If he meant the five more he won coaching the Lakers, he’d have been correct.

But when he said Tuesday he did a ”great job,” he was referring to last season, his first as president of basketball operations for the New York Knicks.

That’s a 17-65 season that was the worst in franchise history, for any Knicks fans who’ve been trying to forget.

It was bad enough to make anyone wonder if Jackson, whose 11 championships are the most of any NBA coach, was cut out for the job of executive.

Now he can prove he is.

With the No. 4 pick in the draft and another $25 million or so to spend in free agency, the Knicks are in position to be offseason winners.

To Jackson, that started with last season’s losing.

”I did a great job last year shedding things, getting us in position where we have this flexibility,” he said.

He was referring to trades that moved Tyson Chandler, J.R. Smith and Iman Shumpert, which helped the bottom line but didn’t yield enough in return and dragged the Knicks toward the bottom of the standings.

Jackson had arrived for his first front-office job saying he believed the Knicks could compete for a playoff spot. Instead, Jackson lost right from the start (preferred coaching candidate Steve Kerr instead took the Golden State job and won the title) to the finish (the Knicks were the only team to drop in the lottery, falling from No. 2 to fourth).

It was unusual and somewhat unprecedented failure for someone who never had a losing season as an NBA head coach and won two more titles as a player with the Knicks. Instead of resting on that success and enjoying a comfortable retirement across the country, he committed to rebuilding a team that hasn’t won since he was part of the latter title winners in 1973.

Skeptics contend he’s in the job for the money and won’t be for long. He rarely travels to road games, mostly for health reasons and has said he leaves dealing with agents to general manager Steve Mills. He was even asked Tuesday what a team president does.

”Presides,” he said. ”That’s it.”

He’s doing much more. Three months before he will turn 70 and after years of hip and knee problems, Jackson is working much harder than he did last spring, when the Knicks didn’t have a first-round pick.

”Last year at this time I was at a wedding in Turkey,” he said. ”I did get back in time a couple of days before the draft, but this is the day I came back.”

He has been in the gym attending draft workouts and traveled to Chicago to interview players at the draft combine, searching for what he identifies as needs that go beyond shooting and rebounding.

He might not find the franchise big man he’d like, but he won’t stop searching for willing passers on the court and thoughtful teammates off it.

”We’re looking for players that are both trainable physically and socially,” he said.

And, Jackson knows, it would help if they were winners. Whatever he does in the draft – he revealed little Tuesday, beyond saying there was a ”short percentage” the pick would be traded – not only starts the process of boosting the Knicks, but also how he’s viewed.

A quick turnaround proves that Jackson can build, he just needed tools he didn’t have in his first offseason. Further failure fuels the belief that he’s out of touch, clinging too hard to old ideals and offenses, in over his head against the younger wheelers-and-dealers who fill modern NBA front offices.

”I do think that this team has to be competitive,” Jackson said. ”Have to be back in a competitive zone where we’re out there competing every night for 48 minutes. That’s something that we’re attempting to do and then everything will work the way it’s supposed to work.”

—

Follow Brian Mahoney on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/Briancmahoney

The post No. 4 pick, cap space, give Jackson tools to rebuild Knicks appeared first on IdealCapper.

“They’re both great players, and they’re both great in their eras,” Thomas said on “The Waddle & Silvy Show” on ESPN 1000. “In my era, we hadn’t seen an athlete quite like Michael Jordan. He jumped higher than everyone else. He was a little faster than everyone else and he was just the best athlete.

“LeBron James is the best athlete of today, and he’s probably a better athlete than Michael Jordan was. He’s bigger, he’s faster, he’s stronger.”

As far as who would win head to head, Thomas said it depends.

“Now when you put them out on the floor to compete against each other in different eras, it depends on which rules you’re playing with and which coach you’re being coached by,” Thomas said. “So there’s a lot that really goes into it.

