Mike Fratello, current NBA TV and YES Network analyst, would love a crack at the New York Knicks’ head coaching job.
From the New York Post‘s Brian Lewis:
Mike Fratello, former Cavaliers and Hawks coach and current analyst for NBA TV and the YES Network, threw his hat in the ring and told WFAN on Thursday he would like the Knicks job.
“I just want one more big headache. How about that?” Fratello said, adding all the top teams used triangle principles, so he would, too. “San Antonio does it. Golden State has incorporated it. There’s a number of teams that have parts of the triangle that they use. They just don’t use the same wording as Phil and as his great assistant, Tex Winter, did over the years. So you can find a place for it in your offense.”
Fratello has extensive coaching experience, having guided teams in parts of 17 different seasons. But he hasn’t been a head honcho since 2006-07, and his take is more valuable for his perspective on the triangle than for his purported interest in coaching the Knicks.
Teams like the Golden State Warriors and San Antonio Spurs do, indeed, incorporate elements of the triangle into their offense. Elements. So they don’t live and die by it. But some of its principles stand the test of the modern-day era. It’s just best when paired with other motions and sets.
And that’s where Knicks president Phil Jackson appears to be failing. He seems married to the triangle, all of it, for better or worse. And it’s subsequently unclear whether he has staged a coaching search at all, beyond placing obligatory calls to Frank Vogel or David Blatt, or if he’s just totally settled on Kurt Rambis and in no rush to announce it.
