Rick Pitino is something of a coaching chameleon. His generation of coaches were largely defined by lengthy tenures at a single school and rigid devotion to a single scheme. His last assistant job at the college level came under Jim Boeheim, he who spent 47 years at Syracuse and almost exclusively ran a 2-3 zone defensively. Pitino has been the head coach of eight different teams over the years, and while he’s known for employing a full-court press, he’s adapted his strategies plenty over the years. Never has that been more evident than his time with the New York Knicks.
It’s a two-year stretch that has largely been forgotten to history, but on Monday, Pitino agreed to return to his old stomping grounds of Madison Square Garden to take over the St. John’s Red Storm. His new employer would probably prefer a lengthier stay in New York City, but they’ll be lucky if his second tour through the Big Apple is anywhere near as revolutionary as his first was.
Let’s wind the clocks back to 1988. Pitino was coming off of a 38-44 debut season in New York, but by Knicks standards at the time, that was actually a relatively successful year. The Knicks combined for just 71 wins in the three previous seasons combined despite the presence of rising star Patrick Ewing.
The problem was the rest of the roster. When the Knicks drafted Ewing in 1985, they had a second star scorer in Bernard King. He had just averaged a league-best 32.9 points per game for New York, but late in the 1984-85 season, King suffered one of the worst injuries in NBA history: a torn ACL that came with torn knee cartilage and a broken leg bone. He was never the same player, and even if he had been, he would go on to play only six more games as a Knick. That left New York’s offense undermanned around Ewing. The Knicks never ranked higher than 20th out of 23 teams in the NBA in offense during Ewing’s first three seasons.
But the 1988-89 Knicks? They went 52-30 with the NBA’s sixth-best offense. It’s not as though that improvement was driven by roster upgrades. Their top four scorers were all with the team in the year prior, and while they added Charles Oakley to their starting lineup, his best attributes were defense and rebounding. No, what propelled the 1989 Knicks was a market inefficiency Pitino saw two decades before everybody else: they shot a historic amount of 3-pointers.
They weren’t even an especially strong…
Click Here to Read the Full Original Article at CBSSports.com Headlines…
