The David Fizdale Coaching Death Watch Is Over

Mark Jackson feels like our destiny. Like the Final Boss we have to confront before we exit the dungeon.

The tea leaves readers who called Pills and Dolan walking out last night as the end of the road have to be feeling good about themselves.

Good riddance to Fiz.

Now do Mills and Perry next.

the team will probably improve…. if elf is back to his old self i think this offense starts looking better… it still probably won’t be good but it’ll be better….

i don’t think there’s any way… unless we magically get over 30 wins… that mills and perry will survive this…. them firing fiz this early is a clear sign they are in trouble….

Feels like most of what there is to be said has already been said since we knew this day was coming for a while. He had absolute trash rosters to work with in both his seasons and still did more than enough to convince absolutely everyone that he wasn’t the right man for the job. We watched him coach ~100 games and you really couldn’t even begin to say what it is he stands for as a head coach. Is he offensive minded? Defensive minded? Does he want his teams to play fast or slow? What are his principles on offense? Defense? Even very, very bad teams can be capable of answering these questions if they have good coaches although in all the cases people will cite there was also a competent organizational structure in place and the rosters generally made sense. He absolutely deserved to be fired and yet firing him solves absolutely nothing.

Anyway on to the next one I guess.

Dead man walking. That’s what Fiz has been since that Mills/Perry news conference. I’m not apologizing for Fizdale but once that took place, his fate was sealed. The players gave up on him and I have no doubt that they stopped playing for him. There was nothing he could do after that to turn the page.

Fiz failed. He wasn’t qualified to coach a young team. But who is? Who’s next? Is there a human alive that can change this team? I really don’t know.

the good news is they already did the press conference. already getting more efficient. i remember when i could at least feign enthusiasm when we fired a bad coach.

Mark Jackson feels like our destiny. Like the Final Boss we have to confront before we exit the dungeon.

The worst thing about Mark Jackson is he costs money. You can’t bring him in to be an interim. So if he takes the job, it’s a multi-year deal, and then means Mills & Perry are sticking around.

The best thing about Mike Miller is that it means him, Mills, & Perry will likely all be gone by the summer.

I say let Steve Mills coach the team with an ultimatum like Dolan did to Isiah.

I was thinking about that the other day. If the league hadn’t stepped in and forced Dolan to hire Walsh, he wasn’t even prepared to let Isiah go back then! Dolan is bizarrely loyal to “his guys.”

Wait….

Was it really as sinister as “we’ll fire him as soon as Payton comes back so that all the improvement that comes from having a real PG will be attributed to the coach and us?”

I think it was.

With 9 days before FA can get traded, how much worse is this team going to be? I expect a wholesale gutting of the roster and we’ll be back to square 1.

When all this madness dies down, I want to know what turned up in all your spotify best of the decade playlists.

Well the madness won’t end, but I have been slowly thinking about my favorite albums of the decade so here’s my long list (in alphabetical order):

Arcade Fire – The Suburbs
Autre Ne Veut – Anxiety
Beach House – Bloom
Bon Iver – Bon Iver, Bon Iver
Broken Social Scene – Forgiveness Rock Record
Carly Rae Jepsen – Emotion
Cortney Barnett – Sometimes I Sit And Think…
D’Angelo – Black Messiah
David Bowie – Blackstar
Fiona Apple – The Idler Wheel…
Frank Ocean – Blonde
Grimes – Art Angels
Hop Along – Painted Shut
Kacey Musgraves – The Golden Hour
Kanye West – MBDTF
Kendrick Lamar – To Pimp a Butterfly (though you could pick any one, really)
Lana Del Rey – Norman Fucking Rockwell
LCD Soundsystem – American Dream
Los Campesinos! – Romance is Boring
Lykke Li – Wounded Rhymes
My Bloody Valentine – mbv
The National – Sleep Well Beast
Radiohead – A Moon Shaped Pool
Sharon Van Etten – Are We There?
Solance – A Seat at the Table
St. Vincent – Strange Mercy
Sufjan Stevens – Carrie and Lowell
Tame Impala – Lonerism
Vampire Weekend – Modern Vampires Of The City
Wilco – The Whole Love

What the fuck? This Woj bomb is absurd. “Knicks assistants Mike Miller and Pat Sullivan are candidates to become interim head coach, league sources tell @ramonashelburne and me.”

HOW DID THEY NOT KNOW WHO THE NEXT COACH WOULD BE BEFORE THEY FIRED FIZDALE?!

How is the roster going to be gutted when they have like, two above-average players, one of which (Mitch) is unlikely to be traded?

It is interesting, with Woj reporting the story, to note that Woj and Perry are thisclose. Remember Woj talking about how good the Knicks’ offseason was?

It is hilarious that they didn’t announce the interim immediately as if Fiz was some bleeding leg that had to be immediately amputated…..

I bet we can get Rick Pitino at a steep discount.

mase, be honest: are you on the MSG payroll

I wish I was on the payroll. Gimme dolans $!

