Knicks Animation Funny Knicks Video Phil Jackson
David Fizdale took comfort in the familiar most of the day Wednesday. Coaches are like that. Routines are sacraments to them. He led the Knicks through their shootaround — just another game day, 1 of 82 — and he drove to Madison Square Garden, and he studied film and he thought, a lot, about the Atlanta Hawks.
And yet: he knew.
"The first 10 seconds, it's going to hit me," Fizdale said Wednesday, two hours before he would make his debut as the Knicks' head coach. "It's going to hit me that I'm the coach of the Knicks. And it's going to hit me that I'm at the Garden."
It was important for Fizdale to remember how he got here, how this peripatetic pathway from South Central Los Angeles landed him this job, which is why he was happy that his older brother, Robert Walker, could be there Wednesday night, in from L.A.
When they were young it was Walker — nine years Fizdale's elder — who gave Fizdale his first pair of basketball shoes. It was a nice family moment that has crystallized over time into something much deeper for Fizdale, much more meaningful.
"On a day like this, you remember how you got here," Fizdale said. "One day in your life triggers this, one person. My brother did that for me."
It is a reminder that however deplorable the Knicks' recent history may be, however wretched the road has been, this is still an important basketball room to work, the Garden, and the Knicks are still a team that has magic attached to it.
That charm might not be as profound as it once was, and that's as it should be. Both the Knicks and the Garden earned their places in the city's heart through achievement and accomplishment. The Garden has always been more than a preferred piece of real estate, and the Knicks more than just a basketball franchise.
If it's been hard to reconcile and remember that in recent years, it remains the thing that still makes this all so enticing. Winning in New York — winning basketball games in New York, where basketball means so much — still matters.
It is why, outside the Garden, some four hours before tipoff, the first trickle of diehards begin to set up shop at the watering holes and restaurants that are walking distance from the arena. Time was, this was a unofficial civic holiday. Time was, it was Clyde and the Captain and Dollar Bill, time was it was Patrick and Oak and Starks, and in those wonderful days it felt like time stood still as a reverent rite of passage when new basketball season dawned.
We are a long way from that now. Word filtered that the Garden wouldn't be a sellout for opening night, something that even in the recent spate of spoiled seasons would have been unthinkable. The Knicks have made little secret they don't expect to win a lot of basketball games this year, and that will inevitably have consequences.
Knicks fans — far and away the most loyal and most scarred of all the local fan bases, and by a lot — may understand that this is what the team needed after years of neglect and nonsense, after years of ownership interference that was followed by the raging, relentless incompetence of the Phil Jackson Regime.
But that doesn't mean they're prepared to pony up to see it.
And that's as it should be, too.
This stretch is going to hurt the true fan, and it should hurt, it should be painful, but there is a penance to be paid for two decades of malpractice. But make no mistake: even if Knicks fans won't be flocking to see the team in person as they have in years past — unless given a good reason — they will still be paying attention. The Knicks still matter.
Fizdale knows that. He knows what goes along with taking this job.
"First games don't define you," he said, "no matter what happens."
He was actually talking about Lloyd Pierce, an old Fizdale friend, making his own debut as a head coach with the similarly moribund Hawks. But it applied to him, too.
On Day 1, in Game 1, Fizdale walked onto the court at Madison Square Garden, and a fan base turned its lonely eyes to him.
Source: https://nypost.com/2018/10/17/opener-special-for-fizdale-even-with-knicks-sad-sack-hopes/
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