Phil Jackson came to the Knicks with 11 championship rings, a Hall of Fame dossier as a coach and, most importantly, zero days of experience for the task he was being paid $60 million to perform.
You think Garden chairman Jim Dolan might want some of his money back now?
From the start, Jackson totally miscalculated the 2014-15 Knicks, seeing them as a playoff team for this season. His plan was to take this season’s success an use the playoffs to attract free agents this coming summer, and then watch the Knicks take off toward a title. In Jackson’s mind, the arrow was pointing up from day one.
Oops.
As he’s shown, he’s as new at his job as his beleaguered coach, Derek Fisher, is at his.
“Obviously I didn’t do the right thing in picking the group of guys that were here,” Jackson said over the weekend.
So now that Plan A has gone up in smoke with what has turned into the worst start in franchise history, you have to really wonder if the Zen Master can pull off Plan B.
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Let’s also remember that as much as Jackson wants to tell everyone that he’s starting from scratch -- “to begin, to restart,’’ as he put it -- he really hasn't taken the Knicks back to square one at Madison Square Garden. Jackson had a chance to take the team down to the studs last summer and do a total rebuild. Blowing it up entirely made the most sense, but he decided he needed to build around Carmelo Anthony to get the playoff berth he wanted for this spring.
Now Jackson is trying to rebuild a superstar scorer who has:
A) A bum knee that likely will require surgery, but only after he participates in the All-Star Game next month in the Garden.
B) A maximum salary deal that will clog the team’s salary cap for the foreseeable future, with his salary skyrocketing from $22.5 million this season to $26.2 million in three more seasons.
C) A deal that includes a no-trade clause, meaning that Anthony has the power to block any deals, if Jackson would somehow be lucky enough to find a team to take him off his hands.
There’s nothing worse in the NBA than rebuilding with an older, unmovable “max’’ player who appears to be breaking down at the age of 30 and has the power to stay put.
With a chance to start fresh last July, Jackson did hitch his wagon to a player who is tough to build around and has advanced out of the first round of the playoffs only twice. How tough will it be? Jackson is going to find out in July, when we hit the main part of Plan B.
It looks like Jackson is going to have to do an epic sales job to convince marquee free agents that they should come to New York. Let’s see, first they will want to play with Anthony, a notorious ball-stopper.
Then they’ll also want to play for Fisher, who has been overmatched as his team has won only five games all season while plummeting to the bottom of the Eastern Conference. And let’s not forget, whether it’s Plan A, B or C, anyone who decides to play for the Knicks must accept the fact that they’re happy to play in a Triangle system that only has worked when Jackson coached it and when Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant performed in it.
“We hope we’re on the right track, even though this is not the track that we anticipated,’’ Jackson said.
There’s nothing guaranteed when you’re chasing stars, as Jackson freely admitted during his latest State of the Knicks address on Saturday, as the Knicks were about to lose their 15th straight game.
Jackson remembered how the Scott Layden-led Knicks in 2002 chased “Antonio McDyess.’’ He remembered the ‘70’s, when he was still in New York, when “we went out and got Spencer Haywood and then we went out and got Bob McAdoo and we kept searching for the big star to change our fortunes, which has never happened over the last 45 years or so.”
But the Knicks’ luck will have to change this summer if Jackson’s grand plans have any chance of working.
“We’re all worried about the fact that money is not going to just be able to buy you necessary talent,” Jackson said. “You’re going to have to have places where people want to come and play. But... we have no lack of agents that have contacted us for their players. We still think that we have a really good chance to develop a team.”
Jackson certainly has every right to believe that. But after the way things have started, Knicks fans have a right to be a lot more skeptical.
Longtime New York columnist Mitch Lawrence continues to write about pro basketball, as he’s done for the last 21 years. His columns for NBCNewYork.com on the Knicks, Brooklyn Nets and the NBA, along with other major sports, will appear twice weekly. Follow him on Twitter @Mitch _ Lawrence.
