THE FRONT MAN
Jackson: I’ll be ‘more involved’ with day-to-day ops this season
Phil Jackson is ready to work. Jackson, sitting next to coach Derek Fisher and general manager Steve Mills at Friday’s seasonopening press conference outside the Knicks practice facility in Tarrytown, made it clear he would be much more active in his second full season as team president than he was in his first.
“I thought that maybe I stepped back too far last year,” Jackson said. “I wanted Derek to be his own person, to have his own feel for this, and that was multiplied in numbers of ways. Derek’s kind of asked me to be a little more present this year actually, not in the aspect of coaching, but just in being around and talking basketball and influential in observations.
“I think I’ll probably be even more involved than I was last year as far as being here and being watchful and suggestive, watching film together with Derek at times.
“I’ve had a great feel for the process of free agency and the anticipation of how to build a team. I think the orientation the last year has been very good for me as far dealing with agents, dealing with the people around players, the players themselves and the new kind of attempt to build teams in the NBA that’s kind of a new mode of operations.”
Jackson and Fisher each said they were too worried last year about stepping on each other’s toes, and gave each other too much space in trying to be comfortable in roles neither had performed before. That was especially true for Jackson, an 11time champion as a coach who clearly didn’t want to overshadow Fisher, who segued immediately from a player into the Knicks coach last summer.
But that won’t be the case this year. Jackson repeatedly mentioned needing to be more involved throughout the 45minute gathering, which was held outside the facility because the Liberty, preparing for the WNBA’s Eastern Conference finals, were using the practice court.
It sounded like the most significant change to the way Jackson would conduct himself on a daily basis would be to work more with Fisher.
“For me, more from a oneonone standpoint, finding out how to structure my days as a coach and where the time is going to be best suited preparing the team to play, postgame learning from the situations and watching films,” Fisher said. “I just realized it would be helpful to be able to do more oneonone discussion [with Jackson] of specific things that are going on with our team as opposed to knowing that he’s sitting on the other side of the building and has seen more basketball than I’ve seen in my entire lifetime and not utilizing that resource to help myself and help our team.
“So I think like I said, we’re finding the rhythm to that. I thought Phil was amazing last year in giving me the space to kind of learn the ropes in a sense, where will my time be spent, and now I have a much better feel for that. We just want to make sure we’re carving out time where we can talk man to man and in a sense, coach to coach, and really make sure our team is heading in the right direction.”
One thing no one was willing to do, however, was make any predictions about how successful the Knicks will be this season. After saying a year ago the Knicks would be a playoff team — they went on to finish with the NBA’s secondworst record at 1765 — Jackson and Fisher declined to say anything more than the Knicks will take the court 82 times.
“I want to stay away from expectations,” Jackson said. “It is such a long season.”
“Last year we tried to predict in a sense how a team would do over a course of a long NBA season,” Fisher said, “and it really is impossible to do that. We couldn’t have foreseen the amount of injuries and changes that took place with our team. I think right now it is more about the process and focusing on building the daily habits that are required to be a really good team … that is all we can do.
“We feel that we have a group of guys that are interested in doing that and it is my job to lead them in the right direction along with our staff. That is pretty much our focus.”