I think Jackson will either pull his hair out of his skull within two years or blow a blood vessel. I would be stunned to see him get the control he supposedly has been given. James Dolan is not a guy who likes to cede control, and he is very similar to Jerry Jones in his inability to keep his hands out of the sausage making.
But, assuming that Dolan DOES surprise the world and decide that having a championship team in the NBA is better than not having one, i still don’t see how Jackson does this job from LA. You simply cannot be a team president and be in a city 3000 miles away and be effective.
We shall see. I hate the NBA and I hate the Knicks, but it would be interesting if the Knicks were a good team again. They haven’t been since the 70’s.
I also think this will be an interesting challenge for Jackson, since he’s not known for his administrative expertise. He’s a coach, and a damn good one. That doesn’t always translate into front office performance.
There were rumors initially that he wanted to stay in LA, but even if that was true, he’s been saying he will move to New York and he said that again today. If he were really interested in this job, that was not going to get in the way.
The difference, specifically with Auerbach, is that Red was his own GM. He had to find them, figure out if they wer any good. Let’s be honest, Pippen would’ve needed a ticket to get into the Hall without Jordan. Hell, I could’ve coached those Bulls teams.
I’ve been reading and listening to a lot of talk about what’s been going on the past few years. John Ireland, who used to work at KCAL for the local LA station and now works for the Lakers, has a pretty good rapport with a lot of the insiders both in the basketball industry and the Lakers itself. The way he tells it, and I haven’t heard many contradict him, is that the Lakers have been for a while putting 3 people at the head of the table to come to a decision: Mitch, Jim, and the late Jerry Buss (Jeanie runs the media operations so isn’t as involve in basketball decisions). Jerry’s been grooming Jim to take over for a while, so all reports are that Jerry gave Jim the last say for the past few years. That’s what a lot of fans are missing, they don’t really know that credit goes to Jim for a lot of that. It doesn’t help that Jim isn’t as much of a public figure as Mitch is and doesn’t really talk to the media
Yes, they are terrible, but its hard to sometimes predict performance when things happen. I credit most of their play to taking a chance on older players or injured ones. They got Howard for a year when he was coming off back surgery. They got a 40 year old Steve Nash who, while still productive, was going to be less so, they just didn’t know how much so. And Kobe’s freak injury was also unexpected. Add that to the litany of injuries for their regular guys like Farmar, Blake, Henry, Hill, and Gasol, and you have a trainwreck of a team that’s barely holding it together. Some of it is their fault: older players are more likely to get hurt. But 2 years ago, everyone was raving about the brilliance of having Kobe, Pau, Howard, and Nash on the same team.
As for Kobe’s contract, I can understand it. This is the face of the franchise, he’s won 5 championships. While a lot of other, lesser teams would be purely selfish and kick the guy out or make him an insulting offer, it seems that its been the Buss family’s tradition to take care of their legends. Jerry Buss famously gave Magic a 25 year, $25 million contract back in the day. Guys like West, Kareem, Worthy, Cooper, Rambis, and Mychal Thompson continued to work for the team in some capacity after retirement. Yes, it was a bad deal on paper, Kobe’s not worth $24 million. But its for only 2 years, and you take care of the guy and he’ll be your ambassador for the next 10 years. They probably knew they didn’t have what it takes to win now, so instead of alienating the franchise face, they chose to send him off.
Well that is one thing, but pertaining to his new role as President and GM of a team, he’s untested.
I think that the New York press and the Knicks fans will savage him. I think that after two years or so, Phil will realize how terrible of mistake he made and quietly throw in the towel. It’s just too big a job in a city which doesn’t treat its winners well (ask Joe Torre about that)
The Knicks couldn’t win in the 1990s when they had talent to spare , so thinking that bringing in Phil Jackson almost 20 years with a group of not-quites and also-rans (Carmelo Anthony being the exception) will do anything except move the target from the owner to him is wishful thinking.
Phil Jackson will get paid, get frustrated and then get on a plane and get the hell out of NYC.
That’s relevant now that Jackson is taking on an executive role, yes. But it’s a bit different from the point I was making: you don’t win a bunch of championships without great players. Jackson had them, Auerbach had them, Popovich had them, Riley had them.
Bullshit.
