Knicks’ rivalry takes on a new twist
Fizdale, a former Heat assistant under Spoelstra, back at AmericanAirlines Arena as Knicks coach
MIAMI — There was a time when Heat-Knicks were Defcon whatever Defcon that NBA basketball can be.
It was during that time, in the late ‘90s, that Erik Spoelstra and David Fizdale found themselves working in the bunker that is the Miami Heat video room.
It was as intense a playoff rivalry as anything the NBA had seen since Detroit’s Bad Boys and arguably as intense as anything since.
Wednesday night, Spoelstra and Fizdale, best of NBA friends from their time on the Heat bench as coach and lead assistant, will square off on opposing sides at AmericanAirlines Arena, with Fizdale taking over this season as Knicks coach.
“We talked about it at the coaches’ meetings, because we were both in the video room at the time,” Spoelstra said after Tuesday’s Heat practice. “HeatKnicks, when it was really HeatKnicks, and those are the fun years, and neither one of us ever would have thought we’d be in a situation like this, coaching against each other for these two franchises.”
For Fizdale, the enduring memory of his initial HeatKnicks partnership with Spoelstra is of Allan Houston’s last-second, series-deciding Game 5 jumper for the Knicks in the deciding game of the 1999 first round.
“I remember staying up. We prepped for the series. Spo and I stayed up 36 or 48 hours,” Fizdale said Tuesday after the Knicks completed their practice at AmericanAirlines Arena. “You lose track after 12 Diet Cokes or whatever the heck we had. But we stayed up two days straight basically prepping because in
those days it was deck to deck. We didn’t have technology. It was two VCRs and you were making these edits, player edits and scout edits. We put a lot into that.
“Then, that whole year, it was a fistfight every game. Some kind of melee broke out. It was never a time we played that somebody didn’t get kicked out. So by the time the playoffs rolled around, it was like, ‘Oh, we hate these guys.’ Then Allan Houston just ripped our hearts out.”
These days, Houston’s office is across from Fizdale’s, with Houston the Knicks’ assistant general manager.
Spoelstra, by contrast, never left, rising in the Heat hierarchy to assistant to Pat Riley and Stan Van Gundy and now in his 11th season as coach. Most of those seasons came with Fizdale at his side.
Since then, the two have coached against each other twice, when Fizdale was coach of the Memphis Grizzlies in 2016-17, each team winning on the road. Then, last season, Fizdale was dismissed by the Grizzlies before the teams met, returning to AmericanAirlines Arena as a guest during his time away from coaching.
“Thankfully, it’s a little bit different now, because it’s the third year of this,” Spoelstra said. “The first time was really awkward for me, I don’t know for him. But such is the life in the NBA. We spent plenty of time together since then. It’s normal. He’s on his second team, so it feels different already.”
Fizdale found himself with a mostly veteran team in Memphis, a
“His developmental resume speaks for itself. That’s a great fit there in New York. Those guys will certainly get better.”
—Erik Spoelstra on David Fizdale
soured relationship with center Marc Gasol among the reasons for that divorce. But with the Knicks, especially with forward Kristaps Porzingis sidelined by recovery from knee surgery that could have him out the entire season, Fizdale finds himself back in his developmental roots, a role he held alongside Spoelstra.
“His developmental resume speaks for itself,” Spoelstra said. “That’s a great fit there in New York. Those guys will certainly get better.”
Fizdale agreed about this second chapter.
“I would say this is probably more my genealogy,” he said. “I would say what I came through. I came through development.”
For Spoelstra, it remains somewhat remarkable that a pair of former West Coast Conference players, Spoelstra at Portland, Fizdale at San Diego, have found themselves on such similar and successful paths.
“Two former WCC ham-and-egg guards, which is pretty cool,” coaching Spoelstra said. “That’s a line from Jon Gruden, ham-and-eggers. But when Jon Gruden said it, it resonated with me — it means we both sucked in college.”
And then they started from the bottom to get to center court Wednesday night, adding a whole new twist to Heat-Knicks.
“Our office was in the Rat Trap, the Miami Arena over there,” Fizdale said of where the partnership started. “But I was just grinding. I was a grunt. I was a runner. We would meet Stan Van Gundy at the plane at 4 in the morning, drop off some tapes. He would go back to the office, we would go back to the video room. We lived in that place, Spo and I.”