“Had Michael Jordan not met Phil Jackson, would Michael Jordan be Michael Jordan today had he stayed with (Stan) Albeck and Doug Collins, and they were great coaches, but I think Jackson had a lot to do with his success. LeBron right now seems to be in the right situation with the right coach with the right players and his talent is being exposed and is flourishing.”

Magic Johnson recently gave his take on who would win a game of one-on-one between Jordan and James.

“Easy answer MJ all day, every day!” Johnson tweeted, before adding: “If MJ and LeBron played 1-on-1 10 times, MJ would win all 10. MJ is the ultimate 1-on-1 player!”

Johnson did give James credit as the best player in the game today.

Jordan and Thomas have some history as fierce competitors. Thomas and several Detroit Pistons teammates left the court before shaking hands with Jordan’s Bulls after Chicago won the 1991 Eastern Conference finals. That reportedly played a role in keeping Thomas off the 1992 Olympic “Dream Team.” Scottie Pippen said he didn’t want Thomas on the team and former NBA deputy commissioner Russ Granik admitted Thomas’ behavior after that series was part of the reason Thomas was left off the team.

During the celebration of Jordan’s 50th birthday on Sunday, Antawn Jamison said if Jordan played today, “he could get you about 10 or 11 points, come in and play 15-20 minutes.” Thomas wasn’t as sure when asked Tuesday if Jordan could average 10.

“If he played 40 minutes,” Thomas said. “It’s all about minutes and shots, always. The question is, yeah, he can score 10, but could he guard the other guy? Could he get back in transition?

“It’s a lot that goes into playing an NBA game and it’s a lot that goes into training to be an NBA player. You can be in great health-club shape, but to be a pro athlete and be in that type of physical condition, training condition and mindset, that’s a different type of person you’re talking about.”

Although he joked about playing at the age of 50 when he was inducted into the Hall of Fame, Jordan has since put that thought to rest, even though Charlotte Bobcats rookie Michael Kidd-Gilchrist said he recently lost to Jordan in a game of one-on-one.

Asked whether he could average 10 at the age of 50, Thomas didn’t hesitate.

“Absolutely not, the athletes and players I think today are too good,” he said. “I think we all have nostalgic great imaginations, and to say that you could do that is just a total disrespect to the players who are playing today.”

Thomas was in Chicago to partner with Mayor Rahm Emanuel in announcing a basketball program aimed at helping at-risk youth.

The post Isiah: LBJ better athlete than MJ? appeared first on IdealCapper.

“Without a doubt, we have utmost confidence in Mike (D’Antoni) as a coach,” Kupchak told ESPNLosAngeles.com in a phone interview Tuesday from Memphis. “I think if you spoke to him, his vision on Day 1 was dramatically different than it is today. It’s the coach’s job to adjust and to make changes. Sometimes a player is just not going to fit. Sometimes a coach has to make changes and compromise in the way he’s done things and I think that’s what Mike is going through right now is just the process.”

The Lakers have hit the midway point of the season riding a three-game losing skid as some of the promises made in D’Antoni’s introductory news conference in November are starting to ring hollow.

D’Antoni claimed the team should “easily” average 110-115 points per game under his guidance. They’ve crossed the 110-point threshold just eight times in the 31 games since he took over, going 5-3.

At the time of D’Antoni’s hiring, Kupchak said the new coach’s system was “more suited to the talent” on the Lakers than Phil Jackson’s Triangle offense, and yet several players have had a difficult time fitting in — Dwight Howard has sniped publicly about his lack of post-up and shot attempts, Pau Gasol has balked at accepting his role off the bench and free agent acquisitions Antawn Jamison and Jodie Meeks have both had to endure strings of DNP-CDs (Did Not Play — Coaching Decision) under D’Antoni.

Yet, Kupchak said D’Antoni’s shuffling of the roster is evidence that the coach is willing to change and try new things in order to try to start winning.

