How Leon Rose’s Knicks leadership bests Phil Jackson’s & why it matters
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While sitting on my couch reminiscing about the Knicks teams I grew up watching, it all of a sudden hit me: holy shit, Phil Jackson really did destroy the Carmelo Anthony era. This is something Knicks fans already know, as the “basketball guru” set the team back years due to his pure incompetence running the team. I then started to realize how Leon Rose may have learned from the Knicks mistakes of old in building around his new star, Jalen Brunson.
Since becoming the Knicks’ president in 2020, Rose has done everything in his power to turn them into one of the best teams in the NBA, all while retaining New York’s identity and showing great patience – pretty much the complete opposite of what Jackson did, highlighting just how far the team has come over a decade. Move after move, Rose has done nothing but improve the franchise’s championship odds, while Jackson came into the picture with a disappointing yet still-promising team and did nothing but gut them of talent and throw away future draft picks for nothing.
All my homies hate Phil Jackson
At the time, the Knicks hiring Jackson to run the team seemed like a match made in heaven. Surely one of the most successful coaches of all-time, if not the most, could help turn around for a team coming off of a 37-win season, right? Nope!
The first thing Jackson did was sign Lamar Odom, and we all know how Stephen A. Smith felt about that. In all seriousness, the first major move Jackson pulled off was firing Mike Woodson just one season removed from a 54-win campaign that saw everyone on the team playing their best basketball. This was a little harsh, though the team needed something new, and the decision was seen as necessary at the time. However, instead of hiring a candidate with an identity – or experience – Jackson hired his good friend Derek Fisher, who’d never coached anywhere. This went about as well as expected. Jackson also forced Fisher and eventually Jeff Hornacek to run the Triangle offense with the Knicks, which again went about as well as you’d expect.
Next Jackson shipped off a former All-Star and Defensive Player of the Year in center Tyson Chandler plus solid starting guard Raymond Felton to the Mavericks for a package centered around Jose fucking Calderón. Sure, Chandler didn’t play up to expectations in 2013-14, but he was still a defensive menace and a core part of the team. To ship him off for Calderón was unthinkable. The trade happened mostly because the Knicks already had another center they’d decided to invest in pre-Phil, when Glen Grunwald James Dolan still ran the show: Andrea Bargnani, for whom he traded New York’s 2016 first-round pick, which eventually gave the Raptors Jakob Poeltl.
Why Jackson decided to prioritize Bargnani over Chandler I will never understand. The final nail in the coffin for the Carmelo era came shortly after the calendar flipped to 2015, when in the midst of arguably the Knicks’ worst season ever Jackson shipped off two valuable role players, J.R. Smith and Iman Shumpert, in a three-team deal that brought back Lance Thomas, Lou Amundson and Alex Kirk. Thomas would stick with the Knicks until 2020, while Amundson played only 70 games with them and Kirk was waived almost immediately. Smith became a starter and Shumpert a valuable role player for the 2016 champion Cleveland Cavaliers, who finished 25 games ahead of New York.
In one year, Jackson traded the four best players around Anthony. All of Chandler, Felton, Smith, and Shumpert were gone, and in return the Knicks didn’t get back a valuable player or a single first-round pick. What followed were years of Jackson beefing with both Anthony and eventually Kristaps Porziņģis, the worst years in the lives of many Knicks fans.
Was the team Phil inherited going to work? No. However, this is where the difference between Rose and Jackson comes in. Jackson had plenty of assets to flip for better players, yet traded them all for essentially nothing. Rose may have had a better hand than Jackson when he took over, but his management has been nothing short of a masterclass.
Leon Rose, miracle worker
Rose became the Knicks’ president of basketball operations on March 2, 2020. The roster he was given had just won 21 games, headlined by a struggling Julius Randle and rookie R.J. Barrett. The Knicks were arguably the biggest laughingstock in the NBA after missing out on both Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving. While this would ultimately be a positive, that’s not how it was viewed at the time.
The Knicks lacked identity, culture – really anything positive. With that in mind, Rose’s first move was to hire Tom Thibodeau, most recently coach of a disastrous Minnesota Timberwolves team. While the move was met with mixed reactions, one thing was certain: Thibodeau brought an identity and loads of experience, a far cry from Fisher as Phil’s marionette.
In his first offseason running the Knicks, Rose got to work trading for Immanuel Quickley, signing Alec Burks and Nerlens Noel and getting rid of cancers like Allonzo Trier in favor of true locker room guy Theo Pinson. This set the tone for what the upcoming season would be like, and for the first time since 2013, the year before Phil’s arrival, the Knicks made the playoffs.
