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Happy Memorial Day, everyone! This is one of the best holidays of the year for barbecues, and wouldn't you know it, Papa Bear Phil Jackson served us some more HOT TAKES, fresh off the grill.
Apparently the Zen Master checked his TL since his infamous #goink crack at three-point shooting teams like the Golden State Warriors, and he felt compelled to clarify his views with a series of Sunday afternoon Tweets:
Some corrected thoughts:1)like 3pt shooters, check it out, but to play for 3pt shot is an error. Penetration, first principal of offense.
— Phil Jackson (@PhilJackson11) May 24, 2015
2)we are glad for JR,Shump,Pablo,etc...players have comfort zones that they need to play their best...we want them to find that in NBA
— Phil Jackson (@PhilJackson11) May 24, 2015
3)the 3pt shot is not the be all end all of basketball. WNBA is taking their exhibition game to extremes-do not disvalue the 2pt shot.
— Phil Jackson (@PhilJackson11) May 24, 2015
A few thoughts:
- I like how he casually drops "check it out" in the middle of sentences like an '80s rapper.
- Glad he's taking the high road with regards to Iman Shumpert and J.R. Smith. There was always the risk that they would make him look dumb by thriving alongside LeBron -- we're talking about a guy who once made Mo Williams an All-Star, after all.
- Yeah, the NBA's Washington Mystics and Minnesota Lynx are running an 'analytic scrimmage' Tuesday with a whole host of wacky rules, including a ban on mid-range shots. Check out this piece for more information.
- It appears Phil knows more about the WNBA than Isiah Thomas does.
- *devalue
I don't particularly mind Phil's three-point rants. The teams he coached were never averse to bombing away from beyond the arc. His first moves as GM were to attempt to hire Steve Kerr (three-point gunner as a player, currently coaching that very same Warriors team), successfully hire Derek Fisher (extended his career for two or three seasons by essentially shooting nothing but threes) and trading for Jose Calderon (one of the most accurate three-point shooters in history).
Personally, I think the guy is reacting to being forced to watch far too many Knicks games. They have long been a club with a serious inability to penetrate opposing defenses. Even the 2012-13 team, historically proficient three-point gunners that they were, had a not-yet-useless Ray Felton driving into the paint and running pick-and-rolls with Tyson Chandler. Once those two fossilized over the course of the 2013-14 campaign, the offense had essentially no way of getting to the rim.
Let us not forget that Phil's predecessors were essentially chained up in the bowels of MSG 364 days a year, only to emerge to read from a prepared script during the annual press conference with electrodes taped to their balls, lest they felt compelled to improvise. We wanted these kinds of insights into the mind of the man in charge, spelling mistakes or no.
Phil's biggest problem in dealing with social media is that he still believes the basketball world views him as the 11-time champion coach. You're associated with the Knicks now, my man, and the Knicks are the poster boys of basketball incompetence. They're a joke, and everything they say and do is a joke. It's a richly earned reputation.
Please try to remember this the next time you want to explain basketball philosophy on Twitter, Mr. Jackson. It's not exactly a great platform for nuance.