At this point I don't know what the right direction is...and we as fans only see what we see when the team hits the court & what the media feeds us.
NYK fans hero JVG commended Jeff for his composure that was kept throughout the chaos and the KP injury....before KP injury we were only 4 games out the playoffs.
http://www.espn.com/blog/new-york-k...irable-job-under-very-difficult-circumstances
When Trey first got here he could barely run P&R... now he's getting better
We got Troy Williams showing out and Frank getting better right before our eyes as well
Luke Kornet is even developing and competing with the Knicks....I'm not in love with them but...
Doc or Mark Jackson are GUARANTEED to help this team do better?
Y'all so hype to get hire a coach then get rid of him when we still don't have a solid core in place.
Players are actually showing improvement right now albeit at the end of the year in a lost season
Knicks get a new coach and the chemistry being built could dwindle.....another system will have to be learned and we could set ourselves back.
KP tore his ACL and won't be back until God knows when...
Rome wasn't built in a day man....coaches need a team of able bodies to win. Look at D'Antoni winning in Houston right now when Kobe and Melo didnt adapt to his system. We've got atleast 2-3 more years of rebuilding before we MIGHT be able to "contend" depending on what the other teams in the league look like
1st off, anybody who knows anything about JVG knows that before anything else he is a coaches coach. He would never in a million years throw an active head coach under the bus or criticize the job they do. That's not JVG's style.
2nd, Knicks maintained a playoff record up until new years because as we have gone over they played the easiest most home loaded schedule in the NBA at the time. It would be one thing if they were 4 games out and had maintained a consistent level of play all season. But the Knicks were falling hard at the time and falling fast, KP was no longer playing anywhere near the MVP-caliber level he was playing at in Nov-Dec. Knicks might have 5 more wins right now with KP than they do without him. Team was not even coming close to sniffing a playoff spot regardless.
But I do see what you are getting at. Continuity is very important, for sure, and the Knicks sorely lack it. As for Hornacek's performance, I'm not a hater and really have complimented him for most of the season. He was handed a roster that wasn't his guard happy style from the front office. Was told to preach defense by the same front office who's offseason acquisitions included the likes of Enes Kanter, Doug McDermott, Timmy, and Beasley. Yet in small ball NBA, he somehow had the Knicks competing for awhile starting Jarrett Jack and 2 big men in the starting lineup. The Knicks played a half court system Hornacek designed that somehow still had the ball moving effectively. Even with the easy schedule Hornacek deserves a lot of credit for that, and knowing the Knicks were outkicking their coverage due to an easy schedule and crediting Hornacek are not and were not mutually exclusive factors.
But it wasn't that the Knicks' play as a team dropped off. That much was expected. Hornacek lost me as a coach for a variety of factors late in the season.
1.
I halfway agree. This organization has fell apart for 20+ years now tho fam....NYK is it's own toxic entity]
First and foremost point #1 is exactly what you stated yourself and exactly what I stated in my post. Even in the beginning of the season when the Knicks were outperforming and I was personally crediting Hornacek as team MVP outside of KP, I still knew that he was just delaying the inevitable and wanted him gone.
The Knicks front office is a ******* joke. We all know that. But these ******* idiots fire Phil Jackson just to promote the ******* cockroach who has been at Dolan's side for 20 years now to team president, despite not a single iota of legit basketball experience on his resume. He hired Isiah Thomas, oversaw the franchise through an embarrassing sexual harassment lawsuit, and to make matters worse, during the only period of relative success we have had during the Dolan era, he was working for Magic Johnson's agency because the only legitimate basketball guy we have had running the operations, Donnie Walsh, made sure he got the boot as soon as he started draining the toxic swamp after taking over as team president... only for Dolan to slowly take back control of the organization and rehire Mills in 2013 once he became too cocksure and got the media/fans off his case with some relative success.
We protested Dolan in 2014 which led him to hire Phil Jackson as a deflection, then he fires Phil, just to promote the same toxic force who was running the team during the protests to the position as team president, and everyone just turns a blind eye because they were so happy Phil was canned. It is a FACT that as long as cockroach Steve Mills is running the Knicks, Dolan is running the Knicks, and that should not be tolerated by this franchise 20 years later.
I bring all that up to circle back to my original point. Hornacek was Phil Jackson's hire. You never want to be the last guy's hire because when **** goes wrong you take the fall because the front office gets a pass until they hire "their guy." For that reason more so than anything else, even if Hornacek did a PERFECT job, part of me would still want him to get fired just so Steve Mills has direct accountability to the team so we can speed up the process of him hopefully getting fired and bringing in a legitimate basketball guy to run the operation.
2. Although point 1 stands as most important, Hornacek lost me down the stretch regardless and convinced me he isnt the coach for this team for a number of other reasons I'm about to go over. Although I certainly don't believe that he is a "bad" basketball coach by any standard.
Relying on Jarrett Jack as the starter for as long as he did was ridiculous. It demonstrates a lack of trust in the young players and a lack of willingness to let them play through their mistakes and develop. I dont discount Frank for his own lack of development this season or discount the role age took in the equation as well, but it certainly isn't a good look for Hornacek as the top of the list for any potential head coaching candidate for the Knicks right now should read "PLAYER DEVELOPMENT."
With KP/Frank and another top 10 pick to come in such critical phases of their career, player development stands above all else right now even if that coach was good at player development and sucked in games like Scott Brooks. We can afford another season in the loss column but we CANNOT waste another season with a coach who struggles developing young players (also another reason why doc Rivers is an even more ****** candidate than Hornacek, but at least he would fit part 1 of my equation).
