Once Just Hot, Isiah’s Seat Is Now Scalding

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The New York Sun

Can we start the countdown yet?

Knicks team president and head coach Isiah Thomas began the season with a mandate to show significant improvement, or his reign of error would be brought to an end. While certain individuals certainly have made progress — notably Eddy Curry, who put together his eighth straight 20-point effort on Wednesday night — the team undeniably has not.

The Knicks have played a quarter of a season, and find themselves at 7–14. At this rate they will end up winning 27 games, a mere four-game improvement on the Larry Brown-led fiasco of a year earlier.

And despite Thomas’s relentless, near-comic optimism, there’s nothing in particular to suggest the Knicks are any better than their record shows. For instance, they have not played a particularly difficult schedule. The Knicks’ slate has been the 11th-toughest in the league to date according to USA Today’s Jeff Sagarin, which is more challenging than most Eastern teams have faced but hardly an excuse for a 7–14 start.

They have not suffered from an abundance of travel. Ten of their 21 games have been at home, their longest road trip was three games, and they’ve yet to hit the West Coast. Besides, they’ve played so poorly at the Garden that they’d probably prefer road games anyway.

They have not been victimized by bad luck in close games. If anything, it’s the opposite. The Knicks are 3–2 in games decided by five points or less, and were it not for Jamal Crawford’s heave in Denver and the triple-OT escape in Memphis we’d looking at an even bigger disaster.

They have not suffered from an unusual rash of injuries. Yes, they haven’t had free-agent pick-up Jared Jeffries yet but take a look around the league. Pretty much everybody is missing a rotation player at this point. Besides, if you can’t win without Jared Jeffries, the problem isn’t the injury to Jeffries. The problem is that you stink.

And that is unquestionably the Knicks’ problem right now. Despite the millions spent on payroll and luxury tax, and the improvement of Curry and the enticing play of young guys like David Lee and Renaldo Balkman, the Knicks are a terrible team that doesn’t seem likely to get much better.

Meanwhile, Thomas’s excuses get lamer with each succeeding defeat. On Wednesday he claimed that the Wizards just happened to play a brilliant game and that it’s tough to win when the opponent is making all their 3-pointers. He left out the part about how it’s tough to win when the opponent is left wide open on all their 3-pointers, or when you put a poor defender like Stephon Marbury on the other team’s best player and make no alterations to the defense while the scoring binge rages on.

Of course, the effect of the losing is magnified byThomas’s previous gaffes, because each defeat puts New York one step closer to surrendering a player like Greg Oden or Joakim Noah to the Bulls’ in next year’s draft. Pardon me while I drag the dead horse out for another flogging, but this is because Thomas failed to include any lottery protection on the first-round pick he gave the Bulls a year ago, or on the firstround picks the Bulls can swap with New York this year.

We all realize that if Knicks owner James Dolan had a clue, he’d have fired Isiah a long time ago. But his demand for progress this year is a clear sign that he’s begun to suspect his chosen emperor isn’t wearing any clothes. After the slow start, one has to think that Thomas’s seat — warm when the year started — is positively scalding right now.

Remember that Thomas pointed to December as the time the Knicks would right their ship thanks to a favorable schedule. So far, they’re 1–3 this month, and although the Knicks have an easy slate it’s tough to count any game as an automatic win at this point. Meanwhile, road games against Phoenix, Indiana, and the LA Clippers look like near-certain defeats, and you can’t like the Knicks’ odds in home contests against Denver, Detroit, Chicago, and Utah either.

If they lose five of those seven difficult games, the best they can do for the month is 8–8 — and that presumes they’ll prevail at home against Milwaukee, Atlanta, Charlotte, and Boston, and on the road against Philly. Those teams are struggling, but not any more than the Knicks are, which makes it more than likely that they’ll drop a couple of them.

That would leave Isiah 12–21 at the end of the December, heading into a January schedule that’s much more difficult. And a 12–21 pace through 33 games would put the Knicks on pace to lose 52 games — which certainly would fall well short of Dolan’s goals, however loosely defined.

What I’m trying to say is, cheer up Knicks fans. The dawn is almost here. The Knicks have been bad enough for long enough that even Dolan has to notice, and if New York doesn’t come up with several wins between now and Christmas we could be ringing in a new era by New Year’s Day.

While Dolan has several reasons to stay in bed with Thomas — he doesn’t want to pay yet another coach for not working, and he has a sexual harassment suit to worry about — my guess is at some point he’ll say enough is enough. Like, say, after a 110–92 loss to Detroit in the Garden on December 27.

So let’s get ahead of the curve and talk about what comes next. Cleaning up this mess is going to take a long, long time even if the Knicks are wise in selecting Thomas’s replacement. Unfortunately, the person doing the hiring will be the same person that selected Thomas in the first place, which gives me little faith that his next pick will be much better.

As we watch the Thomas era drawing to its inevitable close — and even if I’m wrong on the date, I can’t imagine Thomas lasting the season — the Knicks need to remember that the most important decision of the post-Thomas era will be the first one they make selecting Thomas’s replacement as team president. Let’s hope Dolan realizes this too. Otherwise, the only change at MSG will be the nameplate on the desk.

jhollinger@nysun.com


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