Jeff Hornacek basically thinks the triangle offense is going to bring free agents to New York
The season’s not quite over for New York, they’ve got so much left to give us as they soldier on through one more month and 14 more glorious games.
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A recent win over Indiana on Tuesday caused the Pacers to fall into conniptions, of course, as the Pacers are fighting for a playoff spot and the Knicks most certainly are not. An upcoming trip out West could see New York playing the role of spoiler against either hoped-for or certain playoff participants from Portland, Utah, San Antonio and Los Angeles. A trip back home to end March could see the Knicks acting as spoiler for the Eastern brand of postseason wannabes, with Detroit and Miami both coming into Madison Square Garden.
It would seem a wonderful time to batten down the hatches and commit to a pennywise style of basketball that could help the team compete, yet not win too much. More pick and roll play down the stretch of the team’s final 14 games, so as to not only upset the NBA lottery’s apple cart with a few too many wins, but to also practice and re-practice a style of play that in the eyes of team president Phil Jackson, has its limitations due to the predictable nature of its orthodox stylings.
It’s a lose-lose scenario for New York, so you’d think they’d warm to it. Alas, the team has apparently decided to take my advice and fully commit to the triangle offense, some three years too late. Coach Jeff Hornacek thinks it may even lure free agents. From Ian Begley at ESPN:
“There might be players that think [the triangle offense is a deterrent], but there are also probably players out there that say ‘Oh man, I’d like to run something like that,'” Hornacek said Wednesday. “There are guys that may not necessarily like to run around and in [screen] staggers and all that stuff. It’s still an offense where guys, if they’re knowledgeable about the game, should like.”
From Al Iannazzone at Newsday:
“It’s a strategy almost every time down the court if you’re a player. You’re watching things develop. When you look at it that way, it’s actually fun to run.”
Stop laughing this is a serious basketball post and I demand that you clear your day and take this seriously.
It is goofy. We cover a lot of ridiculous stuff on this site, many things that are outright lies that players, coaches and front office types tell us without reflex, but this is just outsized. Nothing Hornacek said about the triangle was actually false, but when you spend an offseason ignoring the offense via the personnel addition of Derrick Rose, prior to giving the offense a lick and a promise for the first 70 percent of the season, you’re hardly speaking to a deep commitment to the offense and what it can create.
This is why Phil Jackson should come down to put his money where his mouth his, Harvey Araton argues, but that statement only drags us to what has been an uneasy realization since Phil Jackson’s first summer spent running the Knicks: Phil hasn’t exactly hired a lot of players that seem suited for the offense.
Rose, most notably, ranks among them. Though in a vacuum a scoring guard of his diminished capabilities could function inside the offense – Phil Jackson was definitely reflecting kindly on former triangle star and ACL tear-sufferer Ron Harper when trading for Derrick – Rose has complained about the offense from the season’s first week, and everyone associated has struggled as a result.
On Wednesday, he discussed “it,” that triangle offense, yet again:
“I don’t want to say it’s hard but we never got a feel this year for it,” Rose said. “I think I pick up things quick especially when it has to do with basketball and I don’t think me being gone away for trial was the problem.”
Yeah, well, a lot of basketball things are hard for Derrick Rose. He didn’t exactly prove himself to be the most calculating of point guards even during his MVP stint with the Chicago Bulls six years ago, so a failure in picking up an offense that doesn’t shift the entire focus of its philosophy into something more in tune with What Derrick Wants isn’t the largest surprise.
The guy grew up with nothing but pick and roll basketball, sets tossed out in order to take advantage of the dribbling, penetration and finishing gifts he showcased with great panache from his childhood all the way through 2012, when Rose torn his left ACL. Those gifts appear in short exhibitions these days, with little added along the way in terms of overall point guard insight, so it is unsurprising that the scoring guard (caught in a contract year he’s been talking about on record for over a year and a half) can’t develop newer, more sensible tricks in his ninth year in the NBA.
Then again, as we talked about, it’s Phil Jackson’s damn fault for acquiring the guy – the anti-triangle point guard – in the first place. Perhaps he thought that Rose could act as an Eric Bledsoe stand-in, forgetting of course that coach Jeff Hornacek had plenty of issues with Bledsoe and his instincts in the season and a half that followed Bledsoe and Hornacek’s shared and spectacular 2013-14 run with the Suns.
That season, like this year’s Knicks campaign, will find Hornacek at home when the playoffs start. He’ll finish his 2016-17 season with nearly 300 NBA games as a head coach under his belt, yet no postseason experience after a playing career that saw him in the playoffs 11 out of his 14 seasons.
This is why the New York Daily News’ Frank Isola saw fit to wonder if Hornacek is on the hot seat, after what would be classified (in any other context) as a disappointing year. He begins with an anecdote about Carmelo Anthony:
One player said that Anthony was so distraught following Wednesday’s loss in Milwaukee that he headed directly for the shower after the game and was cooling down as Hornacek addressed the team in the post-game locker room. By Sunday, Porzingis described the Knicks as being a bundle of confusion.
When the team’s two best players are lashing out in that manner it is proof beyond a shadow of a doubt that the coach is losing the team.
Even in a year that has yet to see a coach’s firing, it is important to note that some NBA head coaches have been fired quicker, and for less, while making more. One recent example came from New York, in the form of the disastrous Larry Brown Attempt.
