Here is a not-all-that-shocking bit of news, in the grand scheme of an NBA offseason:
David Griffin is an accomplished front office executive and these upper level jobs are complex, and it’s not all that difficult to imagine mutually justifiable reasons why a candidate and an owner might not be able to come to agreement on the specifics of a given role.
But the Knicks don’t have any old owner, and the position atop their basketball operation isn’t any old role, and their franchise is in such a state that there shouldn’t be a lot of hard and fast boundaries when that specific role is being offered to someone with the specific acumen and reputation of David Griffin. The Knicks were a franchise in disarray before they turned their basketball operation over to Phil Jackson, a broken Hafiz model of the crooning sword from Who Framed Roger Rabbit?. The Knicks in 2017 are the laughing stock of the NBA—their few worth-a-damn players want the hell out of there, they are unable to attract any new ones to replace them, and the calendar is moving ever closer to the start of a new season. Firing Phil Jackson was a step in the right direction, but only insofar as it offers a fresh opportunity to just stop being the fucking Knicks for a while. Now the Knicks need a firm hand to take up their entire basketball program and dramatically reshape it. If they just go back to being the slightly-less-patchouli-scented Knicks of the immediate pre-Phil Jackson days, they are still doomed.
Which makes this next tweet an absolute showstopper:
Had it been money, it still would’ve been insane. If you are the Knicks, and you have the opportunity to bring in someone with recent, relevant, top-level experience doing exactly the job you need done, you break open the damn bank. But this ... this is beyond the pale. Presumably the job will now stay with whoever thought it was a good idea to give a $71 million contract to Tim Hardaway Jr. James Dolan is a madman.
Throw the Knicks in the garbage.