The 2014-15 season was one of unrest for the New York Knicks as a franchise, but first-year head coach Derek Fisher stood as a source of consistency and poise on the sideline for New York.

The transitional season for the Knicks, which involved major roster changes throughout the campaign, would have been a challenge for any coach. That was particularly for Derek, in his first season on the sidelines after a long playing career. But Coach Fisher treated the year of change, and New York’s transitional phase at large, as an opportunity to learn.

There were plenty of lessons to be learned over the course of the campaign, both by Derek and his players, and he talked about just that after the final game of the team’s season.

“I’m proud of these guys,” Derek said. “We all learned that being successful is on purpose. It’s intentional. It doesn’t just happen to you for being lucky or even for having talent. Very specific decisions and people have to be involved from top to bottom and I think we learned that in a major way this year. We now have an opportunity, as we step away into our offseason, to make the decisions accordingly, understanding that we have to be intentional about where we’re going and what we’re doing.”

D-Fish wasn’t just optimistic in retrospect. It was an outlook he took from his playing career into his first day as a coach, and one he emanated even before the team opened the regular season.

“We’re excited,” Fish 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.”

That excitement was quelled in Game 1 when the Knicks were stopped cold by one of the top teams in the Eastern Conference, the Chicago Bulls. The visitors from The Windy City marched into Madison Square Garden and topped New York 104-80.

But even after that loss, Derek knew that his squad was capable of success.

“My assessment of tonight is that we’re going somewhere, but at the beginning it’s going to be difficult to get wins,” D-Fish said. “We have to fight really, really hard to win games. It won’t be because we’re executing perfectly and we’re playing perfect defense, it will be because we’re working hard and we’re playing with a lot of energy and effort.”

That outlook resulted in big back-to-back wins. The first came the very next night in Cleveland, where the Knicks spoiled the coming home party of NBA star LeBron James and defeated the Cavaliers 95-90. Three nights later, Derek’s squad was back in action, and came through with another win over an Eastern Conference contender, the Charlotte Hornets.

Those two victories laid the groundwork for what New York needed to do to achieve success for the remainder of the year, as Derek outlined after the win in Cleveland.

“It’s just trusting the work that we put in and making sure that these guys understand that they’re not on this team by accident. If we didn’t believe that they could play at this level, they wouldn’t be here,” he said. ”Our management is showing a lot of trust in a lot of our guys and as coaches we’re trying to make sure that they understand that everybody has to be ready to play every night. Tonight should serve as a great example for the rest of the season that if everyone remains committed to the team and ready to play, we’re capable of some really good things.” 

Unfortunately, the Knicks were never able to realize their full potential.

The New York roster was injury-riddled with injuries throughout the season and essentially all the core players on the team, including each player on the team’s opening day roster, dealt with one ailment or several at some point during the year. Carmelo Anthony, Andrea Bargnani, Jose Calderon, Cleanthony Early, Pablo Prigioni, Iman Shumpert, J.R. Smith and Amar’e Stoudemire were among those out of the lineup for long periods over the course of the season.

As the Knicks limped on through the season, Derek had to patch up the lineup and keep his team looking forward, but he handled the adversity with his signature aplomb.

“We’re trying to build something here that will last a long time,” D-Fish said. “It’s a struggle right now. We’re at the bottom. We’re going to keep fighting until we figure out a way to get to the top.”

That quest was complicated on January 5th, when two of Derek’s best players, guards J.R. Smith and Iman Shumpert were shipped to Cleveland in a three-team trade. Smith was one of New York’s leading scorers are the time and Fish was hoping to finally get Shumpert back in late January after he suffered and injury in December that cost him a dozen games. Instead, he was left trying to piece together a new backcourt and incorporate a few new additions to the frontcourt from the trade.

Despite that challenge, Fish’s fortitude on the sideline and in the huddles paid off for a stretch in mid-January. The Knicks reeled off three consecutive wins, beginning with a big victory against a Western Conference playoff team, the New Orleans Pelicans. New York followed that up with with victories over the Philadelphia 76ers and Orlando Magic and seemed to be gaining steam. During that encouraging stint, Derek talked about how great it was to see the positive vibes spreading through his locker room

“What’s most gratifying is how much they’re enjoying this, how different that feel,” he said. “There’s more confidence. Guys are still taking this seriously and being professionals, and that’s what we’ve been talking about since day one.”

That infectious energy carried on. The Knicks notched a big win over the team Derek played for last season, the Oklahoma City Thunder on Jan. 28. Then a few days later they opened February with a win over another one of Derek’s former teams, the Los Angeles Lakers. At the time, D-Fish saw New York’s winter storm as a strong foundation for growth.

“This is a different team with a different energy and a different feel about what they’re doing,” Derek said. “We’re better. We just have to keep building on this.”

However, the Knicks weren’t able to build from there as he had hoped.

Anthony tallied 31 points in the win over the Lakers. But the team’s leading scorer played in just three more games before the Knicks shut him down after the All-Star break for the remainder of the season with a nagging knee injury that had already cost him 13 games over the course of the first half.

The 4o games played during the season were the lowest total in the New York star’s 12-year career. He underwent knee surgery in mid-February and his absence left a massive vacancy on Fish’s squad for the second half of the season.

Also in February, the Knicks waived Stoudemire and dealt Pablo Prigioni to the Houston Rockets, among the transactions for the year. This forced New York to make numerous moves to add to the roster, including the call up of Langston Galloway and Cleanthony Early from the Development League. They also granted 10-day, and later full season contracts to several players, including Lou Amundson, Lance Thomas — both acquired in the trade for Shumpert and Smith — and Ricky Ledo.

Through it all, Derek was tasked with finding roles for each of his players—the rookies and the veterans, the old and the new. Because of their early season struggles and the massive roster turnover that followed, the Knicks were largely written off and out of the playoff picture in the second half. But they still followed the lead of their head coach, and gave maximum effort every night.

Shortly after Anthony’s was officially shut down for the season, the Knicks notched back-to-back wins over the Detroit Pistons and Toronto Raptors—a testament to the team’s character.

“We just continued to challenge our guys on taking some individual and collective pride in who they are and how they perform each night,” Coach Fish said. “I think it shows the character we have in the locker room. Obviously, it hasn’t been easy this season, but high-character guys and guys that have high integrity, they’ll keep coming back. No matter what happens the night before, they’ll keep coming back. As coaches, we’re happy for our players more than anything.”

New York carried that philosophy through the rest of the season and kept fighting. As a result of their effort, they came up with another win over Fish’s longtime squad in Los Angeles, a triumph over the defending NBA champion San Antonio Spurs, as well as back-to-back victories over the Magic and the East’s top-seeded Atlanta Hawks in the final month of the season.

The Knicks ended up winning seven of their final 29 games after losing Anthony for the season, resulting an increase of almost six percent in their win percentage from the first to the second half of the season. And while New York fell short of their preseason goals, the season wasn’t a total loss, particularly in Derek’s eyes. Rather, he believes that this New York franchise has set a strong foundation for the future.

“If we can keep working hard and we can stay together, we can create some of our own special moments,” Derek said late last season. “We haven’t had a successful season, but we feel like we’re becoming successful because of the baits that we’re building and the culture we’re establishing. Anything great takes time.”