Phil Jackson Regime Teaching New York Knicks Fans a Lesson in Patience
In the hierarchy of New York City traits, patience with one’s favorite team falls somewhere on the scale between smiling and sound driving habits. It is, to put it politely, not common.
No franchise embodies this brand of bitterness better or more tragically than the New York Knicks, whose 40-plus-year championship drought has fostered within its fanbase an almost biblical sense of dread—Michael Jordan daggers and John Starks bricks are the beasts of some waking nightmares.
With their team off to a woeful 3-8 start to the 2014-15 season, the 'Bocker faithful would seem ripe for full-on wit’s end.
Only, they can’t quite bring themselves to such sorrow. Not since Phil Jackson came to town.
In a place where the failures far out-boast the banners, patience has become the mantra.
It’s the kind of clout one can tout with 13 rings, the wares of a hardwood wizard as charmed as he is smart. In Jackson, Knicks fans have found a prodigal son—only one who elicits awe rather than loving shame.
If Jackson had marched to the podium last March 18 and demanded that every player on the roster wear an astronaut’s helmet during games, the newsmen would’ve nodded. If he replaced retired numbers in the rafters with Native American folk art, the crowd’s cameras would’ve flared.
Of course, Jackson’s measures were more reasonable: to clear the decks and start afresh with a superstar cornerstone and cap space aplenty, to install his vaunted triangle offense as the team’s chief strategic crux and—most crucially of all—to foster a genuine sense of community and camaraderie in a foxhole long since buried by bombs of its own throwing.
Through it all, patience would be the beacon. Patience—not flash or splash or trade—would be the move.
It was patience that guided Jackson and Co.’s negotiations with Carmelo Anthony. Patience prevented a panic hire in the wake of Steve Kerr’s coaching coup. Patience proved the principal motivating factor behind the trade of Tyson Chandler. Patience led Derek Fisher to tell ESPNNewYork.com’s Ian Begley that “We’re not as far away as it seems right now” following the team's 2-6 start.
Patience and process, process and patience: poles of a planet thrown into a once-in-an-eon shift.
Not that the brass tacks are easily sortable. For all of Jackson’s earnest efforts, the Knicks will need more than mere metaphysics to land a free-agent game-changer. Ditto for making good on the team’s 2015 first-round draft pick, an asset looking more and more lucrative by the day.
Even if the road ahead proves more perilous than previously planned, though, the lessons of perspective won’t be learned in vein.
Heck, Knicks fans might even learn to enjoy the rebuilding process—something that’s hard to swallow when you’re trading paychecks for tickets.
It certainly helps that the Knicks themselves are practicing what their guru has implicitly preached. Indeed, for all its stunning success, the triangle is nothing if not a complicated system. Here’s the New York Times’ Scott Cacciola with one of the season’s more entertaining analogies regarding Jackson’s vaunted vessel:
"The triangle is fundamentally different because any player can touch the ball at any time, and each pass triggers another series of movements. Think of the triangle as a “Choose Your Own Adventure” approach to basketball, with an ever-expanding number of paths to the basket.
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It’s that sense of adventure and opportunity—of pure possibility—that Jackson hopes will compel his famously hardwood-wise fanbase to buy into what could be a trying few years.
In the meantime, the Zen Master is well aware that he’ll need to offer up the occasional public bone, as he did before the team’s recent loss to the Atlanta Hawks (via Peter Botte of the New York Daily News):
"I want to say that this is something that I discussed with my coaching staff and the players about three weeks ago, that this is going to be a very tough start, and we can’t get disappointed if things don’t go well right away. ...
It’s all part of the process. I think we think in terms of basketball-wise, Thanksgiving, December, as times when you really say, if you haven’t gotten it by now, we have to think about if you are a learner or if you’re not a learner as ballplayers, individual ballplayers, at that time.
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What might sound like a veiled ultimatum to his players is really more moving the target for fans—a way to push their impatience squarely into the spotlight in hopes that they see the error of their ways.
That’s not to say Jackson will be a pushover. He grasps better than anyone the stakes at play in delivering the Garden to Eden. He’d just rather take 10 years to do it right than succumb to some failed philosophy of shortcuts and quick fixes.
So long as his spell over owner James Dolan holds, the timetable is Jackson's to mold.
Sooner or later, the gleam from the 13 rings will be too much for free agents to ignore, like a Bat signal of bling beaming over the basketball world. Sooner or later, the narrative yawp—of a forlorn franchise in the city that never sleeps—is bound to sound in Jackson’s favor.
New Yorkers might treat patience like a plague, but as with many a deadly scourge, this is one where the virus is also the antidote.
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