Rick Pitino appreciated the feedback, but it wasn’t going to change his plans.
Coming off a 1988-89 season in which the Knicks reached the second round of the NBA playoffs, there was friction between Pitino and then-general manager Al Bianchi about how each saw the future of the franchise, and Pitino had an offer to take over the men’s basketball program at Kentucky.
“Don’t go,” Stanley Jaffe, a movie producer and a neighbor of Pitino’s in Bedford, N.Y., at the time, told the coach one day. “I guarantee that if you stay, it’ll be great. You’ll have a long career.”
But why take advice from a movie executive? What did Jaffe know about the business of basketball?
“Stanley, you’re a movie producer, how can you guarantee anything?’ Pitino responded.
“I can’t tell you, but you have to trust me,” Jaffe said.
Six months later, after Pitino had made the move to Kentucky, it made more sense.
Jaffe was now in charge of Paramount, which owned the Knicks at the time. Had Pitino stayed, the course of his coaching career may have been significantly different.
“He couldn’t tell me back then; I would’ve been golden,” Pitino recalled in an interview with The Post in between summer workouts at St. John’s. “But he couldn’t tell me for obvious reasons. I would’ve had a long-term contract, I would’ve been the Knicks coach for a long time, and he loved the style of play we had with the Knicks. He loved it.”
Pitino thoroughly enjoyed his two years as a head coach with his hometown Knicks after serving as Hubie Brown’s assistant the previous two seasons.
The team improved from 38 wins his first year to 52 and an Atlantic Division title in his second. They swept the eventual NBA champion Pistons during the regular season in ’88-89, but couldn’t get past the Bulls and Michael Jordan in the second round, losing in six games.
Those Knicks shot tons of 3-pointers — they were nicknamed “The Bomb Squad” — and played a fun brand of up-tempo basketball.
“It was electric,” Pitino said. “The Garden was awesome, and we swept the Sixers [in the first round of the 1989 playoffs] and Mark [Jackson] and Patrick [Ewing] took the broom and made all the back pages of the papers. The guys got along great, we had great chemistry.”
Bianchi, though, wanted them to emulate the Bad Boy Pistons.
The two were brought in at the same time prior to the 1987-88 season, and Pitino had been told by those close to Bianchi that the executive wanted his own coach, someone who shared his basketball philosophy, someone like John MacLeod.
Pitino didn’t feel secure. He saw how frequently fellow NBA and NHL coaches lost their jobs. (And sure enough, his replacement, Stu Jackson — who had been Pitino’s assistant in New York — was replaced by MacLeod 15 games into his second season.)
“He worked for John MacLeod for like 12, 13 years [with the Suns]. He wanted MacLeod, not me, and I sensed that,” Pitino said. “I felt, let Al hire who he wants, because ultimately if the GM and coach are not on the same page, it’s not going to work. He wanted to play a slow-down [style].”
So when Kentucky came calling, Pitino felt it was the right decision, and he left for the Bluegrass State.
Pitino, though, never left the city completely behind. He bought an apartment in Midtown after taking the Wildcats job, and still owns the place to this day.
He doesn’t regret leaving — Pitino won a title at Kentucky and reached the Final Four three times in eight seasons — but he does wonder what might have been had he stayed. As he reminisced about those two years, he couldn’t help but smile.
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“The Bad Boys won the championship; we were 4-0 with them,” Pitino said. “If Jordan didn’t take over Game 6, I thought we could’ve won the championship. But nobody knows that answer [of how long I would’ve been with the Knicks]. … I loved coaching them.”
Questions and, at last, answers
On May 12, the Knicks’ season came to a close with a six-game series loss to the Heat, ending the franchise’s best year in a decade.
Why is May 12 relevant? It’s the last time we’ve heard from anyone of significance from the Knicks.
That is expected to change on Thursday. Out in Las Vegas, three Knicks — Jalen Brunson, Josh Hart and Quentin Grimes — are expected to take questions from members of the media, ending what so far has been a Knicks media blackout unless you count summer league, when only summer league players and assistant coach Dice Yoshimoto were made available.
Brunson and Hart will be preparing for the upcoming FIBA World Cup representing Team USA, and Grimes is on the USA Select Team that is practicing and scrimmaging against them.
With that in mind, below are a few questions that are likely to be asked and hopefully answered:
Josh Hart
• What made you opt into the last year of your contract, which is worth only $12.9 million, rather than become a free agent?
• Was part of that decision made so that the Knicks could sign Donte DiVincenzo?
• Why do you want to stay a Knick long-term?
• What will it be like now that “Knicksanova” has expanded to three players following the signing of DiVincenzo?
Jalen Brunson
• What are your thoughts on the Knicks’ offseason so far? Does this team need to add another player of significance?
• By signing DiVincenzo and trading Obi Toppin, did the Knicks get better or worse? And why?
• Can you improve upon your breakout season? What are you working on to get better?
• What is going to surprise Knicks fans about DiVincenzo?
• At this point last season, some people felt you were overpaid. That has now swung in the other direction. Do you feel underpaid?
Quentin Grimes
• There is now a glut of guards/small wings on the roster. How will that impact you next season?
• You took a leap this past season. What do you need to do to take it another step further next year?
