After firing Derek Fisher last month, New York Knicks team president Phil Jackson announced that Kurt Rambis would take over as interim head coach. Now it seems Jackson wants to keep Rambis for next season.
With roughly a month left in the 2015-16 NBA regular season, it’s become clear the the New York Knicks aren’t really playing for much.
At 26-38, the Knicks have been on a steady and sharp downward slide since they were 22-22 on Jan. 29. Now five games out of the eighth place in the Eastern Conference, the attention around this team has turned from this spring’s playoffs towards the future, starting with the head coaching position.
Since firing Derek Fisher just before the All-Star break, New York has failed to show any actual improvement under interim coach Kurt Rambis.
When team president Phil Jackson made the announcement that Rambis would be replacing Fisher for the remainder of the season, it was mostly thought that he would focus on the progression of budding star Kristaps Porzingis and ensuring the rest of the team didn’t completely implode, then hand off the position to somebody else this offseason.
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After all, this is a guy who has a career record of just 59-152 and was last seen as the head coach of the Minnesota Timberwolves, where he led the team to a 17-65 mark in 2010-11.
Despite going 3-7 in the 10 games Rambis has been at the helm, Jackson has shocked many by being hopeful Rambis will return as head coach during the 2016-17 season, according to ESPN’s Ian Begley.
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To many, that simply doesn’t make much sense.
Not only have the Knicks won only 30 percent of their games under Rambis, but the franchise in general has struggled under his leadership, and it hasn’t been strictly held to on-court problems.
Soon after being named interim coach, Rambis quickly came on blast for having “liked” porn on his Twitter account. Despite this being possibly the least remarkable story of the NBA season, Rambis’ private business somehow gained some traction and after claiming his account was hacked, the Kurt Rambis era in New York was off to a smashing start!
While his Twitter account and what he did or did not like are far from important, Rambis’ on-court handling of the Knicks is absolutely imperative. So far, that’s been an even larger concern.
Torn between playing for the future and trying to pick up immediate victories so he gets invited back next season, Rambis has struggled to find a happy medium.
At this point, it seems like Rambis is still looking to win as many games as possible.
Of the 10 games he’s been at the helm, Rambis has played his star Carmelo Anthony 40-plus minutes four times, which would normally be fine. Anthony is the star of this team and you expect the star to play big minutes, especially when he is set to make nearly $25 million this season.
The problem here is that Anthony is now 31 years old and developing a fairly serious knee problem after requiring surgery last season and missing the entire second half of the season. This is a guy that is locked up through 2019 in New York and with his health becoming a real concern, is playing him this much with nothing on the line a good idea with the future in mind?
Rambis’ handling of Anthony hasn’t been the only concern surrounding the Knicks new coach. He’s also heavily fluctuated the minutes of rookie standout Porzingis, sat another rookie in Jerian Grant for three games, and given a borderline bizarre amount of minutes to Sasha Vujacic (Vujacic has still yet to make a field goal in the Rambis era).
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Of course, there is still a month of basketball left for Rambis to prove himself to both Phil and the fans. But with the timer officially set on his career in New York, the Knicks head coach has plenty of work to do if he wants to be back next season.