No, you couldn’t have. You are not a better coach than Doug Collins.
Interesting stuff, since Jim Buss does normally get portrayed as a dunderhead. I’m a little skeptical, but who knows. The Howard trade was probably a worthwhile gamble and they were going to have some flexibility, but now I don’t know.
Older players and players coming off injuries are more likely to break down, as you point out later on. That’s predictable in a general sense. And when they brought these guys in, they knew Howard was coming off back surgery and that Nash was old.
Somewhat, thought again, he was 35 at the time. You know what was really unexpected? Giving him a two-year contract extension with the highest annual salary in the NBA while he was out with a major injury! They overpaid for no apparent reason and they made it harder to surround him with players who could make this a competitive team. That’s not a small error.
The problem is that those were their regular guys. Plus Nick Young, Robert Sacre…
I can understand it, but it’s not the point. It’s nice of you to spin billionaires throwing money at millionaires as a noble gesture, but unless they’re planning to ignore the salary cap Brooklyn style, it was a bad move. I have to think they could have taken care of him for a lot less than $24 million a year, and giving him that contract while he was rehabbing was truly bewildering. They could have waited months at no cost. Anyway the problem isn’t that he won’t play up to that contract. It’s that they are going to have a problem building a winning team because a third of their cap space is going to go to a 36-/37-year old player who won’t play up to his contract because he’s coming off a very serious injury that took him out for a year. They’re going to struggle to build a complete team that can compete in their conference.
That would appear to be two wasted years where they can neither rebuild nor compete. When I said they were screwed, that’s what I was talking about. Like the Knicks, it’s going to be hard for them to get better in the immediate future. Assuming they renounce Gasol’s rights and release Nash, they’ll have Kobe, Nick Young, a draft pick, and almost nothing else. And don’t forget that it’s harder than ever to get a star to change teams as a free agent.
I’m not sure that’s worth anything. It may have value for the franchise - if they can’t win, they can at least keep their star player - but in a few years they won’t have him, so they’ll need to find some other way to win.
As to my coaching acumen, I was being somewhat facetious. I stand by Pippen being overrated: when it was his team, he couldn’t even get out of the Eastern Conference. When you have a transcendent talent, especially one you had no role in acquiring or developing, it’s not that hard to win.
I think John Ireland does tend to defend Jim when he gets called out by too many people. Same thing with Max Kellerman who’s on a couple hours later on the same station. They point out, rightly, that Jim can’t be a dunderhead if he was making those moves to get those players in. I tend to agree, and I also agree that Phil’s last year wasn’t anything special. They were swept out of the 2nd round by Dallas, all the people excoriating Jim for passing on Phil seemed to have forgotten that.
Howard and his doctors repeatedly said he could play. Everyone knew it was a gamble, but I don’t blame the team being bad on the trade. Everyone would have made that trade in an instant. And compare that to the guy they got rid of, Bynum, who sat out a whole season then bounced out of Cleveland and now is on the injured list with the Pacers, a year of Howard was preferable
They did that and I have no good defense for it. Only that I think their reasoning was that they felt it was the right thing to do.
Put yourself in their position: if you have no realistic hope of winning, why not keep around a fan favorite? I don’t disagree with that logic, and I think most people wouldn’t disagree that a team with Kobe as the #1 option (and lets face it, he wasn’t going to defer to anyone except maybe Lebron) wasn’t going to be winning any more championships. Either it was either give Kobe a small offer, leverage his injury to lower the price, or show him you’re going to reward him for 20 years of play and 5 championships. Sure it sets the Lakers back, but as a fan of them…I’m not super disappointed.
It would have been waaay waaaaay worse to me if they had simply told Kobe they weren’t going to resign him, or if they made him a small offer for a guy his age coming off injuries ($10 million a year? $12 million?) and Kobe got pissed and bolted. This was, I think, the best outcome of a myriad of bad ones.
