Phil Jackson tried to make the day all about Derek Fisher, and that was the right thing to do. He offered an introduction, authored a few brief remarks, handled a few questions volleyed his way, and that was that, that was it.
“Derek has a long list of coaches that he’s worked under and had a tremendous amount of success and we welcome him,” Jackson said, and humbly listed a few of those men, though he left one boldface name off the list, an oversight Fisher quickly corrected.
“Getting a chance to work with Phil again,” he said, “was something that was too good to pass up.”
Fisher was confident and he was self-assured, and it doesn’t seem he will be overwhelmed by the task at hand with the Knicks, even if he ought to be. He gave respect both to the triangle offense about which we will hear incessantly for the immediate future, and also said the Knicks have plenty of talent to win basketball games next year, with Carmelo Anthony or without him.
Maybe that’s so, maybe it’s not. Maybe it was an effort to win the press conference, which is something the Knicks have been a lot better at across the past four decades than ever winning anything that’s actually meaningful once the podiums and the microphones are put away and the backboards, rims and balls return to the gym.
He’ll be given every opportunity to succeed, we know that.
Because for Jackson’s own grand plan to succeed, it means Derek Fisher has to succeed. The blueprint has to include the kind of infrastructure, the kind of talent, the kind of assistants, that will allow us to forget that Fisher brings zero experience to the table.
Look, experience only matters until you get some: Jeff Van Gundy hadn’t spent one minute as a head coach at any level before he was elevated to the job in 1996, and almost 20 years later, Knicks fans grow wistful talking about the teams under his watch, and with reason. The man he succeeded, Don Nelson? Nellie had a dream résumé, and won plenty of games after the Garden, but his tenure in New York was a dumpster fire.
Pat Riley? Hell, we think he was constructed out of holy coaching cloth, but the fact is a week before he became a head coach for the first time, his biggest responsibility was handing out boarding passes to Lakers players, most of whom probably had no idea he’d actually been one of them a few years earlier.
It’s a coin flip. It’s always a coin flip.
Not everyone has to pay their coaching dues like Phil Jackson did, spending years in a nowhere league driving buses to Evansville and La Crosse and battling for every per diem dollar, and so there’s no reason to hold that against Fisher, whose $5 million annual salary will be more than he earned in 14 of his 18 seasons as a player.
It’s just not his show. Maybe it will be someday. Maybe it can be someday. But as much as Jackson tried to make this day about Fisher, it was actually about Jackson, because it will always be about Jackson until this plan actually gets slingshotted into turnaround. Every coaching hire, every player acquisition, every public and private meeting with Carmelo Anthony — all of them will be one more piece to Jackson’s master puzzle.
And so much of that — to date, all of it — is based on faith, and trust, and the belief that Jackson knows what he’s doing now as completely as he did with a whistle around his neck and a clipboard in his hand. Because right now, he is running a club (having never run a club before) and just hired a coach who’s never coached a team before.
There is nothing wrong with this, by the way. But it also means you could use the same logic and next hire Geno Smith as your point guard, since he has as much experience in that job as Jackson and Fisher have in theirs. That’s where faith comes in, and trust, which is how it’s been from the moment Jackson came aboard.
It was Jackson’s day yesterday, and will be tomorrow, and each day next week, and every day until he changes the conversation by changing the culture. Hiring Derek Fisher is a start. But only that. A start.