A good start, now fire Steve Mills and we’ll be getting somewhere

it’d be nice to see what miller can do but it’s probably not gonna change much… this is why midseason firings suck… because you’re picking from a bunch of guys on the bench that also led to the sucking also…

It’s also just logistically hard. There isn’t a lot of practice time once the season is in full swing.

On the other hand I do think there’s some potential low hanging fruit in terms of playing smaller and going to a more standard style. Start Payton-Frank-RJ-Morris-Mitch and start every posession with a spread PnR and this would look like a normal-ish NBA team. It’s even possible to envision that being fairly entertaining. You can’t really play that style all the time because you have a pretty severe lack of wings, but DSJ-Trier/Ellington-Knox-Portis-Randle as a 2nd unit captures some of the same flavor. It won’t make the team good in large part because the PGs aren’t good enough to play that way but they can’t be much worse on offense and it would at least be an identifiable style that doesn’t look twenty years out of date.

I feel a bit bad for Perry. Not that he was very good, but he was much better than Mills/Fiz and probably never got to do his job cleanly with Mills always suggesting stupid shit.

I kind of feel like he doesn’t suck. It strikes me that Mills makes the macro decisions and it’s Perry’s job to execute them.

Our trades are good, for instance. It feels like Perry is in charge of that. Mills may say we’re getting rid of Porzingis, but Perry is the guy who goes out and gets a package with two first round picks in it.

looks like it’s mike miller. nickname can be “no, not that”

i think we can start to worry that if mills/perry are concerned enough to pull the trigger on their own hire this quickly, they might try some obscene win-now flailing before the deadline. i know this sounds ridiculous with a 4-18 team. but ridiculous is usually the exact thing to worry about in this part of town.

Like when Phil was in a similar position back in 2014-15, I think that the record is bad enough that even their worst impulses won’t be acted on.

my point is that one of the biggest issues is continuity.

The continuity can be the young guys- Mitch, Barrett, etc. and that can start now. The problem Mills/Perry made is that they tried, moronically, to skip ahead in the rebuilding process due to their obvious promise to Dolan that they’d be major players in the free agent market. Continuity is fine, but it’s the continuity from now with the young guys, not “Keep Taj Gibson around.”

On Twitter, I noted that this is one of the more embarrassing ways that you could handle firing a coach, and people kept arguing other coaching fires were worse. But, like, “one of the more embarrassing” is right there in what I said, no?

Also, someone argued them firing Horny when their flight landed at 3am after the last game of the 2017-18 season was worse than this. That doesn’t make any sense to me.

Happy days are here again! Haha!

@47 – Brian, turn-over should not be more than 50% of your roster – ever. A smart GM would retail 2/3 of this putrid team, and add a pick or two.
Landing in the lottery for 2 straight decades has led the Knicks to this.
Build with a mix of kids and vets.

Also, someone argued them firing Horny when their flight landed at 3am after the last game of the 2017-18 season was worse than this. That doesn’t make any sense to me.

That seems like the right way to do it to me. Like it sucks to get fired at 3am (probably? at least you’re in NY so the bars are still open) but NBA schedules are weird and that’s the end of their day. You can’t fire him before the flight without making things pretty awkward, and you don’t want him coming in to coach practice the next morning so there’s kind of an inescapable logic there.

That seems like the right way to do it to me.

Right? It just seemed odd. Like, Willie Randolph’s 3am firing during a West Coast trip when the Mets won their game that night? Okay, that’s definitely worse. But Horny’s firing seemed downright normal.

I just want a coach who will yell at these coddled millionaires until spittle flies in their faces. At least until they win a few games.

Also: can they maybe go ahead and fire Portis too?

Does anyone have any reasoning for why they waited until so late in the day / didn’t do this last night?

Dolan asked Mills what they were saying on the knicks blogs today, and Mills reported back that they were talking about the top 50 TV shows of the past decade, so Dolan fired Fiz.

Yeah but maybe just recognizing that Kornet is at least as good but probably better than Portis for 1/100th of the price is the move to make… and it offers continuity to boot!

Man, did I hate that move then and I hate it even more now and I wasn’t even much of a Kornet fan. And Kornet doesn’t even really play for the Bulls (he is another one of those moves where it seems like the GM didn’t even check with the coach, “So, will you play this guy? No? Shit, I should have asked before we signed him”).

talent matters more than continuity…. continuity is good when you have talent… when you don’t have talent… continuity sucks….

i mean the lakers turned over their whole roster in two years… and look where they are now…

go get good players… once you do that you can start to think about who can stick around…. we signed lance thomas to a long term contract for the sake of continuity… that’s not a winning move…

You should have high roster turnover if your roster sucks. Continuity ain’t gonna make bad veteran players good.

One of the underrated aspects of the Process Sixers was that they defied the whole “you need a veteran presence to help the young guys.” Whoops, apparently you don’t actually.

Andrew Wiggins looks like an NBA player these days. He’s young enough to convince Dolan that we can add a young star for nothing but expirings (you know Minnesota’s POBO, a Morey disciple, is dying to move Wiggins at the first opportunity), and these guys are desperate enough.

Morris, Portis, and Dallas’ unprotected pick for Andrew Wiggins. I’m afraid.