Well, its only 2 years. One thing I do have faith in is that we can attract good free agents and rebuild quickly. After Pau and Kobe won 2 championships, we lost a year but got Chris Paul (fuck you David Stern), then that deal fell through and instantly we got Howard. I am upset about the 2 years, but I’m kind of pleased that in this case, a team put serving its franchise players over its own interests. Of course it should go both ways, but like you said, one side is filled with billionaires. As an owner, their window of opportunity is basically their whole life. As a player, it averages only about a decade. Give Kobe his money, the team may stink, but he deserves it. The Lakers can wait to rebuild, and I think most fans would be pretty pissed if the Lakers treated him poorly
In a few years they’ll find someone else. Of that I am certain. Its worth it to suck now and start clean. We’ll get somebody, this is the Lakers, not the Bucks
I haven’t heard that he had agreed to moving, but if he has, that’s great news for the Knicks. It won’t work otherwise. At lease in my opinion. I do wonder how this will work if he is living in NYC, while his woman is living in LA and running the Lakers.
This is one of the strangest parts of the whole thing to me. I don’t know anything about his relationship with Ms. Buss, but I have been under the impression for a while now that they were more than just casual. Maybe not officially engaged, but at their age, they don’t have to be. But if they are in love and have talked about making a life together, I can’t see how this would work when they will both be working on different sides of the country. That would put a strain on even the most stable of relationships. Maybe they have an open relationship and/or the parameters of it are not understood by the public (and quite frankly, it’s nobody’s business but their own.). Still, that won’t keep people from being curious about it and asking questions.
The NY press, particularly the tabloid press, love to dig into an open wound, and relationships are often things they focus on. I hope for the sake of both Buss and Jackson, this part of Phil’s life is left out of the news, and he and Buss can be left alone to manage their relationship as they see fit.
I cherry-picked these quotes from a message that wasn’t a response to me, but it was something I wanted to address. These responses of Marley’s were regarding the signing of Kobe and the $24mm/year for 2 year deal the Lakers coughed up to sign him.
I totally agree with your points made about the seemingly irrational signing of Kobe at the dollar amount they gave him. I have yet to hear an argument made for the signing that made any sense to me, and I still don’t see it, especially since Kobe has been injured for all of this season (except for what, 8 games?)
I have thought about this whole “Phil Jackson to NYC” thing, and wondering why he wouldn’t take a similar job for the Lakers.
I think the Kobe signing was one of the reasons Phil did not take the job in LA. The signing was a BAD one, and I personally believe that this will be looked at as the last nail in the coffin for the death of the current LA Laker team/run. Kobe was one of the greats, but he is on his way out, and the end is coming quicker than anyone really expected. But people often forget that he has 4 extra years on his body because he went straight from high school to the Lakers. Why would anyone give him that much money at this point of his career? I can appreciate the Lakers wanting to reward one of their great players, but at what cost?
I think Kobe was the reason Dwight Howard left the Lakers, and the Lakers needed Howard to build around for the future. Letting him leave was a massive mistake. Once Kobe leaves, and he will soon, what do they have left? Nothing and no one. This is not a team that will attract great free agents any time soon, because they have no talent there and they are more than one or two players away from a championship-level team.
The biggest free-agent to be coming up is LeBron James… Is he going to take a pay cut to play second fiddle to Kobe? Not a chance. So for at least the next 2 years, you have a dead franchise that isn’t going to get much better. Kobe is now an albatross around the neck of the Laker franchise. His ego forced the Lakers to make a decision, and they made the wrong one (IMO… I am not a Laker fan, so I have no attachment to Kobe, and think the Lakers could have signed him for much less,and/or used the money on upgrading the team’s talent.)
I think when Kobe signed, Phil saw the writing in the wall in Laker land and figured if he was going to get back into the NBA, LA wasn’t the place to go. No one really expects him to succeed in NYC, so if he does, he will put himself in some rarified air, a guy capable of turning around any franchise and making them a winner. If he fails, it won’t tarnish his legacy in the slightest, since it will just be another guy who couldn’t succeed in the disfunction that is NY Knicks basketball.
Six games, I think. And they agreed to the deal while he was still rehabbing and months before he was able to take the court.
