The only thing that’s gotten older than Lenny Wilkens is the Knicks not making the playoffs.
BD+>THE graying of the Knicks is the graying of America, insisted the silver-haired franchise icon seated near the team’s new 66-year-old coach.
“Your Social Security is a lot farther away than mine,” Willis Reed told the media yesterday at Lenny Wilkens’ introduction. “I’ll come up at 66, it’ll be 80 when you guys get there. That’s what’s happening. Life expectancy is growing.”
Certainly it seemed that way while Jim Dolan kept extending Don Chaney’s contracts, never mind how many games he was losing. But now President-for-Life Isiah Thomas has traded away every lingering piece of the future except for Frank Williams, the national debt will be paid before the Knicks have cap room again, and media members left to watch a 10th place team in the weaker conference wonder how many more Knick coaches they will see named before retiring at 80.
Since this thought is not pleasant – much like remembrances of Phil Esposito’s tumultuous reign with the Rangers haunting us since Thomas’ anointment – our alternative is to eat forbidden fruit and toast the merriment with which Isiah dug through mothballs for a 30-year coaching veteran to win some games right now.
At least, immediacy is what Thomas said yesterday most drives him. “The thought of winning now is always in the front of my mind,” he said from the opposite side of the same mouth that last weekend said: “We make one trade, you guys say that we have to make the playoffs this year. We never said that.”
Jim Dolan certainly did the day Thomas was hired and, asked about it yesterday, the Garden boss didn’t back down. It might be reassuring if the organization could get its story straight, not that anything that has happened in Isiah’s whirlwind 24 days could lead anyone to believe the long-unspoken philosophy of the Garden – “Why worry about later when we will be sold by then?” – has been violated.
Anyway, we don’t really require clarification of policy. The day of reckoning with the paying customers is only three months away. If the Knicks don’t make the playoffs, the pick they gave the Suns is in the lottery. That won’t make the Stephon Marbury trade a bust, but there will be no consolation prize to hold up to the fans during a third consecutive dark April.
So whom exactly is Thomas kidding except himself that expectations haven’t been raised by the Marbury deal? And what is so lofty about eighth place or makes it so hard to reach when the Knicks are three games out with 42 to play? And why would you bring in a 66-year-old coach, instead of promoting either of two assistants with head coaching experience to finish a season, if there wasn’t a premium on making something out of it?
Say this: If it ever could be a strategy of a team president who stands in the runway just over the coach’s shoulder to keep expectations under the radar, Thomas picked the right man for this bench. To get the Knicks’ attention yesterday, the new coach practiced them for exactly an hour. When the media was allowed in for the last 10 minutes, there was not a single player vomiting.
“I am not a yeller, not a screamer,” Wilkens said. “I don’t make a lot of expressions other than fold my arms. You take away a player’s minutes, it’s more meaningful.”
Indeed, the bench can be a powerful tool and more power to a coach who uses it, rather than just threatening it. In the end, it always is about not what they say but what they do.
That goes for the owner and president, too, because the only thing that has gotten older than Lenny Wilkens has become the Garden’s two teams not making the playoffs. And that obviously is the emphasis, in fact, has always been, so why would Isiah Thomas deny it?