“It’s not like he started a week or two ago trying to figure this thing out,” Kupchak said. “He’s been searching for combinations now for probably six-to-eight weeks. Understandably, I think the longer the season goes the more is at stake and the bigger hole you dig, the more dramatic your adjustments or your take on coaching has to become. I think that’s what he’s doing. He’s grabbing every rabbit out of the hat trying to look for something that works.”

While Kupchak is continuing to support the coach, the disappointment of the Lakers being out of the playoff picture with 41 games left to play is wearing on the Lakers’ GM.

“You don’t want to get too emotional one way or the other, but, we’re halfway through now,” Kupchak said. “Quite frankly, we’ve dug a hole and I think it’s frustrating for everybody. It’s certainly not what anybody or everybody expected halfway through the season.”

Kupchak singled out the Lakers’ effort, or lack thereof, as the most frustrating part to see.

“I’m a little bit concerned about our effort,” Kupchak said. “I’d like to see better effort on the court. When the ball is not bouncing your way, when shots aren’t going in, you just can’t seem to get a break, the one thing you can control on the court is your effort and loose balls and running the floor, defending, offensive rebounding. I think back to the Miami game and I have that vision of LeBron (James) diving on that ball at midcourt. That’s effort. It’s natural when things get tough to hesitate and be unsure, lose confidence. That’s one thing that we can’t let happen. We have to maintain our confidence and our effort more than anything has to be at an all-time to get through this period.”

Kupchak is well aware of the Feb. 21 trade deadline looming if the team decides it needs to pursue a move if that confidence wanes and that effort fails to improve.

“We’ve got a little bit (less) than a month,” Kupchak said. “Typically, it’s unusual, although there was a trade today (between Memphis and Cleveland), it’s unusual if things heat up five or four weeks out. Typically, as you approach the trade deadline, people get serious and they really begin to understand and know their team and they have a pretty good feel of what’s out there.

“So, I don’t think we’re at the point where you say, ‘It’s time for a trade,’ and a trade happens in 3-4 days. That’s just not how this league works. I read somebody somewhere a week or so ago said, ‘This is a deadline-oriented league,’ and I think that’s true even though there are exceptions. That’s certainly one way to address the problem, to look into changing players.”

What’s tricky for Kupchak is that he’s not convinced making a trade or signing a free agent would act as a cure-all for the Lakers’ funk.

“Part of the frustrating thing about this season to date is that I just can’t, or we just can’t, put our finger on the problem,” Kupchak said. “We mentioned a bunch of them and even getting through the injuries and the (roster) changes and the coaching changes and you just try look at the players and how they fit together, is there something that’s missing? I could look at our group and nitpick and say that we could use something here or a better shooter there, but the bottom line is that the group as whole, we have not performed to the level of our ability.

“It’s not like we don’t have a player at a certain position and if we added a player — an eighth guy or a ninth guy — all of the sudden our record is going to go from 17 and whatever it is to 30-11. That’s not going to happen by adding a bench shooter or a defensive player. You know what I mean? That’s not going to happen. We’re underachieving for other reasons, not because we’re missing a bench player. Certainly you can add a bench player and become a better team, or hopefully a better team, but that’s not the reason why our record is what it is. We should be better than our record says we are. But there’s a saying in this league, and I’m sure you’ve heard this saying, ‘You are what your record says you are.’ ”

The Lakers’ record of just 2-7 over their past nine games says that the team is getting worse, but Kupchak believes it’s just been more of the same.

“I’m not sure there have been recent struggles,” Kupchak said. “We’ve struggled from Day 1. It’s not like we played good ball and then all of the sudden the last three to four weeks, we’re starting to struggle. We have struggled from Day 1 and it’s frustrating for everybody.”

That frustration will linger until the Lakers start to play up to their capabilities.

“We’ll just have to figure it out,” Kupchak said. “There’s no end to this. It’s not like if it’s not figured out in a week it comes to a conclusion. It’s just a process. We just got to keep on working at it and figure it out. It’s basketball.”

