The Knicks have begun their coaching search, and there are a number of qualified candidates who would make a fine selection by general manager Scott Perry and team president Steve Mills. David Fizdale, David Blatt and Jerry Stackhouse are all strong candidates. Even some of the periphery candidates such as Jeff Van Gundy, Jay Wright or Steve Clifford would be good options. One of the worst decisions the Knicks could make would be to hire one of the most prominently referenced candidates: Mark Jackson.
It isn’t that Jackson didn’t do some good things in Golden State, but the negative for outweighs the positive. Jackson took over a 36-win Warriors team in 2011-2012, won a playoff series two years later and went 51-31 in his final year before he was fired. Jackson did help lead a talented, young club with Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson and Draymond Green go from a lottery team to a playoff team.
Jackson also got the Warriors to commit to defense for the first time in a long time, with the team earning a 99.9 defensive rating in his final year (2015-2015), third best in the league. His players also seemed to like him, with Curry being upset when they chose to move on from Jackson and hire Steve Kerr. Jackson deserves credit for all those things.
That type of success should be the cornerstone of an impressive coaching résumé for Jackson, until you look at the reasons he was fired. The first set of reasons is strictly on the court. In Jackson’s final season with the Warriors, he only managed an offensive rating of 105.3 (the best of his tenure), just 12th best in the league despite having two of the best perimeter shooters of all-time with Curry and Thompson. When Kerr replaced Jackson the following year, the Warriors had an offensive rating of 109.7, just a tenth of a point off the best in the league. The following two years, the Warriors had two of the best offensive seasons in NBA history.
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Gone was Jackson’s stagnant isolation-heavy offense, replaced by Kerr’s ball movement and spacing that created a lot of open 3s. The Warriors went from shooting just under 25 3-pointers per game (sixth most in the league) in Jackson’s final year to shooting more than 31 per game by Kerr’s second season. Based on Jackson’s commentary during ABC’s national basketball broadcasts, his philosophy on offense hasn’t evolved much. There’s no reason to think he wouldn’t run an offense filled with isolation plays and long 2-pointers if he took a new job. You can’t win playing that style of offense.
Kerr also improved the Warriors’ defense in his first year, dropping the team’s defensive rating by more than a point. The Warriors remained in the top five in that category until this season. It’s fair to question whether Jackson was keeping the Warriors from reaching their potential, especially offensively.
Warriors ownership saw this, which is why Joe Lacob offered Jackson a blank check to hire the best assistants to help fix the team’s issues. In a speech to venture capitalists toward the end of 2014, Lacob reportedly said Jackson declined the offe, saying he already had the best staff.
Jackson’s stubbornness also made it difficult for him to get along with other members of the Warriors organization, from top to bottom. Lacob said at the same conference: "Part of it was that he couldn't get along with anybody else in the organization. And look, he did a great job, and I'll always compliment him in many respects, but you can't have 200 people in the organization not like you."
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Some of that discord became public when Jackson had public incidents with two assistant coaches. He reassigned Brian Scalabrine to the (then) D-League in March of his final season. He then fired highly regarded assistant Darren Erman in early April (according to ESPN) for recording conversations the coaching staff had with one another and the players. There was never an explanation for why Erman recorded the conversations, though there were some reports that he thought Jackson and other assistants were bad-mouthing him to players.
There were also odd incidents with Jackson’s players, such as one described by Grantland’s Zach Lowe in June 2015. Jackson and his staff told his healthy players that an injured Festus Ezeli was cheering against them so he would look better. When the players confronted Ezeli about it, he denied the charges and wept at the accusation.
Not getting along with anyone in a 200-person organization and being forced to let go of multiple assistant coaches for insubordination should be a red flag that couldn’t be larger or raised higher.
Here’s what two of the most respected NBA reporters in the country had to say about Jackson in 2016:
"I think he's going to have a hard time getting hired again in the NBA," Lowe said on his podcast. "The craziness of how his last year went in Golden State and some of the stuff that has come out since. .. I think it would take a superstar player going into ownership saying ‘my time here depends on you hiring Mark Jackson.'"
Said ESPN’s Brian Windhorst: "I just know that if a team does background research on Mark with his old employers, it's going to be a hard hurdle for him to clear. That's not me. That's people who might be hiring him have told me."
Mills said at his postseason news conference that he spoke with Golden State general manager Bob Myers about the process of finding a head coach. Is there any doubt the two also discussed Jackson’s myriad issues in Golden State? That cannot bode well for Jackson on any level.
At its best, Madison Square Garden is a difficult place to navigate from a management perspective. At its worst, it is a tangled web of intrigue that takes a lot of skill to survive and operate successfully in. Jackson’s performance in this area when he was in Golden State does not inspire confidence and points to potentially franchise-shaking drama if he became the Knicks head coach. He couldn’t even control and earn the loyalty of his own assistant coaches. How is he expected to control the Machiavellian nature of the Garden?
Based on his history in Golden State, Jackson seems like the worst possible choice to fit into what Mills and Perry are trying to build. They spoke at their news conference about how they want a coach to work with management and understand the importance of player development, fitness and all the other aspects of putting together a complete team using an organizational philosophy implemented from the top down. Does that sound like something Jackson would excel at? Not to me.
Jackson’s name and history with the Knicks shouldn’t matter. The front office should take all the names off all of the résumés and just analyze what each candidate has done. Name recognition gets a fan base excited for about 15 seconds until the coach starts losing games (and the Knicks will lose plenty next year with Kristaps Porzingis hurt). After that, it doesn’t matter, and the big name will get booed just the same as the no-name. Just hire the right guy and don’t try to win the press conference. Try to win games instead.
The Knicks need to free their franchise from drama. Isiah Thomas was drama. Larry Brown was drama. Even Mike D’Antoni became drama. Derek Fisher was drama. Phil Jackson was drama. The drama needs to end. Mark Jackson is drama. His tenure in Golden State was full of it. He ran a 1990s offense that you can’t win with in the modern NBA. Hiring Jackson would set the Knicks back again and prevent them from developing the way they need to.
The Knicks can’t make that mistake at this juncture of their rebuild. It is essential to hire a coach to give the team stability and an identity that will stick for years to come. This coach needs to be on the bench for at least four seasons to bring some normalcy to the Garden. Mark Jackson is not that guy, and the Knicks shouldn’t hire him under any circumstance.