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A few sources around the twitter world let loose that the Westchester Knicks intend to name former Austin Spurs assistant Mike Miller as their new head coach. That's the third head coach the team has had as they prepare to enter their second season. Miller follows Allan Houston's buddy old pal, Kevin Whitted, and Phil Jackson's friend of ours, Craig Hodges.
Former Spurs D-League assistant Mike Miller will be the new coach of the Westchester Knicks, source tells @SNYtv.
— Adam Zagoria (@AdamZagoria) August 11, 2015
Mike Miller, who once worked at Kansas State, has a history with Phil Jackson mentor Tex Winter. More importantly, he comes from the Spurs.
— Frank Isola (@FisolaNYDN) August 11, 2015
Mike Miller is not LeBron James' bestie. He is a middling head coach who has struggled for wins for the better part of 20 years with schools that never draw top recruits like Eastern Illinois and Texas State. He was the Southland Conference coach of the year in 1997. He was also an assistant coach for a handful of schools, including Kansas State. That was 43 years after the legendary Triangle maestro himself, Tex Winter, was a head coach there. I bet they ran into each other like all the time. They probably talked b-ball, shared ice cream floats at the malt shop on Main Street and told one another ghost stories before bedtime in the dormitories. Sounds like a D-League head coach to me, alright!
Two years ago, Coach Mike leveled up from all those collegiate gigs and became an assistant with the Austin Spurs. Last season Austin was first in their conference and lost to the eventual champion Santa Cruz Warriors in the semi-final. He's no Dylan Murphy, but he'll suffice until we can get us one of those. In his past he's coached guys like Jon'Tee Willhite, Gino Myers-Kyles and Cartier Martin...
Surely he helped out with Kyle Anderson and helped develop a guy like Jonathan Simmons, who recently signed a long term agreement with San Antonio. SB Nation's favorite D-League blog, Ridiculous Upside, polled General Managers and Coaches and Mr. Miller's name came up as one of the best assistants in the league. Granted he didn't get a major percentage of the vote, it still matters that his name comes up.
It seems like Miller will be in charge of getting the D-Leaguers to know the basics of the Triangle while making sure they get better as individual players functioning within a system. Coming from the Spurs, he should be able to utilize plenty of Triangle sets around some of the tenets of early offense. According to the inimitable Keith Schlosser (Ridunkulous Helpside, various Knicks outlets), this nice guy will help the Westchester Knicks finish somewhere above last. Hopefully he won't have to do his own video-editing (worth noting: different guy).
Mike Miller is also a football coach, a house DJ, a guitar virtuoso, a journalist and an aspiring artist of some kind that Pharell Williams has publicly stated some extremely vague niceties about. Good luck in Westchester, Mike!