”
“And Red’s way,” Walt Frazier said, “was a pretty magical way.”
Within a month, the Knicks looked like a new team. They went 28-16 in their final 44 games. A year later, they won 54 games, the most in team history. And by 1970, they were champions. Three years on, they added a bookend title. They are the only championships in franchise history, and Holzman coached both teams. He won 613 games in his two stints on the bench for New York.
He is without question the best coach in Knicks history.
“I don’t think there is such a thing as a coaching genius,” Holzman once said, “just hard workers.”
And his players quickly learned that Red’s path was the only path.
“Red had a knack,” Willis Reed said in 2020. “Red knew the buttons to push.”
Said Earl Monroe: “Everyone knew what their job was. Credit Red. He made us all feel like we were part of the same journey.”
Holzman thought some of his finest work came toward the end of his second tour of duty, when he helped young guns such as Ray Williams and Micheal Ray Richardson learn the pro ropes, culminating in a most satisfying 50-win season in 1980-81.
“The game’s the same,” he insisted. “We’re all just caretakers.”
None better than he.