There was sympathy for the latest head coach to fail at Madison Square Garden. But the team make nothing but bad decisions
David Fizdale, the recently fired head coach of the
New York Knicks, is not a martyr, though you’d be forgiven for any confusion. Luminaries such as San Antonio Spurs coach Gregg Popovich and
LeBron James have eulogized Fizdale as if he were a doomed hero tossed into war by negligent leadership. On those terms, his NBA death isn’t so bad: Fizdale will cash some $17m in checks from the league’s most dysfunctional franchise over the next two seasons, a happy return for him on 18 months of forgettable work. To be clear: his bosses did suck, and the roster was wretched, but Fizdale didn’t really give the world any reason to mourn him, either.
The widespread support for the canned coach comes as no surprise. Across the league, the youngish, charismatic Fizdale is about as admired as the ancient, accursed Knicks are ridiculed. Players get along with him. He seems to be a good guy. In fact, Fizdale’s talent for relationship building was a major reason he was invited to helm the wayward Knicks ahead of the 2018-19 season. The Knicks ended that campaign with an NBA-worst 17-65 record; at the time of his firing, their 4-18 record was the worst of the current season. By December, Fizdale hadn’t refined anything but his face of bespectacled befuddlement on the sideline, and the only case that could be made for him keeping the job was continuity. From a distance, it is easy to write off Fizdale’s failure as inevitable, but it was surely possible to fail prettier. For those who watched many of his 104 games – a fate I would wish on no one – it was not clear that any aspect of the
basketball team, no matter how small, looked any better than the day he took over.