2019-20 David Fizdale Coaching Death Watch: Game 1 – Knicks @ Bulls

The David Fizdale Coaching Death Watch begins tonight, as the Knicks head to Chicago to take on the Bulls in a repeat of an earlier game this year that remains half of the Knicks’ total wins this season.

The Bulls are one of the few teams out there (outside of the Warriors, of course, who have some significant extenuating circumstances) that is almost as disappointing as the Knicks, as the Bulls barely have a better record than the Knicks (or, as David Fizdale would put it, “Just one game back of the 8th seed!”) and, you know, lost to the Knicks, so that is embarrassing enough. Whenever you can say, “Oh yeah, Bobby Portis kicked our ass and defeated us,” you know you’re in a sad state of affairs.

Dennis Smith Jr. is back for the Knicks tonight, after his tragic bereavement lead for the death of his stepmother. Let’s hope he is over his early season shooting woes, where Knicks shooting “expert,” Keith Smart, took a busted shot and made it…well…you know, a lot more busted.

Also, RJ Barrett has been struggling recently, so let’s hope he has a bounceback game!

Let’s go, Knicks!

200 replies on “2019-20 David Fizdale Coaching Death Watch: Game 1 – Knicks @ Bulls”

Dead man walking….
Did Mills and Perry not know this would be the obvious follow-up to their press conference?
If they did, they should have just canned Fiz on the spot.
If they didn’t then they’re idiots and Dolan should have fired them on the spot.
But Dolan’s an idiot.

Julius Randle, earning 18 million dollars, fell down and wendel carter stepped on him while scoring. Then Randle airballed a 3.

I think julius may just be a worst defender than kanter…

it’s like he goes in to this wierd suspended animation state…

at least he moved his head around bit…julius just stands there waiting, waiting to go flail about at the other team’s basket…

randle has that th2 affliction where you are able to notice all defensive errors except your own

DSJ comes in and he’s instantly the worst player on the floor… instant huge run by the Bulls.

I don’t want to be too negative because the kid has been through some stuff, but damn, play him in the fucking G-League, he clearly can’t play.

Our best point guard hands the ball off and then goes and hides in the corner the whole play. When forced to make something happen Frank picked up his dribble and threw the ball away leading to the fastbreak layup.

It’s the most important position in the modern NBA, and we don’t have one pg.

jealous of you folks with the msg feed…

I want some clyde…

is it me or is kevin knox starting to grow into those size 33 shoes he wears…

Why are Randle and Knox playing catch on the perimeter? Who’s running the offense?

Knox seems to have improved. It’s possible he could work himself into the starting lineup before the end of the season.

Knox is actually trying to pass the ball and be looks a lot more in control on the court. That’s pretty encouraging. A couple of excellent defensive possessions by Frank there too.

it’s weird that the pacers are playing so well and still get to add myles turner and oladipo

Knox has been finding people on the roll. He’s impressed on offense, minus the hot potato sequence with Randle.

How did we manage to spend $58 million on PFs in the offseason and the only competent one, Taj, barely gets any playing time.

We’ve all panned the Gibson signing and deservedly so, but I do personally like watching him. I would really like to have him as a backup for a good Knicks team.

We’ve all panned the Gibson signing and deservedly so, but I do personally like watching him. I would really like to have him as a backup for a good Knicks team.

Like Morris, he makes sense for a team on a much different side of the win curve. Morris is at least young enough that they can probably trade him (Mills and Perry will probably want to keep him, though, if he plays well).

I’m giving Dennis a pass for a week. It’s not easy to take that much time off in the middle of the season and jump right back into it. I doubt he was doing any serious full court practice in the past few weeks. Plus, he hasn’t really had a chance to play with any of these guys and the team has probably forgotten how to play with an actual point guard. And if those aren’t enough excuses, what difference does it make?

@48

Yeah, teams will certainly be looking to add Taj as a buyout guy pre playoffs, he’s definitely going to have a market there, but unfortunately not for trading.

hey räz…good to read your words – hope all is well in the world…

speaking of the world, we’ve had a bit different weather (cooler and wetter) the last couple of years in so cal…I think we’re out of drought status…

is there some kind of el nino thing going on in the pacific?

if you need someone to show you how to set a proper screen and defend the pnr and actually give a decent effort on both ends…. he can do that…

for whatever reason no one else on the team does that….

