Kristaps Porzingis skipped his exit meeting with the Knicks to express his frustration with the way the organization is being run. He is spending the summer working out in Latvia rather than the Knicks’ facilities. If a franchise cornerstone, unicorn of a player skipped the exit meeting with 29 other franchises, the team president and GM would have been knocking on his door the next morning looking to talk about his concerns, listen, and make a guy the team should be building around feels appreciated and listened to.
Instead, Phil Jackson took it as a slight and threatened to trade Porzingis to send a message.
Add that to a treatment of Carmelo Anthony that has free agents seeing the Knicks as a refuge of last resort, not to mention forcing the triangle offense on players who do not want, and there’s a lot of reasons to question Phil Jackson’s leadership of the Knicks.
All of that has James Dolan, the Knicks owner, ready to let go of Jackson and make a change, something first reported by Adrian Wojnarowski of The Vertical at Yahoo Sports. The move will be sold as a mutual parting of the ways, which is true in the sense that Jackson started to realize in the past week what was about to go down and made it so.The New York Knicks are planning to part ways with embattled President of Basketball Operations Phil Jackson later this morning, league sources told The Vertical.
Owner James Dolan has been weighing Jackson’s future role running the franchise and seriously considering his dismissal despite two years and $24 million-plus left on his contract, league sources told The Vertical....
Dolan has become increasingly concerned about Jackson’s fitness for the job and the long-term prospects of success for the franchise, especially in the aftermath of Jackson entertaining trades for Kristaps Porzingis, the franchise’s 21-year-old burgeoning star, league sources told The Vertical.
Ramona Shelburne of ESPN added:
Conversations about what was best for the team’s future between Jackson and Knicks owner James Dolan accelerated this week when the franchise decided it would not buy out embattled forward Carmelo Anthony, sources said....
It had become clear, sources said, that Jackson had no plans to remain beyond the two years left on the five-year contract he initially signed in 2014. So with no clear path forward from the toxic situation with Anthony, a constant public relations war over Jackson’s preferred triangle offense, and new concerns about the organization’s relationship with Latvian phenom and 2015 No. 4 overall pick Kristaps Porzingis, sources said it was clear things had reached a breaking point by the eve of free agency.
How are Knicks fans reacting?
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With free agency starting in just days, the timing of this is tough, but frankly, the Knicks stand a better chance of landing free agents without Jackson in the mix. Expect current GM and trusted Dolan confidante Steve Mills to get the job temporarily.
When Jackson took over the Knicks it was hoped that for $12 million a year he could keep James Dolan at arm’s length from basketball decisions — he has done that — and that he would finally provide a direction and for the Knicks. The latter part has not happened. He hired Derek Fisher as coach, who realized the Knicks were not ready to run the triangle so he tried to run a hybrid offense, but that never clicked. Fisher also never clicked with the players, and got into a spat with Matt Barnes that was very public. Fisher was let go and Jeff Hornacek was brought in to run his more modern, up-tempo offense, but then he was given Derrick Rose and Joakim Noah to go with the aging Anthony, with little else but Porzingis around them, and that didn’t work. Now the Knicks are back to the triangle, and players are not happy.
Jackson is unquestionably one of the great coaches the game has ever seen, a man with a great basketball mind, but the skills of coaching and the skills of running basketball operations are different things.
You can say it’s time for the Knicks to move on from Jackson but If not Jackson, then who?
Go ahead and joke that “anybody is better” but we have seen Dolan’s hires before and know that’s not true. Isiah Thomas is still out there. Much like Dan Gilbert in Cleveland, you don’t want to just fire your GM at this point of the year unless you have the next guy lined up. Does anyone believe Dolan has thought that far ahead? There are plenty of quality candidates, including the released David Griffin from Cleveland, but how fast can the Knicks get a man with a plan in place.
Still, this is a good thing for the franchise. The timing of it is just very Knicks.