The coach of the Knicks speaks in the same tone as before, his words every bit as upbeat. You listen to David Fizdale speak, what you hear is a man who hasn’t yet been knocked flat by his won-loss record. You listen to Fizdale speak, you’re still half-tempted to grab some sneakers and shorts and take a charge for him.
“I feel like this team is ready to take that next step,” Fizdale said Monday, media day at the MSG Training Center, when Next Year arrived at last for the Knicks.
“They’re going to come out in every game and compete to win,” Fizdale said. “I feel like we do have a talent upgrade with the job [the front office] did in free agency and bringing in these new guys, and at the same time I don’t feel like it’s going to get in the way of the young talent that we have here who are also hungry to take their next steps and help us win.”
Fizdale covers a lot of ground in those 74 words. For one: It’s OK now to acknowledge that “competing to win” is a good thing again. For another: Fizdale does have an entirely new roster, filled with veterans who, if they buy what Fizdale is selling, can help carry the message.
But there are also the kids — RJ Barrett and Kevin Knox, Mitchell Robinson and Dennis Smith Jr. and Frank Ntilikina — who will ultimately determine what the Knicks are going to be, this season and beyond.
And will ultimately decide who’s coaching the team.
The games count again, so Fizdale’s job description has changed. The wins are an easy thing to calculate: The record is in the paper every day. But by season’s end, the Knicks will need to know if Barrett, Knox and Robinson are a foundation they can build upon. That, too, is on Fizdale.
We need to know if he’s any good at the job.
“Look, I will just say this,” Fizdale said, asked if he plans on using the playoffs as a motivating tool and a feasible goal. “Our guys in there are coming in here expecting to win games and trying to win games, and so when the dust settles, of course that’s where we want to be.
“But we’re not sitting here just throwing that in our players’ faces every single day. We’re going to work extremely hard every day, and every time we step on that court we’re coming out to win games.”
It wasn’t so much that Fizdale was spared last year; he did, after all, have to sit through all 82 games. He sat through all 65 losses. He had the best seat in the house for a Knicks season that went from tire fire to warehouse fire over the course of six months.
If there wasn’t a brigade of angry Knicks fans chanting for his job, that was only because most had the fight beaten out of them. And so Fizdale was granted cover. How were you supposed to judge his first year as Knicks coach, presiding over a team that didn’t just lose 79.3 percent of the time but was undermanned and overwhelmed almost all of the time? Nobody wins a championship in a vacuum, and you don’t post the worst record in a 30-team league in one, either.
Mostly, the accepted thinking for many Knicks fans was this: If his bosses don’t care what kind of a job he’s doing, why should we?It’s different now, and will probably be different for every coach going forward, even those given a skeleton’s skin of talent. Much as it might’ve been intellectually sound to warn against tanking in a league whose lottery system no longer rewarded it, it wasn’t until the lottery’s results — the eighth-worst team winning, five of the six worst teams falling out of the top three — hammered over the head the utter folly of losing to win.
The players, for one, seem ready to bury the tank talk that strangled most of the life and all of the fun out of last year.
“We’re a group that’s going to hold each other accountable every single day,” Julius Randle said, and Marcus Morris said, “We got a lot of dogs on this team” [emphasizing, “That’s a good thing”], and Taj Gibson said, “We have a lot of guys on this team who put basketball first.” Kevin Knox, who saw more than he bargained for as a rookie, said, “First and foremost, it’s not going to be like last season.”
It can’t be. It can’t ever be again. The wins and the losses are Fizdale’s forever, but so is the next, first immediate step. We were hit over the head with one clear message Monday: The Knicks will never lose on purpose ever again.
But what if they keep losing anyway?