The post Mitch Kupchak of Los Angeles Lakers says team’s problem is effort, not Mike D’Antoni appeared first on IdealCapper.

Mike Brown (Los Angeles) gone five games into the season; Avery Johnson (Brooklyn) gone the day after Christmas, 28 games into the season; Scott Skiles (Milwaukee) gone 32 games in, when his team fell to .500 for the fourth time this season. Gentry lasted 41 games.

And somehow, there have been no Phil Jackson (or Stan Van Gundy) sightings.

Since the firings, the Lakers, Nets and Bucks have gone three different directions. The Nets are 9-2 post-AJ, the Lakers are 16-18 since firing Brown, the Bucks 3-3 since Skiles was asked to return the keys. One coach is catching hell (Mike D’Antoni with the Lakers), one is so under-the-radar that hardly anyone knows he is a current head coach of an NBA team (Jim Boylan with the Bucks), one is on pace to have a statue built in his likeness outside the Barclays Center (P.J. Carlesimo with the Nets). With the Suns, it’s too early to tell.

Each team had different reasons for enforcing a head coaching change when it did. The results of each are so all over the place that it’s hard to determine if there is a right or wrong in what each team did, the way the teams went about doing it and/or the arguable timing of them all.

No rhyme, less reason. Nothing seems to fit when the immediate results are so random and varied. Owners flip a coin, hoping it’ll land on the opposite side of their current results.

Just two weeks ago, we watched the NFL fire seven coaches on Black Monday. The NBA? Owners don’t have patience like that. They embrace change in a different way. They react with quickness. Regardless of how the firings are rationalized internally or justified publicly, two things are certain: Job security for an NBA coach is maybe the greatest oxymoron in sports, and there is no assurance that the immediate results under a new leader will give any team the answer it sought.

For instance, there were four coaching changes during the 2011-12 shortened season. Of those four, three of the coaches were retained and have not been pink-slipped. Yet.

Yet, there’s no telling if Randy Wittman in Washington, Keith Smart in Sacramento or Mike Woodson in New York (although he seems relatively safe, nothing is guaranteed if the Knicks fall out of the top four seeding in the East or the “Amar’e Experiment” doesn’t work out soon) were the right choices. There’s no telling if there would be any difference if the teams did what Orlando did when it rode the season out with the existing/sacrificial coach, dismissed him in the offseason, hired the guy the owner and organization “really” wanted (Jacque Vaughn) and began the new season fresh.

The Bulls waited until the offseason to hire Tom Thibodeau a few years ago, as did the Clippers with Vinny Del Negro and Golden State with Mark Jackson. Indiana did not with Frank Vogel. And all these teams are remarkably better than they were the day the current coaches took over.

Go figure.

In the NFL, going back a few years, Marty Schottenheimer (his first job) and Don Coryell (his second) replaced fired head coaches in the middle of a season, and their careers turned out well. In comparison, Jason Garrett took over the Cowboys in November 2010 when Jerry Jones fired Wade Phillips after a 1-7 start. Now the odds are, even after two 8-8 full seasons as Jerry’s puppet, Garrett might not make it to Black Monday next year.

In the NHL, Ken Hitchcock took over a 6-7-0 team in St. Louis last season and proceeded to finish 49-22-11 and first in the Central. Bruce Boudreau was on both ends of an owner’s midseason whims: fired in D.C. with a 12-9-1 record only to be hired by Anaheim and go 27-23-8 with a team that finished last in the Pacific, even after improving under him.

In MLB. In the English Premier League. In the National Rugby League. In any team sport at the pro level, the same theory-less theory holds true. The results prove to be the same: inconclusive. Same no rhyme. Same less reason.

So how do we judge and or generalize when it is a good/bad, appropriate/inexcusable, smart/incompetent time to fire/hire head coaches?

The best example of how (and why) there may never be an answer to this, especially in the NBA where the coaching carousel can get extreme and thoughtless, can be found in the head coaching history of Gregg Popovich in San Antonio.

