Good for him. Better for his team.
Good for Mike Woodson, drilled daily in both basketball and dignity by his coach at Broad Ripple High School, Bill Smith, and schooled by Bob Knight every second of his college life at Indiana about respecting the team, respecting the game.
Good for Woodson, who finally reached his boiling point with a talented but tormented basketball miscreant named J.R. Smith. For parts of three seasons he’d tried the fatherly approach, the friendly approach, the avuncular approach, the carrot rather than the stick. Smith never listened, never learned.
And so he sat.
“I’m not addressing anything about J.R. Smith,” Woodson said before Thursday night’s game with the Heat.
“I’m not commenting about J.R. Smith,” Woodson said afterward.
But in between, his actions, they said plenty. They said Smith had finally used up lifetime supplies of do-overs and mulligans.
Officially, on the NBA score sheet, it was described thusly: “DNP – Coach’s Decision.” Three initials and two words that said more — so much more — than anything Woodson could have summoned pregame or postgame. And the best part of this for Woodson, for the Knicks, for the 19,812 inside Madison Square Garden who finally got themselves something to see inside the transformed walls?
They won. They beat the Heat 102-92, their third straight win, their fourth in five games in the new year, fourth in five over Miami dating back to last year. The coach had said, “Enough!” without actually saying “Enough,” he’d stopped drawing lines in the sand and drew one in concrete instead.
And as a reward, his team gave him their best effort of the season.
In his finest hour.
“Been a great year so far,” said Raymond Felton, who had his best game of the season, 13 points and 14 assists. “2013 is behind us. It’s a new year.”
“We played great on both ends of the floor,” said Amar’e Stoudemire, also splendid, 14 points and 11 rebounds. “We’re starting to gain a little momentum.”
“A momentum booster,” said Carmelo Anthony, brilliant all around, whose 29 points, eight rebounds and five assists almost perfectly countered LeBron James’ 32, six and five. “A confidence booster.”
And maybe — just maybe — an attitude adjuster.
Woodson is no fool. This was his 633rd game as a head coach in the NBA, enough that he knows well Chuck Daly’s old mantra: “It’s a players’ league. They allow you to coach them or they don’t. And once they stop allowing you to coach, you’re on your way out.”
Maybe Woodson wasn’t that close to the abyss — even in the season’s darkest hours, it seemed Knicks’ brass was disinclined to replace him — but the season sure has been teetering close to it for a while. And Smith — who has played terribly, and often stupidly, and lately without any sense of decorum at all — had to be eating at the core of Woodson’s basketball soul.
He would never say that in exact terms; he is too much the gentleman for that. And even on the night when he kept the Knicks’ rotation only eight deep — the night he finally threw up his hands and kept Smith from ever even peeling off his warm-ups, on national TV, against the defending champs — he refused to take a verbal hammer to Smith.
He simply hit him where it really hurts. Smith has been fined more than $900,000 in his career for various transgressions — think about that for a second; nine hundred large — and that hasn’t been enough to shake him into maturity. He’s been lampooned on back pages, cartooned by out-of-town crowds, made a spectacle of himself on Twitter.
And the impact, always, was nil.
This time, Woodson took away his minutes, stripped him of playing time. Turned him from sixth man to scrub, a celebrity-row spectator to go along with Kate Upton and Michael J. Fox. Maybe that will finally reach him, finally teach him. He certainly looked humbled and chastened.
“My feelings obviously don’t matter,” Smith said. “I’m just worried about the team. … We won, we beat Miami, a championship team. So I can’t complain.”
And that goes for Saturday, too, in Philadelphia. It will be tempting for Woodson to try to bring him back, because playing eight men a night is asking for trouble. And Melo, ever the wingman, said: “I need him in Philadelphia.” But he also said: “I stay out of that.”
No. That’s on Mike Woodson, a good man who made a great stand Thursday night, sent a message and was rewarded with a victory. Good for him. Better for the Knicks.