It’s hard to remember just now, a day after the New York Knicks’
announcement that the team will “part company” with Phil Jackson, what, exactly, any of us ever hoped he would—or could—do with the team. When Jackson joined
the team, as president of basketball operations, three years ago, in the
spring of 2014, he did so only after several rounds of negotiation with
the Knicks’ owner, James Dolan, that seemed to make it clear that he had
no special interest in the job. You couldn’t quite blame him: he had
what appeared to be a perfectly pleasant life in Los Angeles; Jeanie
Buss, then his partner, sat at the helm of the Los Angeles Lakers, a team that Jackson had led to the N.B.A. title five times. If
ever, after decades as a coach, he decided to try his hand at building a
team from the executive suite, surely he’d do it in L.A. In the end, it
took a contract worth sixty million of Dolan’s essentially inherited
dollars—twelve million a year for five years—to persuade Phil to move
East.

Jackson’s indifference was vaguely humiliating for the Knicks and their
fans, but, at least . . . well, back to those hopes again—what were they,
exactly? Maybe Jackson’s reputation as a basketball guru and long record
of success would help him to attract the kinds of star players who had
tended in recent years to ignore the Knicks almost completely. We’d
heard stories of Pat Riley spreading his championship rings across so
many conference-room tables, convincing the likes of Chris Bosh and
LeBron James to join the Miami Heat. Maybe Jackson could do that
for us? Or maybe he’d take the material we already had, in the person of
Carmelo Anthony, and fashion a homegrown legend. The view on Jackson,
after all, is that while it was true that he’d been fortunate to coach
some of the game’s greatest players—Michael Jordan, Shaquille O’Neal,
Kobe Bryant—it was also true that none of them had managed to win it all
before he came into their lives. Perhaps Melo would be the latest in
this lineage. Maybe Phil as Zen Master would somehow find a way to
access the hidden reserves of Anthony’s basketball unconscious that had,
to that point, only surfaced in his winning turns at Syracuse and during
the Olympic Games, where he was surrounded by other greats. If anybody
could isolate the truly astounding aspects of Melo’s game and convince
him to jettison, or at least minimize, the rest, the Zen master could.

So the most optimistic thinking went. It was deluded, of course, but for
those of us—masochists, ironists, sentimentalists, Spike Lee—who
continue to love the Knicks, it was fun to believe, if only for a while.
Jackson’s one defensible act as president was drafting Kristaps
Porzingis, and even that he almost soured irreversibly when, last week,
just before the N.B.A. draft, he made an ostentatious show of
entertaining trade offers for the best young Knicks prospect in a
generation. The list of missteps is long. He insisted on installing the outdated Triangle Offense. He antagonized
Anthony with an intensity that served, more than anything, to
repel other stars around the league, most of whom respect and like
Anthony—who, flaws and all, has never come off as anything but likable
and kind. For no reason at all, he insulted LeBron James, calling his
friends a “posse” and sparking a days-long discussion about his racial
sensitivity, or lack thereof. The best free agent he enlisted during his
tenure was the point guard Derrick Rose, a former M.V.P. who, at the
time of his signing, was well beyond his prime, and embroiled in a civil
suit concerning a rape accusation. (Rose was found not liable by the
jury.)

Jackson’s greatest transgression, however, was his first—he simply did
not show any taste for the task, especially as it is performed in
today’s N.B.A. Gone are the days when a person of Jackson’s stature
could hector his players in public, hoping to psychologically steer them
toward greatness through the press. Jackson failed to realize that the
league has come, more and more, under the control of the most talented
players, and that the most that a so-called guru can do is offer
guidance and otherwise pay attention to the bureaucratic matters that
spell success these days: scouting, team culture, careful management of
the salary cap. The true front-office prodigies these days are
technocrats like Daryl Morey, who just acquired Chris Paul for the
Houston Rockets, or even the former Philadelphia 76ers general manager
Sam Hinkie, whose gambit to have his team bottom out in service of
future excellence cost him his position but seems—especially after the
recent drafting of the point-guard prospect Markelle Fultz—on the verge
of paying out. Jackson is a star, and the Knicks paid him like one. We
fans, with our misplaced hopes, thought we’d hit it big, having acquired
a macher. That wasn’t the job.