It brings to mind all the hoops a political candidate jumps through for years, then finally wins, settles into his seat and turns to his chief of staff and says, “Now what do I do?"
Provided he has full autonomy as promised from mercurial owner Jim Dolan, Walsh should be able to do enough to return the Knicks to NBA relevancy.
Again, assuming that is the case, they'll find somewhere to stash coach and outgoing president Isiah Thomas, whether it be a personnel job or if they just put him on the shelf with all the other fired Knicks coaches that get overpaid long after they've been put out to pasture.
The biggest question is how much more money is Dolan going to eat?
Does Walsh bring in Scott Skiles or Mark Jackson to coach and see if they are capable of dealing with Stephon Marbury, or does Dolan choke on that oversized deal as well? And speaking of oversized, there is the status of big boys Eddy Curry and Zach Randolph – two talents that have yet to prove capable of performing as professionals (either on or off the court) on a daily basis.
Those are the first orders of business for Walsh as he moves forward. He hired and fired Thomas with the Pacers, so this shouldn't be such a huge problem considering they have a professional relationship one way or the other.
Regardless, the Bronx-born Walsh is a great pick for the job if it is tenable for anyone. He has rebuilt Pacers teams on the fly and kept them competitive in the process. They were continuously in the playoffs and Eastern Conference contenders until the 2004 brawl against Pistons fans derailed what looked like a championship season, then Larry Bird joined him in the front office.
Now that he's on his own again, success should be inevitable because there is talent on the Knicks roster and he is a super evaluator. It just doesn't fit right now. It will take a new coach. It will take moving out the old, tired head cases that are Marbury, Curry and Quentin Richardson … among others. Dump the damaged goods and replace them with new energy.
The Knicks have been toxic since Jeff Van Gundy walked out as coach in December of 2001. Walsh can be the antidote, but it's going to take time and it won't happen tomorrow, next week, next month or even next season.
But it will happen.
What we don't know is how patient the Knicks fans and media will be until it does.
This is going to get interesting once the dust settles -- from Indianapolis to New York City -- as Donnie Walsh moves from the city where he developed an elite reputation with the Pacers to his hometown where the Knicks are in ruins.
But he met with Knicks owner Jim Dolan last week, and the rumors have been rampant ever since based on the obvious situation in Indy -- either the 67-year-old CEO or Larry Bird, the 51-year-old president, had to go.
The latest thought was that Walsh turned down the Knicks and Bird was on his way out.
That’s why Pacers owner Herb Simon cleared the air Monday.
“I think everyone was getting confused,” Simon said. “There were a lot of rumors and we just thought if this was something that was really going to happen and once I was convinced Donnie was really leaving, I thought it would just be best to let everyone else know.”
Although they all said he would finish the season or stay "until they throw me out," as Walsh cracked wise. Most of it is contingent on the Knicks, despite Walsh’s refusal to comment on the reports that have him already coming to an agreement on a contract.
“I'm not commenting on anything that I'm going to do in the future because I'm unclear about it,” Walsh said. “And I'm just not going to comment on it until the time is right.”
That could be right around the corner, but we’ll get back to that later. Right now, we’re trying to figure out what went wrong here. We just don’t know whether it was Bird making the bad personnel decisions or Walsh. Or maybe it was simply the problem of having two people making the decisions instead of one.
Actually, everyone has been confused about the Pacers for quite some time, with the timing of their precipitous fall from grace in the East coinciding with their notorious brawl in the Palace of Auburn Hills with Pistons fans in November of 2004.
Since then, they have gone straight downhill. From being a model of NBA success in the glorious basketball heartland of Indiana in their perpetually sold out state-of-the-art Conseco Fieldhouse on their way to six conference finals under Walsh to the unequivocal decline the past four years. They failed to make the playoffs last season for the first time in a decade, have the worst attendance in the NBA and are on the brink of missing the postseason for the second year in a row – something that hasn’t happened here in nearly 20 years.
Maybe it’s just a coincidence that Bird took his present post five years ago, maybe not. Nonetheless, the perception of the Pacers as bad guys – from Ron Artest and Stephen Jackson to Jamaal Tinsley, Marquis Daniels and Shawne Williams – hasn’t gone away, and that combined with failure on the court has fractured the fan base. Walsh had said all along this would be his final season, but nobody believed him until now.
At least now we'll know who is making all the calls. And to this point, it would be fair to say nobody has been impressed with anything Bird has done in the front office.
“I think that's maybe one of the side benefits of clarifying the situation, having Larry's voice being the only voice,” Simon insisted. “Some people got confused. I liked having both of them but I think we're going to do very well with Larry.”
We’ll see. Walsh set up Bird with this job five years ago with the intention of him taking over completely one day, but nobody expected it to be under these circumstances. The Pacers had been too stable. Now they’re not.
“It's sad to see him go,” Bird said. “ I know there's a lot of speculation out there about whether he's going to stay or go but from day one he told me exactly what he was going to do and today, you always know it's coming but when it does happen you have different emotions and different feelings about it.
“We've talked about this before and I've always said that one voice is what you have, no matter if it's business or basketball. Learning this position through Donnie, there was a lot of confusion out there but now that he's stepping down I have no doubts in my ability to lead and do the things necessary to get this team back to the elite level.”
That has yet to be proven. On the court, Bird controlled his team's performance. He hasn’t shown the ability to build a successful team yet, and until then it’s ludicrous to compare Bird the player to Bird the president.
We already know what his predecessor has done, and now, unless a lot of people are sadly mistaken, it’s on to New York for Walsh. And it is home. Walsh grew up in the Bronx, played ball for Frank McGuire at South Carolina and cut his teeth coaching with Dean Smith and Larry Brown under McGuire. He earned his law degree, and once he moved from assistant coach to president of the Pacers in 1986, things quickly changed. The only thing that didn’t work was a meek attempt at changing his name from “Donnie” to “Don” as president of the organization. Included on his resume is an Eastern Conference title in 2000 before losing to the Lakers. There's also six trips to the conference finals and four division championships.
Everything else flowed until 2004.
But he’s a natural hire for New York. He’s proven to be a master of the salary cap, capable of rebuilding a team while still competing in the playoffs. One of those periods came with present Knicks president and coach Isiah Thomas as the Pacers coach, which is why this appears to be inevitable. Whether Thomas would stay on as coach or not depends on Dolan since Thomas is still owed so much money in the wake of an extension given last season. On the other hand, he has eaten the huge contracts of Lenny Wilkens and Larry Brown, so that may not be a factor in Dolan's decision.
Regardless, it will be up to Walsh to clean up this mess of a franchise that is presently 19-51 and hasn’t won a playoff series since 2005. They are light years over the salary cap and into luxury tax as the highest salaried team in the NBA. So Walsh will have his work cut out for him – perhaps to hire a new coach in the process – maybe even former Pacer and Knick and present broadcast analyst Mark Jackson.
Reports of Walsh accepting a three-year, $15 million deal from the Knicks are creating a positive buzz in New York. Consider these words of wisdom as we watch what happens.
“The league is its own life form in a way,” Walsh said in part on Monday. “It kind of evolves the way it evolves.”
Or devolves, as both the Knicks and Pacers have done in recent years … and as a byproduct, nobody is better prepared for New York than Donnie Walsh.
