Coach Fisher Leads Knicks Into New Era

Derek Fisher has had a long and storied relationship with his former coach and mentor, Knicks President Phil Jackson. But this summer, a month after accepting the job as coach of the Knicks from Jackson, Derek learned something about Phil and himself that he didn’t expect.

The two took a trip to Kansas to visit Tex Winter, the architect of the Triangle offense, which was famously used by Jackson on the way to championships, including five for which D-Fish was a player for Jackson. It’s the same system the Knicks will be implementing under Coach Fisher in New York, so Fish entered the trip, thinking it was business as usual. But as the two were leaving Winter’s home, the moment struck Derek as a significant one.

“He needed to officially pass the torch. That was the purpose,” D-Fish said of the visit. “I feel like I’m carrying the torch now, and it has to be respected. I’m proud of that, but with that pride comes the appropriate pressure to do it in the way it’s supposed to be done, but to do it in my own way. Phil didn’t try to be Tex. Phil was Phil. I can’t try to be Phil Jackson, and Phil respects that.”

Derek will officially begin carrying that torch on Wednesday night as the Knicks open the 2014-15 NBA season at home playing host to the Chicago Bulls. It’s another first in a season full of them for Coach Fisher, but this is perhaps the most significant of them all.

Derek enters Wednesday’s game just a few months removed from a role as a player on a playoff team in Oklahoma City. Since then, his coaching experience has been a trial by fire as he went from the court to a press conference to coaching the Knicks’ summer league team, then got in a couple months of preparation before training camp.

Such a lack of experience in the profession is considered by some to be a detriment, but Derek is looking at the situation from a different and he believes his close connection to the game as it’s currently played and the players who currently play it will serve him well on the sidelines.

“I do view it in some ways as an advantage,” he said. “I hope it gives me instant credibility. It gives me great comfort and confidence that I can communicate with our players in a way that’s meaningful and impactful to them. I think they can hear me speak about the game and situations that they know for a fact I’ve experienced not more than six months ago.”

Knicks star forward Carmelo Anthony was asked early in training camp what it was like being coached by a man who so recently was one of his peers on the court. Could he possibly respect that person’s teachings as a coach, Anthony was asked.

“That’s not even a question. He’s got our respect. He’s got our attention, he’s got our focus,” he replied. “He has it. I think it’s just his mentality and what he’s about. He made that message clear…and we get it. We know what we’re here for and we know we’re going to do it together we know he’s in a tough situation right now but it’s a fun situation for him as well. To kind of come into a new situation here in New York with everything that goes on. It’s going to be a fun ride for him.”

Still, Derek admits that making the quick leap from playing the game to being a head coach is one of the biggest challenges of his life, though he is ready and willing to take it on.

“In the course of my life, I’ve always found myself in leadership positions, and it’s all prepared me for this,” he said. “Except for some personal things, it’s as challenging as it can get. And I embrace that.”

THE TRIANGLE

Among the challenges Derek has faced in his new role has been the implementation of the aforementioned Triangle Offense as the Knicks’ system.

There have been plenty of growing pains along the way. The Knicks went 3-4 this preseason and took turns between looking crisp offensively and looking completely lost in the scheme. But D-Fish doesn’t expect his players to be comfortable in the triangle, definitely not now and perhaps not ever. That’s the way it should be, he says.

“If you’re comfortable, you’re probably not doing something the right way,” Fisher said. “We have to learn to be uncomfortable and be able to operate outside of our comfort zone. That happened to us throughout this preseason. I think it stretched us and it made us better than maybe we would have been had we not kind of fell into some of these adverse situations. We’ll be fine.”

Fish and his team took each game as an opportunity to work on the offense, which averaged 90 points throughout all seven preseason games. The triangle has been a huge point of emphasis for Fish, and said the team won’t really know where it’s at until they play a game that counts. They’ll get a great test from the defensive-minded Bulls on opening night.

“I don’t really know what the preseason tells us about how much (we have) improved offensively,” he said. “What makes Chicago so formidable is their defense. Whether they’re scoring points or not, they have a way of really making things tough for you on the defensive end.”

Derek noted that many of the difficulties the team had with the system in the preseason had to do with the learning curve. He said that when a player takes even a split second to think about what his next move is, that will catch up with him among other elite players. And until his players get accustomed to running the offense in rhythm rather than step-by-step, those lapses will happen.

“They’re doing everything we’re asking them to do, trying to do it the right way,” he said. “A lot of what’s happening out there is elite basketball players stopping to think out there for half a second. They’re in a really good spot.”

Coach Fisher also noted that the players have been very receptive to learning the system, which is focused on having players make plays for one another rather than for themselves.

“A lot of people question or doubt a lot of these guys’ ability to do that and

[their] willingness to be unselfish and play for their teammate,” he said. “These guys deserve a lot of credit for what they’ve done. We’ve continued to share the basketball, continued to have a high number of assists, percentage of our made field goals.”

And if there’s ever a question among the players whether the Triangle will actually work, Derek simply shows them the proof.

“Being the type of player I’ve been, it’s a struggle. I’m not going to lie,” said J.R. Smith. “He just told me — look at the rings they have. It’s worked. I want one so bad, I’ll do whatever it takes. If it takes me sacrificing my scoring, that’s what it takes.”

Coach Fisher noted that he’s also had long conversations with all of his players about what it took to earn the five NBA championship rings he owns.

“It’s not really looking at the rings per se, but just looking at how people that have been successful at anything they’ve done, they have a way of going about doing it,” he said. “There’s consistency to their habits. There’s a particular kind of culture involved. There’s a commitment to others and a service to others and making everyone else better and putting the group first.”