On a similar note, as much as I credited him for shaping an offense that facilitated ball movement during the beginning of the season in a half court setting that really got the most out of a lineup featuring 35 low post big men and a 34 year-old starting PG, Jeff's lack of willingness to tweek the offense after the all-star break shows me the same negative signs as sticking with Jack for so long.
The half-court style offense suited 2 bigs and Jack, it did not suit 3 PGs all under the age of 25 and only 1 big man at a time. That also held back Frank and some of the other young players IMO. Frank is already young and raw and new to the NBA, but trying to orchestrate against NBA defenders in a half court setting all the time certainly didn't help his case as many of the best plays we have seen this season out of Frank have come on the break.
Conflict with Noah was a really bad look. Locker room seemed to develop into chaos a little bit (nothing like last year, which he also coached the team for, but gets a slight pass because of Phil) towards the end of the season. At the end of the day, Noah is here on a guaranteed long-term contract, Hornacek is not. Noah is also well-respected by the players and now has the NBPA on his side. That cant be a good look for Hornacek not only in our own locker room but around the League.
He comes across as a bit of a pushover at times. Doesn't always command respect. Saw that in Phoenix when it certainly wasn't all his fault or even mostly his fault, but he definitely lost control at the end and came across as weak when he was publicly aired out by Markieff Morris. Same thing with the Knicks last year. Wasn't all his fault or mostly his fault but he was still the head coach of one of the most dysfunctional seasons we have seen in a long, storied tradition of dysfunctional seasons.
He also came across as weak by succumbing to Phil Jackson and bringing back the triangle midway through the season. A great coach should always stand up for himself and coach the team to the best of his abilities at all times, even if it costs him his job. Because great coaches know that bending over backwards to the front office and coaching just to protect their job would likely cost them their jobs in the long-run anyway.
If you wanna talk about Van Gundy, I would have loved, LOVED to see Ernie Grunfeld or any other front office guy, come into one of JVG's practices and try to monitor the way he coached the team. Read the book Just Ballin' about the '99 Knicks to get the inside scoop about the way JVG felt about front office interference on his basketball team. Jeff would have died on his sword and left kicking and screaming before he gave into a front office demand about how he should coach/handle his basketball team. If he coached to save his job we would have never even had a '99 Finals run to make him a legend in the first place. Or he would leave entirely before that happened, like he ended up doing when Dolan's stench got more and more powerful. Regardless, the last thing JVG would EVER do as a coach is bend over backwards to his organization's front office and coach to protect his job.
The same is true with Pat Riley. The same is even true of Phil ******* Jackson himself who notoriously HATED Jerry Kraue and constantly feuded with him publicly and disdained him trying to have any sort of influence whatsoever over the players and the team. Great coaches should either be like-minded with great front offices, left to do their own thing by uninvolved front offices, or in renegade combative mode when dealing with a confrontational front office. But the one thing they should never do is give in and come across as weak, especially midway through the season. So yeah, that was something else that made Hornacek come across as a weak leader and contributed to the dysfunction that was the 2017 Knicks.
He never fired Kurt Rambis.... enough said.
And that's just all I can think of off the top of my head about why Hornacek isn't the right coach for us. But again, 75% of my reasoning all has to do with #1. That we need to allow this franchise to hire "their guy" and claim full accountability over this team good or bad. If it wasn't for that reason I might be more willing to overlook some of the other **** I wrote and get down with the "why not give the guy one last shot" mentality.
With "the last guy's hire" in place there will always be a barrier between the front office and full accountability until they hire "their guy" whether that is this summer or the next, and that isn't good considering that the front office themselves are just another barrier of accountability for Dolan. We definitely don't want 2 barriers from Dolan on an organization that runs from accountability more so than anything else, so yeah, Jeff's gotta go.
“At the same time, I do feel I did a great job my rookie season. Second year, they drafted another point guard [Exum] — which kind of messed with my mind. It played with me a little bit. That’s where it went wrong. My rookie season the coach [Tyrone Corbin] gets fired. Going into the second year, it’s a whole new coaching staff to get used to. Sometimes it don’t work out.’’
You can easily play both sides to that equation. It works as much as it doesn't work. Look at Golden State and what they accomplished after they fired Don Nelson with one of the worst records in the NBA and a developing young roster and brought in Mark Jackson and then replaced him with Kerr and took another step forward into greatness. Look at Milwaukee who replaced Larry Drew (and that was after only 1 season, not even 2) after Giannis' unspectacular rookie season in which they won 15 games and brought in Jason Kidd who led the Bucks to the playoffs in his first season and helped transform Giannis into "The Greek Freak." Do you imagine Giannis being the same player he is today if the Bucks decided to wait it out with Larry Drew during his formative years?
A lot of it just falls on the individual player themself and IMO Trey never had it in him to succeed in the NBA until he developed into a more capable/consistent scorer, since he is an undersized scoring PG after all who isn't a great floor general or exceptionally athletic (not exactly a premium type of player unless you can really get buckets), which took him some time to do and get that kick in the *** he needed from the G-League. So I wouldn't necessarily equate Tryey Burke's current success to coaching changes in Utah or Jeff Hornacek. It was just the path he needed as a player more so than anything else.
But like you said, it's also about hiring the right guy. I know for a fact that guy is not Doc Rivers that's for damn sure.
(Sorry for rant, it's been a minute
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