The Knicks don’t work with the same rules as others, though, once again committing to a rebuilding job midseason after starting 2016-17 with legitimate, spoken playoff aspirations. This is the second time in three full seasons with Jackson as Knicks president that New York has taken this approach, after a wildly expensive offseason, leaving Hornacek to point to the points in the team’s season when the club was competing as his proof of earned permanence.
New York was at .500 after 32 games, as it entered what would be a loss to the Rockets on New Year’s Eve. That’s not half-bad, considering this roster and these ever-changing expectations. Is a mediocre record for a mediocre team enough to keep Hornacek from losing his job after just one season?
Marc Berman at the New York Post doesn’t think so, especially when the last 36 Knick games (with just 11 wins involved) have come with the team having mostly committed to losing as many games as possible.
Less than a reason to retain than more of an example of why Phil gets along with him, Berman credits Hornacek for establishing a better relationship with Jackson and lead assistant Kurt Rambis, in comparison to the turn of Phil’s first hire in forever-player Derek Fisher:
Hornacek, according to an NBA source, gets high grades on both counts — maintaining a strong rapport with Jackson and associate head coach Kurt Rambis, Jackson’s longtime compatriot.
Jackson’s coaching role has grown in recent weeks because of the collapse. He staged a triangle clinic a week ago for the guards. On Wednesday, Jackson was on the court during practice, talking animatedly to Rambis, the defensive coordinator, while going over positioning and footwork.
If Jackson should have promoted then-interim Rambis as coach last spring, it’s too late now. Though owner James Dolan has given Jackson carte blanche, Jackson would look awful if he bagged Hornacek.
“Phil can’t afford to fire [Hornacek] and bring in a new coach,’’ said another NBA source, who has spoken to Jackson.
Hornacek signed a three-year, $15 million deal in 2016, with a one-year team option for 2019-20. For comparison’s sake, Maurice Taylor made over $7.1 million to play for the Knicks a decade ago. The team can’t afford to pay three head coaches at once, with Fisher still collecting money.
Al Iannazzone, in an accurate yet weirdly titled column at Newsday (‘Jeff Hornacek blames everyone for Knicks missing playoffs’) appears to be somewhere in the middle on the coach, while relaying what he said to the press on Wednesday:
“Every single guy, every single coach, every part of management — everybody’s to blame. We’re all in it together. I don’t think there’s been any other talk of anything [like that].”
There shouldn’t be. Teams don’t typically hire three coaches in a 36-month span. That span doesn’t officially include the embarrassing intrigue that led to Phil Jackson needing five months to be talked out of hiring Kurt Rambis in 2016 as the tenth head coach to join the Knicks since Jeff Van Gundy stepped away from the team in late 2001.
Hornacek became that hire. And for now he’d like to stay No. 10. And he’d like to hire some more free agents this summer, when the Knicks have gobs of cap room and, in a shocker, no knockout young prospect due to take in an explosive, second contract.
The Knicks will have to wait until 2018 to extend Kristaps Porzingis. In the meantime, there is still room to maneuver even with Carmelo Anthony (or whatever he’s traded for) due to make over $26.2 million in 2017-18. Chortle at the triangle idea all you want, cackle at the notion that a type of offense could turn a player into a Knick-in waiting.
Again, you should be laughing, just not at the triangle. Not this time, at least.
NBA stars and prospects change teams all the time, but mostly due to a similar routine of reasons. More money to make in another town, or state. A better chance at winning a championship. A chance to go home. Spite, as we saw in the case of Dwyane Wade jumping to the Chicago Bulls for 1,722 career minutes.
Not a lot of, “man, I sure do dig this spacing” or, “it sure is the journey that is the reward, with this brand of ball movement!” NBA players have never talked like that. Nobody, outside of Phil Jackson and myself, talks like that.
NBA players looking to make a major free agent jump are usually looking for as much maximum money as possible (with the chance to make the sort incumbent player max money down the line), a championship-level setting, home cooking, or the chance to allay a strong sense of resentment.
Cleveland was lucky to lure LeBron James in 2014 with the promise of checking all the boxes, from major money (over $140.4 million in five seasons between 2014 and 2019) to work in his home state amongst a talent-laden crew, topped off with a major case of the “forget you, guy”-ies while pointing toward Pat Riley and his sometimes-there motivational techniques.
Nobody is going to sign with Phil Jackson to piss someone else off, though. Former Jackson combatant Jerry Krause is retired, and modern players are too young to even be aware that Jackson and Pat Riley probably still have a thing, and that bit of resultant enmity. The Knicks will have space this summer, and a nice core, but no in-prime star is going to jump to New York to wait for Porzingis and this June’s teenaged lottery pick to come around to their own primes some six or seven years from now.
Unless, of course, that player makes a mistake. We’ve seen that before with Knicks and careers, as Pat Cummings, Allan Houston, Amar’e Stoudemire and others probably wish they’d clipped the tail end of their primes to another franchise’s ascension. Carmelo Anthony, really, appears to be the only boffo Knicks signing (or, re-signing) that truly wants to stay with the team.
To the club’s, and the triangle’s, great detriment. You may have read our thoughts on this subject before.
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Kelly Dwyer is an editor for Ball Don’t Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at KDonhoops@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter!