Isiah Thomas is in town tonight. Once, he used the Knicks as his defining moment in the NBA. Now, he depends on them for survival. The irony is delicious.
Thomas is coaching the New York Knicks, and God help him. He's also the team's GM, but he's sure to lose both jobs if he doesn't win enough games to please the white collars at Madison Square Garden. And considering what he has to work with, it's safe to say that his resume isn't exactly gathering dust.
He can't even blame his personnel woes on upper management, because he's upper management. Isiah the GM gathered the players for Isiah the coach, and it's because of his less-than-stellar job of doing that, that he finds himself under the "win or else" situation currently.
In April 1984, Thomas went bananas against the Knicks at Joe Louis Arena, in Game 5 of the Pistons' first-round playoff series with the New Yorkers. In that series-deciding game, Thomas scored 16 points in the final 90 seconds of regulation to bring his team back from a double-digit deficit to force overtime. He fouled out in OT and the Pistons lost, but that game, and Isiah's performance, is often placed on the short list of all-time great NBA playoff moments.
I was there that night, in muggy, packed JLA. Isiah's outburst came out of nowhere, and happened so quickly, that nobody knew how many points he had scored in it, nor in what time frame. But we all knew we had witnessed something extraordinary. Nearly 23 years later, the memories are strong.
But now Thomas is in charge of the misfits and greenhorns who wear Knicks uniforms, and the results have been predictably unpretty. The Knicks are 5 and 11, and a 50+ loss season is not out of the question at all. They may, in fact, come closer to sixty losses than fifty. Which means Thomas will be done like dinner.
He helped create this mess, Isiah Thomas did, and it will go down as another of his post-playing career failures, joining his stint as commissioner of the CBA, GM of the Toronto Raptors, and coach of the Indiana Pacers as experiences that would cause you to wince, should you be shown a rap sheet of them.
It would be tempting to call this job with the Knicks as Isiah's last significant one in the NBA. But television will always be waiting, I'm sure. It's where all the coaches and executives go between league gigs. Only, in Zeke's case, he'd better get himself quite used to wearing an earphone and reading off a TelePrompTer.
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