The New York Knicks are a mess and the team’s general manager, Phil Jackson, hasn’t been doing anything successful in an attempt to change that. He finds it better to tweet weird things or criticize LeBron James and the way basketball is being played around the NBA more productive.
In an interview with Bleacher Report (which was done in May) Jackson speaks about more than just how LeBron James travels or how far NBA offenses have fallen, but it’s easy to take these outtakes and make a bigger story from them.
When I watch some of these playoff games, and I look at what’s being run out there, as what people call an offense, it’s really quite remarkable to see how far our game has fallen from a team game. Four guys stand around watching one guy dribble a basketball.
I watch LeBron James, for example. He might travel every other time he catches the basketball if he’s off the ball. He catches the ball, moves both his feet. You see it happen all the time. There’s no structure, there’s no discipline, there’s no ‘How do we play this game’ type of attitude. And it goes all the way through the game. To the point where now guys don’t screen; they push guys off with their hands.
The game actually has some beauty to it, and we’ve kind of taken some of that out of it to make it individualized. It’s a lot of who we are as a country, individualized stuff. It struck me: How can we get so far away from the real truth of what we’re trying to do?
Jackson seems to forget that a lot of his success came with giving the ball to certain players while four other guys got the hell out of the way during crunch time. Jackson also seems to be putting himself and everything he has achieved up on pedestal compared to what’s happening in basketball today. Meanwhile, he’s getting more than $10 million a season to run the Knicks. It seems the first set of decisions he’s made haven’t really been helpful in pulling the Knicks out of the mud, so maybe he should focus more on actually improving this team. Anyone can give Carmelo Anthony a max contract. It takes someone a bit smarter and more creative finding a better solution to the problem.