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I hate this dude with a passion and usually ignore his articles but he's speaking truuuuuuth.
Mike Woodson deserves respect from Knicks and Phil Jackson, even if he is fired
After Mike D'Antoni was sent away, Woodson took over a flawed team and righted it. Then he won 54 games and a playoff series - the first in a while. But management at the Garden wants to lay all the blame for this bad season at his feet.
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Friday, April 18, 2014, 12:02 AM A A A 25
Even with this rush in basketball New York to make Mike Woodson the fall guy for everything wrong at the Garden except ticket prices and get him out of here, maybe somebody at the Garden other than Carmelo Anthony could show some respect for the work Woodson has done here. The Knicks’ record was 18-24 when Woodson took over from Mike D’Antoni. This was a season that ended with Tyson Chandler — somehow treated as some kind of great champion here because he played 27 minutes a game on a Mavericks team that won an NBA title — being named Defensive Player of the Year.
Then the Knicks went 54-28 and won the Atlantic Division and J.R. Smith played better than he ever had in his life and Anthony was an MVP candidate and the Knicks not only won a playoff series for the first time in 13 years, they might have made the Eastern Conference finals if Chandler hadn’t looked as small as a jockey against Roy Hibbert.
Woodson is so far and away the best coach the Knicks have had since Jeff Van Gundy beat it out of the Garden it’s not even close. Now we hear it was all Jason Kidd’s doing. Sure it was. The suckers want you to believe that the way all the guys with long knives at the Garden want you to believe that the Knicks not making the playoffs was all Woodson’s fault.
And when all should have been lost this season and the media were telling you Woodson had lost his team, whatever that was supposed to mean, the Knicks finished 16-5, missed the playoffs by as little as they did. You wonder what would have happened around the trade deadline if the Knicks had a real general manager or if management was invested at all in helping Woodson make the playoffs.
What does this all mean? It absolutely means that Phil Jackson needs to show respect for Woodson this week. Because all Woodson has done since the moment he took over from D’Antoni is honor the opportunity he was given, and the place, even trying to navigate the dumb, mean, permanent government around James Dolan.
Woodson is so far and away the best coach the Knicks have had since Jeff Van Gundy beat it out of the Garden it’s not even close. All those losing seasons before Woodson and he goes 109-79 and wins a playoff series and has a record of 54-22 in March and April. He wins down the stretch this time when the team should have quit on him the way management quit on him long ago.
Woodson got the very best out of Smith and he has gotten the best out of Anthony. But now you really are supposed to believe that the team coached itself when things were going good and Woodson tried to ruin everything when things went sideways earlier this season.
Guess what? We are going to find out a lot about Jackson, president and savior, by the way he handles things with Woodson now that the season is over and Jackson is on the clock. By the way? Jackson has a perfect right to bring in his own man. But as a coach himself he needs to show that he understands the work Woodson did this season.
Once again: Go look at the records of all the other coaches who followed Van Gundy, Lenny Wilkens and Don Chaney and Larry Brown and Isiah Thomas and D’Antoni. And then see that Woodson has been 30 games over .500 here. It doesn’t mean he gets a job for life, or that he is Red Auerbach or Phil Jackson or Pat Riley or Gregg Popovich. But if you don’t appreciate the job he has done and the way he has conducted himself over the past 200 games, then go watch ultimate fighting. You’ve been watching the wrong movie.
At least Carmelo Anthony finally did stand up for Woodson on Thursday, after a season when Anthony was praised for playing harder and better than at any other time in his career. It wasn’t supposed to matter. But it did, even if it was too little and too late to help Woodson very much. This was at least a form of accountability from Anthony, on behalf of a coach who was the most accountable person in the building.
Woodson never had a prayer with this year's flawed roster, but he deserves respect for what he accomplished as head coach of the Knicks. “If he needs my recommendation, whether it’s here or anywhere else, I’ll back him,” Anthony said Thursday. “I have nothing bad to say about Mike Woodson. I support him. For me as a player, I had some of my best years under Mike Woodson. So I would never have anything bad to say about Mike Woodson.”
But Woodson gets no credit now, especially from all the frontrunners at the Garden. So the only record that is relevant is the one over the first 60 games of the season, not anything that came before or anything that came after. Talk about the coach, not overrated and overpaid and over-the-hill basketball players such as Chandler and Amar'e Stoudemire, somehow still treated like stand-up guys. Woodson had a .580 winning percentage with Smith as his secondary scorer and a gimpy Stoudemire and Chandler so often living off reputation and the sketchiest point guard play in the league. But none of that matters, oh no, because Woodson doesn’t matter, all that matters now is the starry-eyed coverage of Phil Jackson.
Say it again, now that it seems as if somebody passed a law that the Knicks have to go in another direction: Woodson acted like a big guy even when the season turned lousy. He coached his team to the end, right to the end of the Toronto game. It would be nice for Phil Jackson in particular to acknowledge that one of these days. You show respect to someone who has shown this kind of respect to the New York Knicks. It is a kind of class Jackson remembers from the old Garden, if not this one.
Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/basketball/knicks/lupica-easy-ax-jax-woodson-deserves-knicks-respect-article-1.1760637#ixzz2zFH4yyJL -The Knicks’ coaching search still includes a lone frontrunner, Kurt Rambis, whose qualifications for the position include a strong relationship with Jackson and a willingness to take the job.
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