This is where Rose’s first bump in the road came, and where he might have learned from Jackson. The Knicks lost in rough fashion in the first round, then the next season they won just 37 games, leaving fans crying for Rose to fire Thibodeau and trade Randle. Instead, Rose learned from his mistakes, shipping off the disappointing Noel, Burks and Kemba Walker, creating the room needed to sign Jalen Brunson and Isaiah Hartenstein – two players who’d shown flashes of excellence, but had yet to prove they could consistently do so on the biggest stage. We all know where this story is going.
Rose has pulled off multiple low-risk/high-reward moves during his tenure, the complete opposite of Jackson. There were bumps along the way, like signing Walker and Evan Fournier, but Rose still found a way to use their contracts for the betterment of the team, something Jackson never could. Even when Rose makes mistakes, he finds ways to make up for it.
The difference between the two front office executives is their patience. Jackson took over a team a year removed from their first playoff series win in 13 years and fired the entire coaching staff, traded cornerstone players and completely destroyed any identity the Knicks had at the time. Some of this can be blamed on Melo, who we know was not the easiest star to work with, but we’d seen contenders built around him before.
When Anthony was in Denver, the Nuggets featured an electric offense with shooters around him while providing multiple second options in Hall of Famers Allen Iverson and eventually Chauncey Billups. The Knicks did the same, whether it was Amar’e Stoudemire, Billups or J.R.; they even had elite defenders in the form of Shumpert and Chandler. The formula was there: give him some shooters, at least one defender to make up for his woes and a playmaker to make up for his lack of passing. Both the Nuggets and pre-Phil Knicks had success with this approach.
Yet once Jackson took over, he did everything in his power to abandon it. While he’d eventually try to get back to it, trading for Derrick Rose and signing Joakim Noah, we know how that went. As for Leon Rose, he came in and built a playoff team; when faced with adversity, he could have torn it all down and built around Barrett, Quickley, Obi Toppin and Quentin Grimes, or continued pushing and building an identity with Thibodeau. Rose made the right decision, re-tooling his roster by making smart moves with little risk that did nothing but benefit the Knicks – the opposite of Jackson. One used patience to build a contender. The other quickly destroyed a potential one.
Thankfully, the Knicks are long removed from the Jackson era. Still, it’s interesting to think about the what-ifs from this time. What if Stoudemire were healthy? What if Jackson didn’t try forcing Fisher and Hornacek to run the Triangle? What if they hadn’t devoted a third of their cap space to Noah and Courtney Lee? You can go on and on. It truly feels like we suffered the worst timeline.
How to treat star players vs. how not to
Throughout Jackson’s tenure with the Knicks, he was constantly and openly trying to trade Anthony and Porziņģis, the only positive aspects of the franchise at the time. This happens with teams trying to rebuild all the time, though, so what’s the big deal? Jackson was too open.
In many cases, front offices, at least general managers, are reserved if not tight-lipped about trading a star unless said star requests a trade. Not Phil. During his exit interview for the 2017 season, Jackson announced that he planned on trading Anthony that summer and that the two men discussed the possibility during the season. However, it became pretty clear this wasn’t the case.
Jackson even took a shot at the 10-time All-Star, saying there was resistance at the “top” to run Phil’s Triangle offense. Even if that wasn’t directed at Anthony, that’d likely mean it was at Porziņģis – regardless, not something an executive should really declaring publicly. Perhaps Anthony and Porziņģis did not want to run the Triangle because the year was 2017 and the NBA was in the midst of a three-point revolution? Or maybe the Knicks didn’t have the personnel to run said offense? Whichever way you spin it, Jackson was the problem.
There was constant uncertainty around the roster under Jackson, with Melo himself even saying the front office was “hard to trust.” However, this wouldn’t be the end of Jackson’s issues with players on the team, as just like with Anthony, Jackson became very open about trying to trade the young star he drafted in Porziņģis. With hindsight, we know trading those two ended up being the right moves for the franchise. At the time, trading Porzingis was for some fans unthinkable – not only fans, but people around the NBA. The young All-Star was tearing up the league when healthy.
This was a two-sided beef, with Porziņģis constantly frustrated over Jackson’s insistence on running the Triangle. This is likely what led to Jackson consistently making it known that Porziņģis was available for trade when, at the time, he really should not have been. From wrongly comparing Porziņģis to Shawn Bradley to forcing the triangle to constantly trying to trade the stars, Jackson did everything in his power to drive away New York’s two best players.
