CBS Sports is reporting that Phil Jackson wants to return to coach, but that no NBA teams — including the New York Knicks — have contacted the coach with more championship rings than any coach in league history.
Ken Berger of CBS Sports ripped the Knicks in his report, saying in part “Let’s not be naïve about what the Garden is running now. It isn’t a basketball team, but a movie production.”
Here is more of Berger’s report:
Recent leaks out of Madison Square Garden painted the public push for Jackson to coach the Knicks as a scheme right out of Larry Brown’s playbook. The Knicks, according to the spin machine, aren’t going to be used as an ATM by another aging coach looking to pad his retirement fortune.
As if Jackson, who played for the Knicks’ last championship team in 1973, needs the Knicks’ money more than the Knicks need his coaching. Never mind the fact that Jackson almost certainly wouldn’t touch the roiling cauldron of dysfunction that is Madison Square Garden with his walking cane. The fact that the Knicks knew this — knew their organization is so fraught with paranoia and pettiness that the greatest coach alive wouldn’t roam the sidelines with somebody else’s legs — says all you need to know.
Not only have the Knicks failed to place a call to Jackson or his agent, Todd Musburger, they have zeroed in on interim coach Mike Woodson to serve as the latest pawn in Creative Artists Agency’s top-to-bottom takeover of the team. So when it was revealed last week that Woodson had dumped his agents, the father-son team of Joe and Keith Glass, at the team’s request, Knicks fans had the only explanation they needed for why Jackson will, for the time being, remain focused on reviving his tennis game.
Hard to believe that the Knicks would not at least pick up the phone and see if there is a deal to be made with the 66-year-old Jackson, who has won 11 championships.
Then again, maybe it really isn’t all that hard to believe.