He, too, was an interim coach who replaced Bob Hill 18 games into the 1996-97 season. (His was one of eight midseason coaching changes by seven teams.) Since then, Popovich has gone on to become the sensei of all active coaches. And he would be the perfect example of the upside to firing a coach during or somewhere in the middle of an NBA season if … at the time he wasn’t the GM and VP of basketball operations for the Spurs and he hadn’t appointed himself as head coach.

Despite owners’ certainty that a change on the bench will bring different results, flipping a coin often lands with the same ugly results staring them in the face. Heads or tails. And sometimes, because they limit their thinking to those two options, either this or that, they’re surprised when it lands on the coin’s narrow third surface, spinning on its edge.

Coaches in all sports come and go. Coaches in the NBA just seem to do so at an advanced pace.

When it comes to the revolving door at the core of most relationships between ownership and a head coach, how the coin will land after it stops spinning is too hard to guess. A few games midseason rarely determine — especially in the NBA — the good decision/bad decision outcome of a bad fire/new hire.

Or is it new fire/bad hire? Looking at the immediate results, I can’t tell if there’s even any difference.

The post Midseason NBA coaching changes appeared first on IdealCapper.

“We still like this team a lot,” Buss said Thursday in an interview with ESPNLA 710 radio in Los Angeles. “How can you not believe in this team? This team is built to win. It’s a very, very solid team. We haven’t seen them all together and play together for games. In my mind, we would not consider a temporary fix or blow it up. Why blow up something we have a future with?

“It’s very difficult to talk this way because we’re five games under or six games under .500, and we’ve dug ourselves a hole. But at the same time, I feel that if we put it together, we can string seven or eight games in a row and dig ourselves out of this hole. If we play with the energy we’ve seen in the last two games, then I think you go into the playoffs with momentum.”

Buss was referring, of course, to the Lakers’ injury woes this season. Steve Nash missed seven weeks with a broken bone in his leg. Dwight Howard has struggled in his recovery from back surgery and is now out indefinitely with a torn labrum in his right shoulder. Pau Gasol has missed time with assorted leg injuries and is now out with a concussion. Backup point guard Steve Blake has missed all but the first five games with an abdominal injury.

Still, bad luck hasn’t been the whole story of the Lakers’ season. The team fired coach Mike Brown five games into the season and chose Mike D’Antoni to replace him when former coach and 11-time NBA champion Phil Jackson was available and interested in the job.

General manager Mitch Kupchak has previously said the Lakers chose D’Antoni because they felt his system would apply to this roster better than Jackson’s Triangle offense. Buss concurred and said he, Kupchak and his father, owner Dr. Jerry Buss, still feel that way.

“We thought Steve Nash was our future point guard for the next three years and we needed a coach we felt would fit with him,” Buss said. “That was one of the main issues where we thought that D’Antoni was better than Phil. Well, not better, nobody’s better than Phil, but we felt that he fit the team the way we wanted to work it.

“I like D’Antoni a lot. I still believe in him 100 percent. I have no questions about him. We just have to have this team work together and play together. We just don’t have enough information to analyze anything. It’s just not enough data to put your finger on a problem.”

Injuries and everything else aside, what if this team and its $99.2 million payroll don’t make the playoffs?

“We stuck our neck out with this payroll because Kobe (Bryant) is in the twilight of his career and we want to win championships,” Buss said. “Now, am I upset that we might not make the playoffs? Of course. I’d be upset if I had a $10 payroll or a $200 million payroll. I want to make the playoffs and I want to win championships. But to panic? No, we’re not going to panic.”

The Lakers could face a difficult situation in convincing Howard to re-sign with them when he becomes an unrestricted free agent July 1. The Lakers can offer more years and more money than any other team because of the way the NBA’s new collective bargaining agreement is structured, but would Howard want to stick around after a season that’s gone so poorly?

