Rick Pitino appreciated the feedback, but it wasn’t going to change his plans.

Coming off a 1988-89 season in which the Knicks reached the second round of the NBA playoffs, there was friction between Pitino and then-general manager Al Bianchi about how each saw the future of the franchise, and Pitino had an offer to take over the men’s basketball program at Kentucky.

“Don’t go,” Stanley Jaffe, a movie producer and a neighbor of Pitino’s in Bedford, N.Y., at the time, told the coach one day. “I guarantee that if you stay, it’ll be great. You’ll have a long career.”

But why take advice from a movie executive? What did Jaffe know about the business of basketball?