Mike Vaccaro

Mike Vaccaro

NBA

Jackson, new coach must agree for Knicks’ sake

It’s been two decades, and then some, since the Knicks were able to perfectly marry a coach and a general manager, and if that sounds like an absurd sentence … well, these are the Knicks we are talking about. And while it is a civic privilege to base all of this on James Dolan, the fact is this has been an ongoing piece of Knicks ridiculousness going back to Red Holzman’s second tour of duty.

So Steve Kerr ought to know that, as things begin to get serious between him and the Knicks, as he and Phil Jackson retreat to their separate corners to ponder their meeting in Greenwich Village Friday night. But, then, Kerr knows plenty about how devastating such dysfunction can be: his time as the Suns’ GM was marked by an unhappy alliance with Mike D’Antoni, a coach that might have actually shared zero of Kerr’s philosophies about basketball.

So, yes: Hirer beware.

And hire-ee, too.

“There are things that Phil and I agrees to discuss further, all kinds of things, organizationally, personnel-wise,” Kerr said Sunday night, as his dual and dueling professional paths mingled perfectly over the weekend, Friday The Knickerbocker for chow and chat with the new boss of Zen Plaza and Sunday behind the microphone for Nets-Raptors.

“But those discussions are all private.”

This much is very public: the Knicks long and inglorious history of coaches and GMs who can barely stand to be in the same room together, let alone existing on the same page.

Hubie Brown and Dave DeBusschere were a calamity; somehow, Rick Pitino and Al Bianchi were worse. Jeff Van Gundy and Ernie Grunfeld worked so well that one of them had to be fired to restore organizational peace. Larry Brown and Isiah Thomas weren’t exactly corporate soul mates. There are others. Too many others.

The exception, not surprisingly, was the pairing of Dave Checketts and Pat Riley, at least at the beginning, when Riley was chastened by his firing in Los Angeles and was willing to be a coach and nothing but a coach, before his megalomaniacal side became too much and he had to flee or be fleeced. It is no coincidence that those first three years together, 1992-93-94, the Knicks owned New York with a vapor grip, and came tantalizingly close to climbing the elusive championship summit.

Same page, same philosophy, one voice, one brain.

Kerr already knows how damaging it can be if that isn’t the foundation of a professional partnership. He was brought into Phoenix to be D’Antoni’s boss at a time when D’Antoni had begun to believe his own press clippings, when he believed that he really would become the first coach to win an NBA title without any of his players guarding anyone else’s.

Kerr wanted to hire Tom Thibodeau to be D’Antoni’s assistant. The coach resisted. He brought in a spent Shaquille O’Neal and planted him in the middle of seven-seconds-or-less. Soon enough, D’Antoni fled to the Knicks … where (naturally) it never exactly felt like he and Donnie Walsh were ever going to be fishing buddies.

So as much as it seems that Kerr will be a natural fit here — successful pro, championship player, played (and well) for Jackson, knows intimately all of Jackson’s sacred basketball creeds — there has to be more than a surface belief that they can work together. It won’t be easy being Jackson’s public arm; if the Knicks win, it’ll be because they were smart enough to finally hire Jackson. If they lose, well, Kerr will absorb most of that.

And that’s just the starting point.

“There’s a lot to discuss with a job like this, on both ends, both sides,” Kerr said. “We’ll further the conversations.”

They’d better. And those conversations had better yield one simple result: that they are moving in the same direction, same voice, same brain. Even if Jackson himself used to try and play the iconoclast, and play up his differences with Jerry Krause when Krause was his boss in Chicago, he’s lately conceded that they worked a lot better together than he was ever willing to previously admit.

Of course they did. That’s the only way it worked in Chicago. And the only way it’ll work in New York. Whether it’s Kerr or somebody — anybody — else.