Other than that, Mike Miller can actually get the full time gig if he can get some of the young guys to play to their potential. A LOT of the this team’s problems disappear if Payton stays healthy and Mitch stops fouling. Between Mitch, Morris, Barrett, Ntilikina, and Payton the Knicks have a good defensive line up they can stick to. The rotation going forward should be Payton, Ntilikina, Barrett, Morris, Robinson, Randle, Trier, and Gibson with sprinkles of Knox, Smith Jr, and Ellington as they earn the time. I’m hopeful Mike Miller will prioritize young guys and give Julius Randle the Kanter treatment.

I didn’t necessarily think these guys would be stellar, except Randle, but seems like they should have been able to cobble a decent team together.

I think a big part of the problem (which is on both the coach and the front office) is that the signings only make sense the way you’ve looked at them, which is in a vacuum, taking each one individually and without any context of the other signings or the roster that existed.

There was absolutely no sense of like “Okay we want to play like X and we currently have A, B and C which means that we need a player who can do Y and Z, therefore we’ve gone for Julius Randle”. It was just we had a lot of money to spend and here were five guys who were willing to take the money. This may be a structural problem with trying to build a whole team in FA in a single year where you don’t land any of the big guys. They never really knew what the had so they never really knew what they needed. But the resultant roster is totally lopsided which is itself an indictment of the signings.

Firing Fizdale is like cutting off your rotten toe when your leg has gangrene.

Fizdale did not recognize or play the best possible lineups for two years straight and never ran an offense/defense that fit the personnel. He was not a good coach. I’m glad we are moving on from him. But honestly, for 2 years straight he was given a huge pile of shit for a team that did not fit together.

Pop would have had a tough time putting together coherent lineups with this team.

Mills is an obvious incompetent and has to go, but Perry is just as bad.

People are cutting Perry some slack because he didn’t sink us with any terrible long term contracts, but he has brought in an endless stream of one way terrible basketball players that didn’t fit together. He ultimately traded KP for 2 non lottery picks that will probably net us a couple of 18 year old kids that will become good role players in 2028, a 3rd string PG, and stuck us with an extra 2 years of Noah’s contract instead of Lee and Noah simply dropping off this year.

I’d add drafting Knox instead over Mikal Bridges to his resume, but some people say it was Fiz that pushed for that.

To be honest, I’m also no enamored with the Randle deal. I’m a Randle fan, but he’s the 3rd option on a team with a stretch C (like KP) or he’s a backup C/PF. He’s not a primary option and not a good match at PF with Mitch. If I was in charge, he’d be the first guy I tried to trade because the contract is not good and Mitch isn’t going anywhere.

The only good thing he did was draft Mitch and I’ve been told it was someone else that wanted him.

Perry is a terrible “basketball” mind that just happens to not give out long term contracts. He’s bad!

Mills, Perry, and everyone that Mills hired all have to go. We have to start fresh with a good basketball mind at the top hiring all his own people and then rebuild with the few nice pieces, space, and assets we have.

Oh certainly the roster is lopsided, but I figured some players would work out and get signed longer term, a prolonged tryout of sorts.

I wasn’t convinced that Randle couldn’t play with Mitch either.

Of course I never really saw much footage of Randle before. Seems like a scout should have diagnosed it. Strat did.

Most of my conclusions about Randle were based on his numbers, I don’t have the time or inclination to go through and watch games from other teams, so stats are what I have. Even then it seems like we should be able to use Randle more effectively than we are. Interested in seeing what a new coach can do with Randle.

I know I shouldn’t pay attention to ESPN but Kendrick Perkins needs to be slapped. He’s like, “(Fiz) was set up to fail” and “I support you” Great, can’t wait until LBJ weighs in. They’re 4-18 and coming off back to back 40 point losses! Anyone and everyone deserves to be fired. I agree Mills/ Perry even more so and Dolan should face a fucking firing squad but Fiz as a victim? Really?

Some part of me hopes the Knicks sign Jackson as the interim. I don’t think they’ll win another game with him this season, then we won’t have to worry about him anymore.

Mike Miller’s college resume doesn’t seem that impressive, although he did make the tourney once with Southwest Texas (now Texas State). And his gleague success might have been talent driven. But also who cares? He at least has had recent success getting groups of young players to play well, I figure he’s worth a shot.

If Wiggins is the next move, I’m done forever. I know it’s idle speculation but it is so, so Knicksy.

Knicks are so dumb yup but I really believed when I took the over. I was annoyed at a 30 win roster with the 9th pick but really thought that was a lock. This roster is not good but better than 4-18. Fizdale was truly horrible.

Actually, it’s worked out well. Not that I’m not heart sick. I hate watching the team I’ve idolized since childhood get stomped night after night but we now have a chance to shed some pieces, pick up an impact player in the draft and make better FA decisions.

It’s more that I’m tired of the same thoughts year after year. Seems all lotto teams get better but us.

I agree that if they go all in on Andrew Wiggins and trade assets I’m gonna look for a new hobby

How many coaches and executives are currently not working for the Knicks but are still being paid by them?