If someone is really desperate I could see them giving up a second rounder. It’s not like we have any real incentive to cut Taj, unless Kadeem Allen needs to get shifted to the big Knicks. Even then, Taj would probably be waived well before the trade deadline.

if ppl are really trying to save their jobs… i don’t think anyone will be traded unless we go on a serious winning streak….

@49 …sad but true, DSJ is a direct threat to our true chosen number one draft pick frank’s on court pursuit of basketball glory…

Mudiay > DSJr ??

I’m not sure how to fix Smith since I didn’t like his game when he was going well, but we’d probably be winning this game if it wasn’t for his few minutes. He may be the 19/20 tank commander if we can’t get him right.

I can’t believe I’m saying this but I want to see Knox get more minutes in the second half

Kadeem Allen deserves a chance for a role on this team as soon as he’s healthy.

Taj is eminently watchable. Reminds me a bit of K-Mart on the 2012-2013 team. He deserves better than whatever this is.

We’re really missing Mitch this game. If for no other reason than he’s taller than our penta-forwards.

just dunk the ball frank, you can do it…

there should be entire practices where frank does nothing but dribble and dunk…anything else, stop him, re-focus him, and, back to dribbling and dunking…

are they taking about all the zone we’re playing on msg? bulls broadcast has yet to notice.

Wasn’t someone claiming a while back that it was totally illegal to play zone in the NBA?

Barrett has these occasional games where he looks so much more mature than his age.

This is one of them.

Mitch, RJ, Knox and Frank need to play together as much as possible.

RJ with the beautiful kick out to Knox for a three. RJ helps force the turnover and then jams it. This kid.

Knox is still trash on defense, I’m not sure I’d start him. I like Knox off the bench for now.

the zone looks a little ridiculous and we have no idea how to play it but it does induce an already not savvy bulls offense to try some stupid shit

We we’re 9/10 from the line at one point tonight and I almost said something. Now back to our usual 60ish%

That was a gorgeous play all-around between Trier-Gibson-Portis. Need more of that. Trier still doesn’t really look comfortable passing the ball in the PnR.

Knox just doesn’t know how to play perimeter D. Can someone coach him up?

@92 – 100%. Taj can be a floor general for the kids and even with Knox, it’s a really good defensive unit.

Just got back to the office, so hadn’t checked the box score. I didn’t realise it was the Taj Gibson game.

Mitch, Frank, rj, knox and taj

I’m skeptical of putting Taj and Mitch together. For one, who’s gonna play defense on the second unit. Two, I think Taj and Mitch would get in each other’s way on offense. I’d like to see Trier in that lineup instead.

@98 – it’s just so obvious he’s the only knick on the court who understands how to play the game…RJ and kevin look good at times…

I think DSJ on the bench is more frightening to frank than even a lay up…

White was a 21% 3 point shooter before tonight. But the Knicks are doing wonders for his confidence

Portis and Randle are so unnecessary. All they do is hog up usage and lose games. We can do this with our young players.

@112…apparently under direct order of jimmy d…

he got heckled, it pissed him off…like someone would dare blame him for this mess…

he pissed in mills ear – made mills say on tv (for all of time) that the team his front office assembled should be performing better, put every one on notice – including just maybe mills?

It’s so hard being a fan of this franchise. You’re rooting for a constantly losing team with no rebuild in sight. It’s a team full of subpar, overpaid vets coached by a fool overseen by corporate yesmen working under the league’s most inept owner.

Good: RJ, Kevin Knox had 4 assists

Pretty much everything else was bad, although I guess we can say that Frank is better than Dennis Smith.

White was a 21% 3 point shooter before tonight. But the Knicks are doing wonders for his confidence

Jimmer Award.

these guys were doing so good with taj on the pnr and on defense with him.. and then they totally forgot about him….

This is what a 30th in SRS team looks like.

RJ is kinda the only watchable part of the team. When Mitch gets back his 17 minutes will be watchable too.

Shoulda taken on that Moe Harkless contract.