The last nail in the coffin was last year. They won at least 57 games a year for four years in a row and won two championships and a conference title. Last year they barely made the playoffs and then Dwight Howard left. Now they stink, and the problem is that Kobe’s new contract is going to make it harder for them to recover. They can still do it in a few years, but I don’t see a plan here. I see a hope that they can lure some big stars to play with Kobe, but that’s not a plan as such. LeBron isn’t walking through that door. Luol Deng, maybe. I love the guy but he’s not going to turn a team with Kobe and Nick Young into a contender. Could they get Kevin Love the year after next? Maybe. Durant? I tend to think not. Oklahoma City has a great foundation and he seems to like it there. It’s hard to get a star free agent to change teams these days, and even if they get two other name guys, I think this contract hampers their ability to build a team around them. The Heat have done a great job of that and they’ve gradually improved over the last couple of years, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to do. And again: Kobe is turning 36. So if it takes you seasons years to put two star players around him, well, now he’s 38 and probably further diminished and he’ll need to be replaced sooner rather than later. That’s a lot of things they would need to break their way.
They didn’t let him leave. They offered him a max contract and he left to take less money from another team. There’s not much they could have done about that. I do think his bad relationship with Kobe was an important part of that, but the negative environment in LA didn’t help either - and he was right that Houston had built a better team.
As long as you mean the next two or three years, I agree. Beyond that, who knows? They’re the Lakers, and they’ve always been great at bringing in free agents- but the deck is stacked against that approach right now. If they don’t make any awful signings and hit on some draft picks, they could be good again in a couple of years. But that’ll be too late for Kobe and they can’t make the hole any deeper.
I see no sign that he was wanted in LA. That’s the beginning and the end of the discussion. I think Lakers fans and NBA fans are just presuming the team might’ve wanted him, but I don’t think they did. The Busses - Jim, anyway - don’t want to give up control of the team and perhaps the credit that goes with it, and they don’t seem fond of him. Just last year they talked to him about the head coaching job and then pulled the rug out from under him to hire D’Antoni, who everyone seems to agree was a bad fit. Dolan seems to have been interested in this for quite a while. Will he really going to give up control of the team? Nobody knows, and when he says he will, nobody should trust him. But it’s not like he was choosing between two competing offers here. The Knicks were the only suitor as far as anyone knows.
Kobe, and any other world wide superstar is worth at least 80-100 million a year easily, as long as you see a team as a business and making money as the goal rather than winning championships.
I agree that the Kobe deal was bad on a thousand different levels but it’s not the reason why Phil didn’t end up in LA. Phil didn’t end up in LA because Jim Buss didn’t want him to - period. Full stop. Giving control basketball operations control to Phil completely marginalizes Jim since Jeanie does the financial portion and that doesn’t sit well with Jim. Couple the fact that Phil and Jeanie are a couple and it really shouldn’t be any surprise that Jim Buss didn’t offer Phil a spot with the Lakers.
As for expectations for Phil in NYC? I don’t think there’s much expectation for Phil to succeed but there is enormous pressure on Phil to succeed - if that makes sense. Phil’s got the paycheck, the reputation, and the ego all riding on him performing. Nobody rightfully knows just how Phil can right the ship so everyone’s expecting Phil to fail and in the face of that comes a 15% sliver in just about everyone that is wondering just what miracle can Phil conjure to make things right.
You are correct. Howard did leave for less money, but he left for a better situation. Kobe didn’t help Howard at all in LA, and I don’t think LA was exactly a great fit for Howard. But I think if Kobe would have publicly supported Howard and said he was the future of the franchise, and who they were going to be building around after he retired, maybe people would have embraced him more. He just never seemed accepted as a Laker. Was he too soft? Too sensitive? I don’t know. Maybe too much was expected from him and he couldn’t handle it. Whatever the case, i think it will ultimately set the franchise back a few years until they can hit the reset button after Kobe retires.
Yes, of course I’m talking short term. No one can predict what will happen to the Lakers long-term. They could hit a home run in the draft. They could attract a free agent that is willing to take less than a max contract (like Howard did to go to Houston), and LA is NOT OKC, so the potential to make boatloads of money from ad revenue is enormous, certainly someone could look at LA as Shaq did, as a home base for his career as an actor and media personality. There will be another Shaq out there (not necessarily his size, but his vision) that may want to take his game to LA. And if they didn’t sign Kobe, I could see LeBron in Laker uniform. Max contract money left in the table for someone like LeBron would be made up with endorsement deals in LA, if not completely, it would be a big chunk of it.
You are right here. I just heard Jeanie Buss say in an interview (don’t know when it was recorded) who said “there wasn’t a role for Phil with the Lakers.” What she was saying was that Phil wasn’t being courted by anyone but the Knicks, since the Lakers didn’t have an opening for him.