Just like Jackson, Rose has two stars in Randle and Brunson. The difference is how he’s treated them. While we don’t know much about what Rose says to his guys – unlike Phil, Leon avoids the media – his roster construction gives us some insight. For starters, the heavy Villanova presence is no coincidence. Sure, they all fit with what the Knicks are trying to do, on both sides of the ball, but there are other players around the league who do, too. Rose is trying to build not only a functional roster, but please his stars and build a culture around them while doing so, something Jackson failed to do.
Since signing with New York in 2019, there have been nonstop rumors surrounding the Knicks trading Randle, virtually every year. I say “unproven” because – unlike Jackson – Rose never publicly made it known that Randle or anyone else was available to be moved; hence why the trade for OG Anunoby was such a surprise when it happened. This way of navigating the media is not only smarter, considering how said media often covers New York sports, but far more efficient. When an executive makes it known that a player is available, it does disastrous things for not only the locker room but the player’s value on the market as well. If an opposing team knows you’re trying to get rid of a player, they have the upper hand in negotiations. They know you would rather have said player gone than stay on the roster and are going to offer less than what you want, thinking you won’t have much of a choice.
This is where Jackson went wrong with Anthony and Porziņģis and where Rose has shone. The difference in how the two navigate the media is truly something, especially given their aforementioned reputation (or lack thereof) when hired.
Where do we go with this information?
Not only did Rose accomplish what Jackson couldn’t, but he managed to do something several executives have failed to: build a contender around a star while their championship window is open. Time and time again we’ve seen executives fail to put competent rosters around their star player, but Rose has managed to, and in under five years has given the Knicks their best chance to win a championship in 25-30 years. Even back then, when Patrick Ewing was their star, Michael Jordan had Scottie Pippen. Hakeem Olajuwon got Clyde Drexler. Shaquille O’Neal had Penny Hardaway. Gary Payton had Shawn Kemp. Karl Malone had John Stockton. Ewing had . . . John Starks. No offense to Starks, a Knicks legend through and through. But when I think of 1990s NBA co-stars, Starks sticks out like a polar bear in Arlington, Texas.
It seems every star who won a championship or at least competed for ones in the ‘90s had another alongside them – except Ewing, at least not until the late ‘90s when he was past his prime. Dave Checketts and Ernie Grunfeld managed to put competent rosters around the Hall of Famer, don’t get me wrong, but never enough to deliver a championship.
Whether Rose’s gambles the last two offseasons pan out is yet to be seen. However, simply adding Brunson next to Randle, then Anunoby and Mikal Bridges, is more than any Knicks’ general manager has done for their star player since the ‘60s and ‘70s. Keep in mind, Rose has been running the team for only four years. Checketts and Grunfeld ran the Knicks for a decade. While they oversaw two Knicks teams reach the Finals, they still failed to bring the trophy home to New York, mostly because Ewing never had a true second star in his prime.
Think about other non-Knicks teams in the past – for example, the Cavaliers with LeBron James (the first time). Sure, players like Zydrunas Ilgauskas and Mo Williams were cool, but they never gave LeBron a true second star. From failing to complete a trade for Stoudemire to never really giving LeBron a real second option, the Cavaliers, run by Danny Ferry, completely fell flat in failing to capitalize on James’ talent and lost him in free agency.
While it’s hard to compare these teams to the current Knicks, as both James and Ewing made the Finals despite no second star, this points to the capacity of a front office to capitalize on their championship window, something Rose is certainly doing. He sees the potential of his Knicks team, and instead of wasting time he’s doing what he can to further their championship odds.
This is the best time to do it. The NBA is in an era of parity, with a different team winning a championship every year since 2019. While the Celtics currently have the highest odds to win it all next season, which would break the streak, we’ve seen their weaknesses and so have the Knicks. Rose loading up on defensive wing talent is not a coincidence. Rose has done something hundreds of front office executives have failed to do throughout NBA history. While the results remain to be seen, the Knicks are in their best position to win it all in over 20 years. If Rose were Jackson, they wouldn’t be. This is where Leon stands out.
From a big-time agent to one of the best executives in the NBA today, Rose showcases what could be a new trend amongst teams in the league. Recycling old talent, like the Knicks did with Jackson – and “old” is fair; Phil was pushing 70 when hired, and sometimes it showed – is not always the best idea. Taking a shot on someone with little experience but vast potential could be the better alternative, especially when you’re a team in as bad of a position as the Knicks were when Rose was hired.
We’ve come a long way as Knicks fans, thanks to Rose. Hopefully, his gambles to bring New York their first championship since 1973 pay off and we can move from calling Rose one of the best executives in today’s NBA to one of the best we’ve ever seen.
