The Knicks Chance Turn Into Realistic Hope

NEW YORK — Year One of the Phil Jackson Era in New York has a different sound. See if you can spot it.

“As far as wins go, I can’t tell you how many wins we’re gonna have,” Carmelo Anthony said at Knicks media day Monday morning. “What I will say is, we’re gonna have a better season than we had last year.”

“We hope it’s expedient,” Jackson said of what he tells people when they ask how long it will be until the Knicks are title contenders. “But it’s a step-by-step process.”

Gone were the declarations from each fall that amounted to a single phrase: Championship or bust. We aren’t likely to see a Larry O’Brien trophy replica atop every locker, as we did in Madison Square Garden’s home locker room last year. Nor should we expect Jim Dolan to declare that the Knicks can win a championship, as he did last November about a Knicks squad that finished 37-45.

Since officially joining the Knicks in March, Jackson has said this would be a process. It’s no wonder when you consider all that has to change.

Jackson and coach Derek Fisher need to transform a Knicks offense that relied on a system no one can really describe under Mike Woodson — Iso and Friends is probably a good shorthand — to the Triangle Offense. It’s a big change. Try and identify the Triangle Offense principles in this possession. I’ll wait.

Both Jackson and Fisher have also stressed defense, though precisely how they manage to improve it when last year’s Knicks were near the bottom of the league by most defensive measures and had the added advantage of former Defensive Player of the Year Tyson Chandler remains to be seen.

And doing all this with little more in the way of roster turnover than Chandler and Raymond Felton out, Jose Calderon and draft pick Cleanthony Early in, won’t be easy.

So what, then, are the goals for the first full season? When I asked Jackson how he’ll define success this season Friday, he gave a characteristically-detailed response.

“Basketball’s a pretty simple game when it comes to having success,” Jackson said. “When players play completely without inhibition and they play with with a tremendous amount of energy, they’ll be successful. When there’s confusion, a lack of teamwork where they’re supporting each other, that becomes apparent. And that’s what we’ll watch. … There’s a process going on. They’re learning how to do this or they’re not learning how to do this.

“The next measure is, where’s our talent level?” he continued. “Do they have enough talent to reach the ultimate moment in basketball, which is receiving that trophy? So those are decisions that will be made offseason, and that’s something else that we’ll have to deal with.”

But I wondered: are these two measures binary? Is it as simple as happening or not happening? The former clearly wouldn’t be measured in precisely the same way for likely goners like Andrea Bargnani as it would be for Iman Shumpert, whose future is cloudy. And obviously Jackson himself doesn’t see this Knicks team as championship-ready either. So would the evaluation really wait until the end of the season?

“It takes probably a month to six weeks for a team to jell and an idea of how to do this concerted work together,” Jackson said. “So we have a month of training camp, we have a couple of weeks in November to see how everything’s blending together. Kind of one area — it can depend on injuries, and how much time guys have on the floor together.

“There’s a time around the All Star Game where everything’s coming together and we have a deadline in two weeks for trading, so things start moving at that time. If we don’t have coordinated activity, then we can make adjustments to our team. But that’s something way down the line and not something we’re ready to discuss or think about right now.”

But even that represents a change in the chronology of recent Knicks seasons. It was right around this time last year that Dolan fired general manager Glen Grunwald and replaced him with Steve Mills. By November, the swirling rumors around Woodson began and really didn’t end until Jackson came in. Fisher, of course, is Jackson’s guy.

But really, the measure of the Knicks always boiled down to whether they looked like a championship team. Since they seldom did, heads would roll.

Dolan’s decision to step back, at least for now, frees Jackson to spend his time evaluating. It allows Fisher, a first-time head coach who’d been a player as recently as a few months ago, to learn on the job. Meanwhile, Dolan can open for The Eagles at Madison Square Garden, a pursuit Knicks fans (and nobody else) dearly hope he continues indulging for a long time to come.

And yet, the Knicks haven’t completely started over. Those that see Anthony return, Jackson and his 11 rings added to the front office and don’t carefully study the team’s salary commitments may not understand the need for patience quite the way they would have if Anthony had left town.

Photo credit: Elsa / Getty Images

That’s the bargain the Knicks struck with Anthony, too. No one expects this Knicks team to contend immediately, a hard circumstance for a 30-year-old with Anthony’s playoff history to swallow.

However, Anthony doesn’t have to look around at a roster that clearly isn’t ready to properly support his championship dreams — at least, not yet — and pretend otherwise. He was asked Monday whether it was difficult for him to give up a chance to play for an NBA title immediately. The need to be patient, that Year One is no longer Ground Zero for Knicks hopes and dreams for the first time in many, many years, was implicit in the question.

“It was hard for me, to be honest with you,” Anthony said. “It wasn’t all about winning a championship right away. I’m ready to be patient.”

But he quickly added:

“How long I’ll be patient, I can’t tell you.”