They were booing loudly and roundly and chanting “Fire Phil” at Barclays Center, partly because Kristaps Porzingis wasn’t Justise Winslow or Emmanuel Mudiay or Willie Cauley-Stein; partly because he is skinnier than NBA commissioner Adam Silver; partly because he is a Euro project; and partly because the Knicks haven’t won anything in 42 years, once drafted Frederic Weis and just left behind the stench of a historically horrific 17-65 season.
Poor Zingis.
Welcome to New York.
You either trust Phil Jackson or you don’t, and right now Knicks fans don’t.
The natives are understandably restless.
He’d better be right about this kid, and he’d better be right in free agency.
He has no more margin for error.
Jackson has learned the hard way that honeymoon periods can end abruptly here, even for legends of the game who return home as the $12 million-per-year designated blue-and-orange savior.
Jackson entertained trade offers with this precious fourth pick and elected to roll the dice with Porzingis.
“The risk is great, the reward’s great, too,” Jackson said.
The risk is failing for the first time in his Zen life and risking his legacy as the Knicks disappear into the basketball Bermuda Triangle.
“That’s not my thought process, my thought process is, ‘What do I do best for this franchise at this particular time, in the history and where we’re at?’ ” Jackson said. “We have five players on the roster, we need something athletic to make a real difference in the way we play. And this young man’s an eye-opening athlete and a player, and so that’s something we have to go with.”
In truth, the reward cannot be expected to arrive before 2016 at the earliest, when the salary cap balloons and Carmelo Anthony tries to help Jackson recruit the difference-making free agent.
Jackson swings for the fences here and hopes and prays Porzingis can be more Pau Gasol than Darko Milicic, more Dirk Nowitzki than a Latvian Andrea Bargnani.
Jackson — who also dealt Tim Hardaway Jr. for Notre Dame guard Jerian Grant — decided it is not necessarily better to be safe than sorry, and no one can possibly say with certainty today whether he is right or wrong, mostly because no one aside from Fran Fraschilla and NBA scouts have seen Porzingis play live.
Knicks fans would have been happy with a single or a double, but Jackson is looking for the home run.
It is called daring to be great, in the twilight of a lifetime of greatness.
How ’bout we give him, and Poor Zingis, a chance?
No one should have been under any illusions the Knicks were going to be much more than a 35-win team in 2015 anyway, which means this is about 2016, and always has been about 2016, when Melo turns 33.
Jackson took a seat in the press room Thursday shortly after the boos rained down from the rafters of Barclays Center and fell on him as far away as the Knicks’ training facility.
He looked out through a window at the gray clouds and muttered: “I think it’s gonna rain on top of it.”
He spent the next six minutes trying to look on the sunny side.
“The reaction in the crowd is what you anticipate in New York,” Jackson said with a wry smile, “and [Porzingis] is aware of it. Very much intelligence on this thing that ‘I’m gonna have to face an uphill battle,’ but he’s willing to take it on.”
The good news: Porzingis is 7-foot-3 and can stroke it from beyond 20 feet and is a gym rat with a chip on his shoulder, burning to prove he isn’t Mister Softee.
“He fits very well into what we like to run here,” Jackson said.
The bad news: A stiff wind might blow him over. He’s 230 pounds soaking wet. Jackson concedes defense will be a problem until the Knicks get him in the weight room and start force-feeding him potatoes. Or pierogies.
“Pau was 227 [pounds], I think, when he came in the league, something like that, and was a great contributor to our teams out in LA without a doubt,” Jackson said. “This young man has better range perhaps than Pau does, a natural 3-point shooter, but that’s the evolution of the game at this time, and there’s a lot of comparisons to him. I think the structure of their bodies are very similar, and I think the activity level, how they run and their athleticism are similar.”
Porzingis was asked on radio if he modeled his game after any NBA players.
“I mean, obviously I watched guys like Kevin Garnett, Dirk Nowitzki, Pau Gasol, those guys, and tried to look for those things, ‘Why are they so great? What are the things that they do so good?,’ and learn from those guys,” Porzingis said.
He wanted New York. Jackson wanted New York. The two of them got New York, all right.