I just saw a highlight on twitter where the ball gets passed out to arciwhatever by the arc with Coby White out next to him-4 knicks are in the paint and bobby portis is off the court in the near corner for some reason. Frank runs out to challenge arci and nobody thinks to also run out to contest the guy who has been raining 3s on the knicks all quarter, the ball gets swung to white and he drains another 3. I’ve been watching this shit for years. There’s almost never more than 2 knicks on the court at any one time who seem to have any basic idea how to play defense.

Fiz just said he has no idea why Coby White was so wide open and not sure which sets they ran, he will have to watch the tape to figure that out, all he knows was that every time he looked up they were going in.

Classic!!!! – he can’t make adjustments cause he’s clueless in what was actually happening while it was happening. After the kid made three in a row, here is a hint. Put Frank on him and tell him to to leave him.

You know, the future of this team isn’t that bleak, we’ve got a few promising young players, all our picks plus a few from Dallas and mostly guys on one year deals.

What pisses me off is that other teams in our situation, like the Cavs and the Suns, play hard every night and don’t get blown out by other shitty teams.

Losing is ok, but getting our asses kicked is not.

It would have been nice to have had competent people in charge of all that cap space coming into this year. Maybe they would have looked at the skill sets of the young players we had and added players that fit with them and each other logically. But of course to do that, you have to actually understand real basketball and not be playing fantasy basketball.

We have several young players that should develop into good NBA players in time and several veterans that could be solid role players on very good teams, but it’s a mish mosh of illogical parts coached by a man that’s making matters even worse.

The good news is these idiots have only set us back 2-3 years and not put us in a horrible long term position. if we hand the team over to a competent group at year end, it can be turned around quickly with a year of development and good use of the cap space we’ll have next year.

Look on the bright side, we could be the Nets. They were pulling off a miraculous turnaround and blew it up to make room for the shell of Kevin Durant and the immensely talented but overrated Kyrie Irving and will wind up rebuilding in a few years after coming up empty.

So what’s the story with Jokic?

I know he hit some huge shots to win games lately, but did he go on a high carb diet in the off season?

He looks a little heavier and softer to me.

The Thunder need to set Paul and Gallo free. Gallo to the Trailblazers makes some sense. I’m not sure where Paul make sense with that salary, but it sure isn’t OKC.

There’s almost never more than 2 knicks on the court at any one time who seem to have any basic idea how to play defense.

First you have to understand that good defense is critical to winning high level basketball games. Then you have to focus your attention on acquiring players that primarily defend at a VERY high level while you search for your #1 and #2 scorers. We keep accumulating players that can score a bit but can’t defend. We are a team of 4th options that don’t defend, 6th men, and Frank/Mitch. Not that it matters much or that he’s an elite defender, but you keep a cheap guy like Vonleh even though he can’t score much over some expensive mediocre scorer that doesn’t defend. They have it backwards.

He looks a little heavier and softer to me.

reminds me of the color of money when forest whitaker schools paul newman, then asks him afterwards if he thinks that he should lose some weight…

What pisses me off is that other teams in our situation, like the Cavs and the Suns, play hard every night and don’t get blown out by other shitty teams.

It’s called coaching……. Monte Williams was a well respected coach when tragedy took him out of the league for a few years and Cleveland had the temerity to hire a college coach with 754 wins and 352 over .500 mostly at major programs. The guy actually knows how to make players better…. not PR and flim-flam!!!

Fiz just said he has no idea why Coby White was so wide open and not sure which sets they ran, he will have to watch the tape to figure that out, all he knows was that every time he looked up they were going in.

I heard that and was astounded. Is it a fog of war thing? Ar the players too big to see the opposite side? Is he inattentive? Is he just not wanting to call people out in public? Maybe I’m behind the times but I thought that was the point of having a coach at the times, is to correct mistakes and adjust in real time as the game is going on.

_The Spell is broken_
Before this one i had seen 8 games Live and they were all Losses.
I fell asleep in 2 games and we won both of them.
Yesterday i fell asleep but Knicks lost !
Now i feel free to enjoy watching my beloved team being
humiliated LIVE
without feeling guilty of jinxing it !
What a relief !

Just watching highlights… how is white so open for all these threes? Ok most of them the nearest defender comes running at him way too late. There are some plays where Frank is trying to close him out from under the rim.

@146 that’s odd, especially the bit about Frank, since they were supposedly playing a zone. He was definitely not getting attention. I mean one, two Ok, but after that maybe stya within arms reach of him. Is that unreasonable?

As for the game, it was nice to see RJ bounce back, and as noted by others Taj is a solid professional who is probably the best PF on the team.

They were playing a zombe.
Similar to the zone but with less intensity & less brain. Like zone played by GRomero’s vintage zombies.

I’m happy we got another PG back last night..but man! I don’t know if DSJ is healthy, but he was clearly pressing last night. It’s a long season, we don’t need him to get it all back in one game. He looked quick on offense.

Why is Fiz continuing to let Mook play hero ball?! Why are our bigs handling the ball 20 feet out more than our guards?! It fees like Mills is gonna get his wish, but if Dolan is smart, he gives Mills his walking papers as well. At this point, I’d rather have Zeke as President of Basketball Ops than Mills. The last of my hope for Fiz is gone after seeing more thoughtless rotations and a clueless offensive scheme. Barrett had it goin and you don’t put the ball in his hands more? You let Mook dribble dribble shoot instead? Yank his ass when he’s playin hero ball! He’s not Melo or even Trier on offense!

I just..I have a headache now.

Good day all

The events of the past week have really solidified the Knicks as a choice destination for free agents this summer. Nothing like a premature public panic to inspire confidence in an organization.

OK, I feel really really comfortable now saying Fizdale needs to go.

DSJ, Trier, Knox, Randle, Portis (or was it Morris instead of Randle? I can’t remember due to PTSD). Anyway, that was an actual lineup that a coach trying to save his job vomited onto the court.

btw in 40 possessions this year (nearly 1/2 a game), the 4-man combo of DSJ/Trier/Knox/Portis is -49.1 with a 0th percentile offense (82.5) and a 0th percentile defense (131.6). He’s actually trotted those 4 out there for 4% of all the available minutes (1070 total non-garbage possessions).

btw – this coach (and FO) who preaches defense has put out the best defenders together for exactly 5 possessions (Frank, Dot, RJ, Mitch or Frank, Dot, RJ, Gibson, or Payton, Dot, RJ, Mitch, or Payton, Dot, RJ, Gibson). btw that lineup (Frank/Dot/RJ/Gibson) had a +20 rating in those 5 possessions. Shocking.

frankly, i’m shocked at how bad Julius Randle has been. I know Jowles likes to say that coaching basically makes no difference except in edge cases (i.e Pop), but I think we’ve discovered that Fizdale is indeed an edge case also.

This is the problem with having a coach whose best qualification is “gets along great with Wade, Lebron, and Bosh”, when you don’t have anyone on your team that is even 50% the player that any of those guys is/was.

My guess is that if KP goes off tomorrow night and/or the Nets come into the Garden and win on 11/24, Fizdale is gone. I hope to the basketball gods that Mills goes with him. Give Perry the keys for the rest of the season (as a dead man walking, mostly because no one else in-house really has any experience), make Mike Miller or Kaleb Canales the interim head coach, then reassess in the offseason whether you can get Masai or someone else actually competent to come.

how much would people be willing give up for Masai? I would give the worst of the Dallas or NYK picks in 2021, protected for top 8 i think. Maybe a charlotte 2nd also.

Nothing like a premature public panic to inspire confidence in an organization.

Premature? Have you watched this team?

Again – I wrote in a post yesterday that in basically zero of the 93 games Fizdale has coached so far have the Knicks looked consistently coherent on either end of the court.

Mills has been a disaster all along. The THJ + Baker contracts would be fireable offenses in any other organization, and those were like the 4th and 5th worst things he’s done.

Perry – probably too early to say, but I have to think that he’s responsible for the mismatched roster and not using some of that cap space to get assets.

We all kill KP for wanting out of the organization, but it’s at least a possibility that he took a realistic look at the leadership and didn’t like what he saw.

One thing I appreciate about Perry is his ability to keep things quiet. None of his trades were signaled in advance. The only thing we got wind of in advance was the drafting of Knox. I bring this up because I think it might be another reason why he looked so unhappy at the press conference. He might be unhappy with Fizdale, but I get the impression he would never say it publicly. Honestly, I hope he stays with the Knicks. Not screwing up big time with contracts and having good draft picks should eventually make the Knicks decent. Mills and Fizdale, on the other hand . . .

A guy trying to throw the game for Vegas gamblers would put a better lineup on the floor than the Knicks’ start of the fourth quarter lineup. Fizdale’s lucky there’s not an FBI investigation.

the trouble with all this unrest is that the FO now will be looking to save their jobs with meaningless wins as opposed to looking towards the future of the franchise.

Morris has to be traded.
Ellington has to be traded.
I love Taj but he probably should be traded too.

Even for 2nd round picks these guys should be traded.

All these guys would be and have been useful players on a playoff team. But if you’re trying to eke out 28 wins rather than 24 wins (too optimistic?) to show Dolan you’ve made “progress”, you can bet these guys will all be staying here.

@153
I was unclear. Panic perhaps, but what was served by the public presser by Pillsmerry? The handling of this raging dumpster fire confirms the worst perceptions about this organization. Perhaps most egregiously, as the metrics, you posted in @152 show Coach Fizz did not seem to get the message. The catalyst for the public element is undoubtedly Dolan.

I don’t think trades are going to make much of a difference this season. At best we will get a future second round pick or two. Or we will trade for a name that is supposed to make us competitive, but won’t, and the trade will actually set us back. I think we are faced with rooting for lottery luck yet again. We might as well keep the players we have to do that.

I don’t actually blame Dolan at all for this dumpster fire outside the initiating problem of the fact he put Steve Mills in charge.

This is how I see it:

2018-19 season – Dolan aware that team sucks and that we’re playing kids, tanking etc.
Somewhere along the way in 2018-19, Mills tells Dolan that KD and Kyrie or whoever are definitely coming. There’s no other reason Dolan goes onto the michael Kay show and says what he says unless Mills tells him.

2019 offseason – KD injury happens, Mills has to tell Dolan that because of the injury which couldn’t be foreseen, that whole plan has to change– BUT we’re going to sign these guys and we’ll have a highly competetitive product on the floor, which in turn will make us legitimate contenders for Giannis or whoever in 2021.

2019-20 season – we’re arguable worse than we were last year when we were actively trying to lose.

if I were Dolan and had made a decision to be hands-off and to trust my basketball people to run things, I would be freaking pissed — as it seems he was sunday night. It is not too early for everyone to be put on notice IMHO.

My only hope is that Mills eventually (this season) runs out of people to throw in front of the bus.

If Fizdale wanted to actually win the game yesterday he would have yanked the backups early in the game. The fact that he couldn’t pressure White who was white-hot is an indictment of his coaching ability. There is enough talent on this team to win one out of 3 games. They can’t even do that. At this rate, the way this team is playing, 17 wins might be a miracle.

they were supposedly playing a zone

From the Coby White highlights it looked like the zone didn’t include the 3 point line. Smith and Trier were culprits on most of them, from what I could tell, but even my darling Frank looked like he was way out of position for some.

Getting the feeling the David Fizdale coaching deathwatch is not going to be a long lived knickerblogger feature

gibson, knox, trier, frank, RJ, dotson, RJ were the closest defenders on his 7 3s, although I don’t know who should have been the defender on some of the plays

At this point, I’d rather have Zeke as President of Basketball Ops than Mills.

I live on 10th street in the Village and I thought i got a whiff of the acrid scent of Zeke coming south down Broadway late last night from the MSG offices……

It was hard to tell if the closest defender deserved the blame or was covering for someone who got lost in the zone. Smith and Portis both seemed to be generally lost most of the time. Barrett and Frank were frequently closing in from way too far away and I can’t tell if it’s because they were out of position or if they realized that the defense broke down and ran to recover.

Either way, it just seemed like a total shit show. It’s hard to sympathize for Fizdale when he is this bad. My only problem with firing him is Mills doesn’t deserve the second chance. Mills is the one who passed on the Coach of the Year because he wouldn’t let him have any say in the roster.

That’s a double fail, too. Because not only would Bud have installed a good system that would make Mills’ signings look better, he would have been able to lead him in the right direction. Bud, for instance, would have been smart enough to say “we need a PG, not 4 PFs, start with Rubio”.

I’ve been going to a lot of games this year (thankfully for free) and would like to get a Fire Steve Mills chant going instead of the Fire Fizdale chants. But unfortunately Knicks fans are wildly uninformed and don’t seem to understand why I try to change it up.

We talk about how patient we are and how we would be ok with a proper rebuild. But this board is so much more informed and enlightened than the average Knicks fan.

It would be better for Fizdale’s career if he was fired today. I’d bet a bunch that he knows this, and wouldn’t be remotely surprised if his lineups and commentary are aimed at achieving this goal. The lineup at the start of the fourth quarter of a tied road game, with an lol zone defense, and the “Beats me how Cody was so open” have the look and sound of a guy who wants out now.

If he goes now, he’ll still have a bunch of allies who will interpret all this as an incompetent and impatient front office overreacting and scapegoating. The longer it goes on, the less that will be the case.

I am sure once Fiz is fired, Popovich is coming here next. You just wait, it will happen for sure. Cause that it is how it works, great coaches want to come to dysfunctional franchises. Even Fiz, a guy fired from his last and only head coaching job, received a 4 year $22mm deal. You know why he had such pricing power? Cause to come here, you need enough money where you don’t mind this being your last NBA job.

Up next – Mark Jackson, cause the line to get him starts around the block.

When your coaching hire’s resume has Sycophant as its top bullet point you’ve probably made a bad hire…..

I was joking last night when I suggested CP3 as a trade and player coach, but in my PTSD delirium it is starting to make sense to me.

CP3 CLEARLY has forgotten more BB than Dizfail ever learned. He has instant credibility with every player in the league. He gives off the “I don’t suffer fools very well” jibe which is precisely what this team needs…. a swift kick in the ass.

You just can’t have young players not learning how to play basketball properly in their teens and early twenties. I’m guessing he wouldn’t mind making an extra 5M to coach in his twilight years….. The notion that OKC is going to eat 80M in his salary and release him so he can go to LA and play there is just a fantasy.

I got killed for saying this two summers ago… I know hating Mark Jackson is cool but he was the second best candidate we interviewed (Budz was best by a mile). We would have been *much* better off hiring him. And he’s probably the best coach we can get to come here now.

Give me Mark Jackson. I know all his flaws. I read the reddit thread. We have to be realistic here. This team needs to be brought to respectability. These kids need a coach who can develop them. The guy nurtured the Baby Warriors. He ain’t a clown.

CP3 CLEARLY has forgotten more BB than Dizfail ever learned. He has instant credibility with every player in the league. He gives off the “I don’t suffer fools very well” jibe which is precisely what this team needs…. a swift kick in the ass.

Agreed. Bring him in here for expiring contracts. I don’t need a draft pick. Just give me some of that. He’ll be worth every penny.

I don’t know if you need Paul and Jackson, but either one of them will be a good start.

Mark Jackson’s not going to come here to coach the team “collaboratively” with a dolt like Mills or “to work closely with the front office we’re all in this together, yadda yadda yadda.” The only way he’ll come here is if he’s free to coach the team and he won’t be free to coach the team with Mills still in the building.

Getting the feeling the David Fizdale coaching deathwatch is not going to be a long lived knickerblogger feature

Had me choking on my coffee with this one. He’s got to be wishing Thursday’s game was in like Detroit or some shit, instead of a home game on national TV. If it gets embarassing he’ll be checking over his shoulder all night for sure.

The zone last night was one of the more half-baked things I’ve ever seen. If you’ve ever seen people try to play zone in pickup (note: don’t be those people) it looked pretty much like that: “Hey, zone just means we all collapse to whoever has the ball, right?” It’s not like we’re some defensive juggernaut or whatever but it’s clearly not the main problem with this team so I was surprised to see that’s where Fiz is focussing the formidable power of his basketball intellect on trying to come up with wrinkles.

what makes mark jackson a good coach?

1) has the best platitudes
2) knows which strip clubs to avoid and which churches you should give your paycheck to
3) can help plot against aging veterans (like John Stockton) to force them to retire
4) makes injured players (like Festus Ezeli) pull themselves up by the bootstraps by trying to get their teammates to think that they don’t want the team to succeed without them
5) knows which players (like Harrison Barnes) are possessed by actual, literal demons

QED

The only way he’ll come here is if he’s free to coach the team and he won’t be free to coach the team with Mills still in the building.

By many accounts, Mark Jackson is not only an abjectly shitty basketball coach, but one of the more paranoid people in the league. He wouldn’t let his assistants do interviews. He wouldn’t let members of GSW’s front office (including Jerry West and their damn color guy, Jim Barnett) watch practices because he thought they would undermine him.

Jackson is a fucking hack if there ever was one. Anyone who thinks he’s the franchise’s logical step forward is actively praying for another five years of total fucking misery.

If we do hire Mark Jackson that’s going to make it very hard for me to keep following this team. There’s a very good reason he was fired 5 years ago and no franchise ever gave him another chance.

There’s no other reason Dolan goes onto the michael Kay show and says what he says unless Mills tells him.

It seems that in this scenario, Mills is playing Optimistic Knickerblogger Poster:

“I definitely know this is going to happen.”

[it doesn’t happen]

“There must have been some unforeseeable change in circumstances, but at the time, I was definitely right.”

Y’all thought David Fizdale was better than Mark Jackson. Y’all were wrong.

The next guy we hire won’t be better than Jackson, either. And I know Jackson ain’t great. But we’ve got slim pickings after what we’re doing to Fiz.

The best thing that can happen is that we continue playing poorly (seems fairly likely), Fizdale gets fired, then the new interim coach does NOT do much to turn the season around. At that point it becomes clear Fizdale was not the only problem and even Dolan may smart enough to clean house and finally get rid of Mills and Perry. Then we can go into next year with another year of development for the young players we already have, add another quality 19 year old in the draft that can be a contributor 5-6 years from now (lol), and a pile of cap space. Being in that position is almost useless when bad basketball people are making the future picks and managing the cap space. But if Dolan does bring in some competent basketball people and hand them full control over all management and player decisions, we could actually have a decent team next year with plenty of youthful upside long term. But Mills, Perry and Fizdale have to go or they will make too many errors to create a coherent basketball team fairly quickly. In a few years we’ll be reading Berman articles about how Barrett isn’t happy anymore.

I have a red-line – Mark Jackson. He’s the last person I would want coaching the Knicks.

If Mills and Perry are on the clock, you don’t let them select anything other than an interim coach.

A Mark Jackson here would have a 0% chance of success, and a 100% chance of devolving into complete farce.

I’m amazed it hasn’t happened yet. Dolan’s Razor and all.

Wanting to hire Mark Jackson is like saying “this throat cancer isn’t working out, I’m gonna swap this for lung cancer and see how that goes”

yea i wouldn’t be mark jackson’s biggest fan either…. to his credit he did get that warrior team to play hard but he almost turned that warrior dynasty into an isolation heavy offense… it sounds even more ridiculous in hindsight but it wasn’t all that pretty at the time either…

I think Jackson has some Donald Trump-ness to him, in that the mere mention of his name causes people to flip out.

His track record is better than most coaches out there. He was a better option than Fizdale. We would at least be playing a coherent defensive system by now if we had him.

A Mark Jackson here would have a 0% chance of success, and a 100% chance of devolving into complete farce.

I’m amazed it hasn’t happened yet. Dolan’s Razor and all.

I’d really like to be taken to the deepest levels of this dungeon please.

I think Jackson has some Donald Trump-ness to him, in that the mere mention of his name causes people to flip out.

I don’t see much hysteria, just people who’ve followed Jackson’s career and seen how terrible he is. A dumb, hyper-religious paranoiac. He’s not even good at the x’s and o’s.

Any assistant or college coach selected at random would likely be a better choice than Mark Jackson.

By many accounts, Mark Jackson is not only an abjectly shitty basketball coach

Most of those accounts are on reddit and owned by people who would fire you from their startup if they knew you were Republican. It’s zealous group think that has nothing to do with basketball.

He’s not without major flaws but if anyone thinks he wouldn’t have done better than David Fizdale, or that Becky Hammon can do a better job with this team, just admit it’s your personal bias and move on. It’s ok to say “I hate the guy because I read online that he is a bigot” but at least admit he did a decent job getting the warriors from the basement to the mezzanine. And that’s precisely the route we need someone to navigate.

We probably don’t even have to argue this. I don’t see Mills having better options or having the fortitude to promote Miller or Smart, so we’ll most likely find out ourselves.

Most of those accounts are on reddit and owned by people who would fire you from their startup if they knew you were Republican. It’s zealous group think that has nothing to do with basketball.

If we want to know the truth, we’d probably have to ask all the players off the record. On the record most of them say they liked him, gave him credit for changing the culture from one where defense was an afterthought to one where it was requirement to play. Even Kerr gave him credit for that defensive culture change. Curry was publicly upset when he was fired.
He was also let go at the exact point some of the young players he was developing were reaching their prime age.

The truth is probably that he was an average coach, very difficult to deal with, said some things publicly that made it difficult to keep him employed in that market, but was nowhere near the nightmare reputation he has inherited from dimwits on the internet that know little about basketball but don’t like him on a personal level for a variety of reasons.

Holy shit, there are people arguing for Mark fucking Jackson? My god, as much as we all yell at each other here I thought there were at least a few things about which literally everyone agreed. Don’t re-hire Isiah Thomas. Don’t trade for Andrew Wiggins. Don’t trade RJ and Mitch for John Wall. Things like that. I absolutely thought “don’t hire MARK JACKSON” was in that category.

I guess we have Phil Jackson defenders, so nothing should surprise me, but man a Mark Jackson hire might be the most easily foreseeable disaster in the history of a team that has engaged in nothing but easily foreseeable disasters for twenty years.

He was also let go at the exact point some of the young players he was developing were reaching their prime age.

Pleeeeezzzze with this “they all, all of a sudden got better just the exact second Jackson left”.

Kerr took almost exactly the same core 8 and won 16 more games and the title the following year. However…. he played Draymond 10 mpg more and D Lee 13 minutes a game less…..

Their O ratting went from 14 to 2 and their D rating went from 4 to 1…. but Jackson was a terrific coach….. yeah right…. forget all the other internecine stuff.

why is it personal bias that clouds ppl’s judgement about mark jackson? it’s pretty clear that he didn’t have a great handle on the talents of his team…. that’s why i asked why you thought jackson was a good coach…. you stated his record and that he would make this team better without offering any reason why….

he tried to play draymond at SF and turned a team of talented passers into a iso heavy stagnant offense…. just like how you can probably blame fizdale when multiple veteran players have tanked under his watch this season… it’s not a coincidence that everyone saw huge jumps in production when jackson left….

that’s not to mention the drama that he left behind which isn’t good but i don’t pay any mind to…. i can give fizdale a pass on the memphis drama also… but what’s more important than anything is what you’re doing on the court… and on the court jackson wasn’t good….

why is it personal bias that clouds ppl’s judgement about mark jackson? it’s pretty clear that he didn’t have a great handle on the talents of his team

He was a coach that exhibited excellent mentorship skills and was great at developing a defensive system for a talented young team. He absolutely is the kind of coach that needs an offensive coordinator and might not be able to take you further than the mezzanine. He was ill suited to get the most offensively out of one of the best teams of all time. When he realized he was getting fired, he melted down. He was paranoid, but they were really after him, too.

His records, in order, were: 23-43, 47-35, 51-31.

How does that track record illicit the vitriol in this thread if it is only about basketball?

David Fizdale needs an offensive coordinator, a defensive coordinator, a communications liaison, and someone to diagram plays out of a time out. He has lost 73 out of 92 games and we have yet to find a positive in ANY OF THEM. There has literally not been a game where it looked like Fizdale was adding value or in the process of developing something or someone.

And there are people who won’t admit that Jackson would have been a much better coach of this team? Yeah, I think that’s bias.

David Fizdale needs an offensive coordinator, a defensive coordinator, a communications liaison, and someone to diagram plays out of a time out. And there are people who won’t admit that Jackson would have been a much better coach of this team.

Who said Fizdale is a better coach than Jackson? You’re manufacturing a take out of thin air.

It’s possible Fiz and Jackson are both terrible coaches. And going by this thread, most people here believe that to be true.

Who said Fizdale is a better coach than Jackson?

Quite possibly every single poster on this board in the summer of 2017. They were wrong then, and they’re also wrong now when they think we’re better off with “any random assistant” because Jackson is “an abjectly terrible coach.” There’s a blindness on this subject because it intersects on a ven diagram with another circle that makes people very passionate.

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