“If we make the playoffs, that means we’re playing well and I think we’ll go deep in the playoffs and it’s a no-brainer that he stays,” Buss said. “I think if it continues to fall apart because of injuries, I’m hoping we can convince him, ‘Look, everybody was injured, you weren’t 100 percent for the whole year, let’s give it another shot next year.’

“It points to 95 percent that we’ll be able to keep him. I can’t control what he does, but I can sure make a great argument.”

As for Gasol, who is averaging a career-low 12.6 points a game and has struggled each of the past two seasons to find his place in the Lakers’ offense, Buss said he expects the 7-foot Spaniard not only to revert to his previous form, but to play more in the low post, as both Gasol and Bryant have advocated.

“I love Pau Gasol,” Buss said. “The thing is, if you shoot the basketball from 6 feet, your percentages are going to be in the high 50s. If you shoot from 18 feet, you’re lucky to get 40 percent. To base his year off of his shooting percentages is just not the right way to analyze how he’s playing.

“I believe if we can get him down low, he can coexist with Dwight Howard if they play enough games to where they can play off each other. I believe eventually he will move down there and D’Antoni will move him down there and his percentage will go back right to where it was.”

The post Lakers are ‘very solid’ appeared first on IdealCapper.

King told Ian O’Connor during an interview on ESPN New York 98.7 FM on Sunday morning that the team “supports” interim coach P.J. Carlesimo and will “re-evaluate” things moving forward, while deflecting questions about Jackson by repeatedly saying “P.J.’s our coach.”

“We’ve put our support behind (P.J.) and then we’ll look at things and evaluate it later,” King said. “I know people have been throwing lists together and things like that, but we have not contacted anybody. … We’ve made the move and now we’re going to let P.J. coach.”

While King didn’t want to put a timetable on anything, he did suggest that Carlesimo could conceivably finish out the season, calling it “a great opportunity” for Johnson’s former assistant, who has several years of NBA head coaching experience under his belt with three other franchises.

Sources had told ESPN.com that the Nets have made Jackson, an 11-time NBA coaching champion, their top target to replace Johnson on a permanent basis. But when King was asked about when he was going to contact Jackson, he replied, “I don’t know how many times I can say it or Mikhail can say it. P.J.’s our coach. We’re gonna let him coach and then re-evaluate things. I know Mikhail said it about 10 times when he was asked, and I’ve been saying it, and I think people just keep dismissing what we say.”

Prokhorov spent $330 million to improve the Nets’ roster in the offseason and said a successful first season in Brooklyn would be defined by a trip to the Eastern Conference finals. Given those high expectations — the Nets are in the third-year of Prokhorov’s five-year championship plan — it seems reasonable the Nets would contact the biggest names on the market.

Carlesimo, who is 2-0 since taking over for Johnson with wins over the Charlotte Bobcats and Cleveland Cavaliers, said Saturday he believes the possibility of retaining the job for the rest of the season is “available” to him. Carlesimo had a fancy lunch meeting in New York City with Prokhorov Saturday, but declined to discuss specifics of what was said about his future.

“Sometimes you just need a different voice,” King said. “What I like about P.J. is he’s had NBA head coaching experience. I think he understands the game, he’s been around it.”

King believes this is a good time to give Carlesimo an opportunity to lead the team.

“More than anything, you just need to calm the waters and let guys breathe as a group and try to gel,” King said. “Because if we’re in the middle of a search, the turmoil just continues. We need our guys to just focus on the now and San Antonio (on Monday).”

Van Gundy is held in high regard by the Nets, but a league source said he needs to learn more about the organization before determining his level of interest in the job. He also would prefer taking over after the season, not during it, the source said.

“I would never comment on a job that was filled,” Van Gundy told Yahoo! Sports, which first reported his preference to wait until after the season. “I was an interim coach. I hope P.J. has great success there. He’s someone I respect greatly.”

Kelvin Sampson, Nate McMillan and Mike Dunleavy have been other names mentioned to take over for the Nets.

The post Nets stick with P.J. Carlesimo for now appeared first on IdealCapper.