I don’t know what the story is with the Busses and Phil, or why Phil’s girlfriend wouldn’t want to give him a job with the Lakers, but I can speculate. Phil couldn’t be president for the Lakers without someone pushing him to be the coach at the first opportunity. That would turn into a circus. Phil is also pushing 70, so how many years does the man really have left? He was burned out of traveling and coaching the last time, so why would he want to go back to that?
From what I can piece together, the Knicks were bidding against no one, and Phil did his best to make the Knicks pull the offer. But every condition he set was agreed to by the Knicks, so at the end of the day, he had to either accept the job or look like a complete tool for dragging them along. He wouldn’t have cared, but Dolan would have looked like a complete fool.
I will be shocked if this works. Phil has already announced the team will run his triangle offense. Ok, well who can teach that as well as Phil? So, he’s going to coach by proxy? That can’t work.
I remember Kobe saying all of those things. What gets said in public is not that important. In private, they didn’t get along, the team didn’t run the offense the way Howard wanted it to run, and they had a bad season and the environment was bad. Houston was a better-constructed team and looked like more fun, so he went there. There was nothing anyone could have said that would have changed that. (There were rumors he might’ve stayed if the Lakers had agreed to trade Kobe, but I don’t think they could have traded him even if they wanted to.)
I think this is really overrated, by the way. Unless you specifically want to pursue a career in entertainment and producing, it doesn’t matter if you’re in a big or small market - you get endorsements with multinational companies, and nobody in those companies (or in their target markets) cares what city you’re based in. And you know, everybody said Dwight Howard really liked LA as a city and enjoyed that stuff, and he left anyway. It helps if the city has a nightlife and a culture that appeals to ballplayers, but I’m not sure about the endorsement angle.
It’s not up to her. (She is his fiancee, by the way.) She does financial stuff and doesn’t run the team. Why that power went to her brother, who people generally agree is a dope, I am not sure.
I see no evidence that he tried to get the Knicks to back out. He wanted the job on exactly his terms, but that’s not the same thing.
He actually did not announce that. There are rumors he wants it.
There’s probably more than one answer. The official answer is that the NBA owned the Hornets at the time, which meant David Stern was in charge of the Hornets. He says he rejected the offer because it wasn’t good enough. The owner of a team can do that since he is, after all, the GM’s boss. The unofficial or rumored answer is that some of the smaller-market teams pitched a fit and pressured Stern to reject the deal. The NBA had just been through a lockout and one of the supposed selling points of the new CBA was that it would improve the competitive balance of the NBA (it really doesn’t do much for that, but it does make the owners even richer). The trade would have had a rich team get richer at the expense of a poorer team, and at that time these owners really didn’t want that to happen. Here’s an ESPN story about the trade falling apart.
I don’t think the official reason was that it was a bad trade (it was horrible of course), i think the official reason was that the deal would have ended up with the Hornets taking on more salary which made things very murky since they didn’t have an owner and the other owners felt (rightly so) that it was basically sticking them with the bill.
There’s also been talk that Howard privately said he wanted Phil to coach, and that it would have kept him in LA had the Lakers made that decision. I’ve heard the trade Kobe rumors too, but those are more speculative than the Phil thing
The talk in LA is that Jerry Buss groomed Jim to take over basketball operations, and Jeanie to take over the business side. Jerry wanted Jim, and not Phil, to take over, and that’s why the organization has been run without Phil in mind. There was never a place for Phil once Jerry made that decision, and all the speculation about how he could have been hired was pointless. Unless Jim decides to cede control to Phil, they were simply not going to hire him, period
All rumors, but I’ve heard the same thing. Phil was using the Knicks as leverage against the Lakers, hoping the Lakers would swoop in with a last minute deal to save him from the abysmal Knicks job. But when he got everything he wanted, there really was no way to turn down a guaranteed $60 million and full control of the team.
However, I won’t say he didn’t have any other suitors. There was a reported deal with the Raptors that got nixed because Phil didn’t want to move to Toronto, and had the Kings moved to Seattle, Phil was already in negotiations to take that job
The real reason is that David Stern is the epitome of evil in sports! :mad: