Knicks’ President Steve Mills Aims to Fire Head Coach David Fizdale

It seems that the New York Knicks head coach David Fizdale might lose his job anytime soon, according to Adrian Wojnarowski and the ESPN.

And it appears that the initiative for that came behind his back. Wojnarowski found out from his sources that the Knicks’ president Steve Mills began preparing the terrain for Fizdale’s removal.

“Everyone is moving to their positions now. This is how they’ll make (Fizdale) the fall guy,” the source revealed the strategy to ESPN reporters.

Something like this was obvious to the experts after the game against the Cleveland Cavaliers, which the Knicks lost 108-87 when Mills spoke to the media at the press conference without Fizdale. During his address to the reporters, Knicks’ head coach was still in the locker room, and this action of the president was interpreted as a highly unusual and rude. According to the unwritten rules and NBA customs, the home team head coach is always the first to speak during the press conferences.

Even before Sunday news conference, Knicks president Steve Mills had started to lay internal groundwork for the eventual ouster of coach David Fizdale. ESPN story with @malika_andrews: https://t.co/FqJY7v6WxW

— Adrian Wojnarowski (@wojespn) November 11, 2019

But this time Mills and the Knicks’ general manager Scott Perry abruptly broke that. Knicks’ president publicly stated that the two of them are not satisfied with the current record of the team, and that the entire franchise needs to work harder in order to improve the current situation.

“Scott and I are not happy with where we are right now,” Mills said. “We think the team is not performing to the level that we anticipated, or we expected to perform at, and that’s something that we think we collectively have to do a better job of delivering the product on the floor .”

Now, this was clearly a shot towards the coach. Many insiders are saying that Mills does that to cover up his mess and bad decisions. Knicks’ president didn’t do anything during the offseason, although the market had several game-changing guys who could finally push the Knicks towards the playoffs.

However, the management failed to attract any name, although several of them were in combination. The hype surrounding the Knicks’ free agency started before the previous season ended, and it included players like Kyrie Irving, Kevin Durant, Kawhi Leonard, etc. At a certain point, everybody already saw Kyrie and KD teaming up, but they decided to skip Madison Square Garden and go to Barclays Center.

Going after Zion was impossible because of the poor trade potential, which was, by the way, ruined when the Knicks decided to trade Kristaps Porzingis to Dallas. It was one of the biggest mistakes of the management and the executives because they couldn’t persuade the Latvian player to stay, or even keep him until the end of the season and boost their assets for the negotiations.

The majority of Fizdale’s colleagues agree on the fact that the New York Knicks are below average team and that Fizdale gets the best out of them, knowing their youth and inexperience. On the other side, Mills is claiming that the team has quality and that the problem is poor guidance.

Since he became the president of the franchise, the Knicks changed five coaches, and their overall record is 165-337. What comes next is highly unpredictable. At the moment, Fizdale took responsibility for the bad results and didn’t speak about anything else than the court-related issues.

Will that continue, we’ll see.