Bill Simmons on Phil Jackson

HERE.

Bottom line: Jackson is simply crippled with physical problems dating all the way back to drastic spinal fusion surgery during his days as a player. He’s now in his 60’s and it’s simply starting to catch up with him. I agree with Simmons that we’ll never see Jackson coaching again.

People sometimes downplay Jackson’s achievements with a frustrating line of reasoning that is often encountered in many other contexts as well. Namely, some people repeatedly say that Jackson deserves little credit for all his championships, because “he always had superstars”.

The problem with that argument is that the superstars were in place prior to Jackson’s arrival, but did not win championships until he arrived. Superstars don’t automatically win. LeBron James is in roughly the same league as Shaq, Kobe, and Jordan (to the extent that anyone can possibly be in the same league as Jordan), and LeBron still hasn’t won a championship. Charles Barkley and Karl Malone never won championships, and neither will Allen Iverson.

But they all probably would have won championships with Phil Jackson as their coach. He is a master ego manager, knowing precisely how to motivate the great players and make them buy into the passing-heavy triangle offense. In both the 1991 and 1993 Finals, Coach Phil convinced Jordan to pass to John Paxson for the biggest shots in the Finals. Coach Phil convinced Shaq and Kobe in L.A. to run layup drills with no ball in a sot of Zen exercise, which one cannot imagine a lesser coach having pulled off.

I even once had a conversation with someone who claimed that he wouldn’t be sold on Phil until he took over some rock-bottom NBA team and lead them from the bottom all the way to the championship. But I’m not sure that has ever happened in the NBA (though it’s happened in both baseball and football, which use many more players and hence are less superstar-centric than basketball).

In any case, those arguments will be forgotten over time, and Phil will be remembered as a guy who won an incredible 11 NBA titles in a 21-year period, with two different teams.

But perhaps his most startling coaching job was in 1993-94,when Jordan had just retired for the first time. That Pippen-led team might possibly have won the championship yet again without Jordan, if not that the Bulls were screwed by a Hue Hollins mystery foul call against New York.

It’s interesting to speculate how NBA history might look a bit different if the Bulls had won the title that year without Jordan. The obvious guesses are that Phil Jackson and Scottie Pippen’s historical stock would rise dramatically, and Jordan’s would sink to a limited extent. Actually, Jordan might not have returned from retirement if the Bulls had won without him– there might have been concerns that he would “disrupt the chemistry” of what would now have been Scottie Pippen’s team.

Instead, Jordan (who is certainly the greatest player ever) now also looks like a magical team savior, and Pippen is dismissed by some of his detractors as a coattail-riding supporting actor amd perhaps even a head case who also helped Portland choke with a big lead against L.A. in the 2000 playoffs.

Granted, Pippen brought some of that on himself. His tantrum in the 1994 playoffs when the final play was drawn up for Toni Kukoc, his refusal to re-enter the game for the final 1-point-whatever seconds as Kukoc did hit the dramatic winning shot against New York, did not put Pippen in a good light.

But as for Phil, I think he has to be called the greatest NBA coach of all time. Red Auerbach coached with one dynasty in a less competitive-era. Phil skillfully managed two different teams to multiple championships over a period of two decades. He’ll be missed.