COMMITMENT TO DEFENSE

Those same principles are the crucible to any defense and when the Knicks opened training camp, that’s where Derek started, not on the Triangle, because he refused to have the importance of defense be understated from Day 1.

“That’s really where we have to anchor ourselves is on the defensive end,” he said. “Starting out and through the season there will be a lot of talk about who we are offensively and what we’re trying to do on the offensive end in terms of running the triangle. But defense is the anchor. That’s the foundation to all good and great teams.”

Like the offense, the Knicks defense has had its moments during the preseason. New York did limit opponents to under 85 points in four of their seven games, but there were also some rough evenings, including a 106-point night by the Boston Celtics in their first preseason game and a 120-point showing by the Milwaukee Bucks last Monday.

But as with anything within a team with new parts, putting in a new system, the Knicks defense remains a work in progress. Derek insists they are coming along well and noted that perhaps the most difficult thing on that end has been eliminating old bad habits, like switching, which crept up particularly in the game against Milwaukee.

“Until [then], our defense was light years ahead of our offense,” he said. “A lot had to do with their different lineup. Communication was low. Switching came back in. We were forced back into it.”

Smith noted early on in training camp that the defense the Knicks will run under Derek is a lot more clear than the one they ran previously and he believes it will run a lot more smoothly as long as the players stick to their assignments and don’t let bad habits creep into their defense.

“In terms of what we are going to do defensively, we are going to push everything to the sideline and keeping people out of our middle, last year it was more forcing people to the middle,” J.R. Smith said. “That right there is a mindset that eliminates people not helping and who is supposed to be where and what. The attention to detail and the drills that we are doing, everybody understands where they are supposed to be on the defensive end.”

The New York defense will also get a stern test from Chicago, as the game marks to return to regular season action of former MVP Derrick Rose. Though Rose has missed most of the last two seasons due to injury, he has looked in prime form this preseason and D-Fish knows the Knicks will have to be on top of its game defensively to slow him down, though he assured his players that Rose cannot be their only focus.

“Derrick Rose is a guy that’s returning from injury, but I think he’s playing at a really high level to be so early in that return,” Derek said. “We’re going to have to be conscious to what he can do out there to hurt us, but our defense all season will be about five guys and not just the individual matchups. We can spend all the time we want to trying to figure out how to keep Derrick Rose from scoring, but he’s still going to score.”

UNDERSTATED EXPECTATIONS

It is not lost on Derek that his official coaching debut comes at home, inside Madison Square Garden, known as the World’s Most Famous Arena.

Derek noted the magnitude of being a part of any game at the Garden and expects each one he coaches there to be special in its own way.

“The Garden is a special place,” he said. “Whether you come here as a visitor or now this being home and thinking about doing this hundreds of times per season hopefully for many years. To think about this being one of the many first steps in my career as a coach, to have this opportunity is very special.”

The Knicks begin Derek’s first season at the helm with complicated expectations.

New York is coming off one of its most disappointing seasons in recent memory, a 37-45 finish that left them short of the postseason for the first time in four years and started a near complete franchise overhaul. Few pieces remain from the squad that won 54 games and went deep into the playoffs just two years ago.

But the ones who do remain, including Amar’e Stoudemire, Iman Shumpert, Smith and Anthony are key pieces to the puzzle. And there are several newcomers who will be as well.

Over the course of seven preseason games, Fish alternated through 11 different starters, including young point guard Shane Larkin, who stepped in for another newcomer Jose Calderon, who was injured. Both those players came to the Knicks in an offseason trade with Dallas. So too did big man Samuel Dalmebert, who is likely to start at center.

Other newcomers Quincy Acy and Jason Smith are expected to play big roles at forward while backcourt minutes will be divided between Larkin, Calderon, Shumpert, Tim Hardaway Jr. and Pablo Prigioni. Fish stated this week that each and every one of those players will play a role in the team’s success this season.

“You can expect us to give our best effort and do everything we possibly can to win,” Fisher said. “We’re becoming a team that’s committed to our team first. We’re not going to be focused on how to make things work for just certain guys. We want to find a way as a team that, offensively and defensively, blends the talents and ability of every guy on the floor. We truly are a team. It’s the New York Knicks and not just one or two guys and everybody else.”

But the Knicks will be led by Anthony, who tested free agency during the offseason only to return to New York on a new five-year contract. The Knicks star indicated this week that he didn’t make that decision with the intention of going through a long rebuilding process in New York.

“Now is the time we can set that foundation,” he said. “There are goals that I set from that standpoint as far as having the chance to win our division again, getting home court in the playoffs. It’s going to take some work, but those are goals I set for us.”

Coach Fisher is on board with the expectations set forth by his star player and believes that for any team to reach the ultimate goal of winning a championship, they must enter every season working toward that goal.

“We won’t get a pass because we’re doing a new thing offensively and we have a new coach and new players,” he said. “I expect us to understand that and be ready to go right from the beginning. I think we have a really good team. It’s just a matter of if we can remain committed even while you struggle, when adversity hits, when people are questioning what we’re doing. Will we have enough resolve as a team to stay on that path of success? I think we can. But we have to prove it.”

The road to doing that begins on Wednesday night when the Knicks host the Bulls and continues through the next week when the Knicks also face the Cavaliers (Thursday), the Hornets (Sunday) and the Wizards (Tuesday). All four of those teams are expected to be among the top teams in the Eastern Conference.

“We’re excited,” Fisher said. “This is an amazing opportunity. The excitement in the city for the future of our team and where we possibly can go with so many new faces. We’re excited to get this started. We know we have a lot of work to do. We’re going to get better every day and every week. There’s no question how excited we are to get it started.”

Tip off of the season opener from Madison Square Garden is slated for 8 p.m. ET and the game can be seen nationally on ESPN or locally on MSG.

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