Barnstorming: Escape from New York

Yesterday, Derek Fisher was relieved of his duties as head coach of the New York Knicks. Well, that’s a gentle way of saying it. Fisher was fired. Which makes him the third coach in as many weeks to lose his job, and the fifth head coach to be replaced during this season.

The evidence that the Knicks were not good is fairly strong — a 23-31 record, 12th in the Eastern Conference, outscored by an average of 2.5 points per 100 possessions, and losers of nine of their last 10 games. The evidence that they were not as good as they should have been is a little bit thinner. The front office may have had playoff aspirations, but they weren’t realistic. Even in this jumbled and chaotic Eastern Conference, New York’s talent is a tier below. Still, Fisher struggled with enough different things — rotations, in-game adjustments, winning the hearts and minds of the players — that there was more than enough to justify a change. Not that justification is really needed in these situations.

Over the past decade and a half, the Knicks have come to represent a certain level of organizational chaos. Many of the names and faces have changed but there is still a lingering aura of the overconfident and reactionary, a franchise that is constantly in the process of pushing its chips to the center of the table and dramatically throwing down a pair of eights. There was a time when they were a legitimate tire fire. Now, the Knicks are just a mid-level team struggling with their own limitations.

Placed in a context of the recent past, the Fisher firing could be seen as just the continuation of a pattern. A mistake is rashly rectified by plowing headfirst into another mistake, with the whole sequence wrapped up in absurdly optimistic valuations of players, coaches, and their fortunes. Firing Fisher doesn’t seem quite as desperate and flailing as some of the franchise’s moves in the past.

However, this organization, for all the passage of time, for all the transformative regimes and roster turnover, still projects as a group in love with the idea of a savior. In my lifetime, it’s been Larry Brown, and then Isiah Thomas, then Mike D’Antoni. It’s been Donnie Walsh and Phil Jackson, Amare Stoudemire and Carmelo Anthony, and too many respectable, but not quite elite, veterans to count. I don’t mean to imply that the Knicks have been looking for a shortcut, although I’m sure they would welcome an obvious one if it presented itself. It’s just that the Knicks don’t appear interested in getting on the elevator unless they’ve been assured it will hit the top floor.

This summer the Knicks appeared to pivot, playing it unexpectedly safe on the free agent market. The paid reasonable prices for solid, if unspectacular, players like Robin Lopez, Arron Afflalo, and Kyle O’Quinn. They even took a low cost gamble on Derrick Williams, instead of their normal approach of throwing good money after bad. This conservative approach was widely seen as a positive step, a new organizational maturity. The Zen of Phil finally taking hold.

In his press conference, Jackson implied that Fisher was fired because the team wasn’t playing as well as they could have. If we assume that Jackson is at least somewhat grounded in reality, that he understands the team had been playing over its heads, there is still a small sliver of space where his statement could be true. And it’s certainly both fair and reasonable for him to make a judgement call about whether Fisher was doing the best job possible to take them where they wanted to go. But past mistakes apply an enormous amount of pressure. Even if this was the calm and rational move, it’s simply too close to what came before. It becomes part of the legend of New York flip-flopping and micromanaging, even if it doesn’t really belong there.

You can do the right thing, for the right reasons, and still look bad. And, of course, still fail. Kurt Rambis will finish the season as head coach and will apparently be given every opportunity to the win job for next season. Given his track record — a disastrous two years in Minnesota that were far worse than even his 32-132 record implies — it’s hard to imagine he’s any sort of long-term answer. Maybe he stabilizes the things Jackson thought were flagging, maybe he helps scaffold the development of Kristaps Porzingis and Jerian Grant until their next head coach arrives. There is simply too much baggage here to tell if the Knicks have really moved towards the kinds of patient, slow-building processes that have been anathema to them for so long. Whether firing Fisher is just a bump on the way to something new, or a backslide towards the wild hand-waving of old.

Because, after all this money, time, blood, sweat, and gnashing of teeth, transcendence continues to elude the New York Knicks. Their long journey to the middle continues.