Mike Woodson had no chance of returning as Knicks coach once James Dolan shelled out that sweet, sweet Cablevision money for Phil Jackson. Woodson has a reputation as a defense-first guy, but with the exception of the mini-season he coached after Mike D’Antoni’s semi-firing, the Knicks were somewhere between below average and unwatchable on defense under Woodson.
And in a bit of Knicks history everyone seems to forget, D’Antoni already had those 2011-12 Knicks working as a borderline top-10 defense before New York let him walk.
The Knicks ranked 24th in points allowed per possession this season. Every team below them was either tanking on purpose (Utah, Philadelphia); tanking by accident (the Lakers and Bucks); incompetent enough defensively that they tanked the end of the season to make sure they kept their draft pick (Detroit); or decimated by injuries (New Orleans). The Knicks were basically the worst defensive team among NBA teams that were trying to win NBA basketball games.
The front office did not bless Woodson with a good defensive roster. Rick Carlisle is a genius coach with a great staff, and yet the Mavs finished only two spots ahead of New York in the overall defensive efficiency rankings. But the Knicks had two advantages over Dallas in this theoretical exercise: a former Defensive Player of the Year in Tyson Chandler, and 52 games against the sad-sack Eastern Conference. The sheer awfulness of the East was the only thing keeping the Knicks alive in the playoff race. They rediscovered some of their 3-happy, low-turnover offense from last season against a soft March/April schedule, and the injury-riddled Hawks propped open the door like a sleeping drunk.
The Knicks just weren’t good enough to seize their chances. There is only so much you can do on defense with Amar’e Stoudemire, Carmelo Anthony, J.R. Smith, Raymond Felton, Tim Hardaway Jr., and Andrea Bargnani. Woodson’s critics howled for more of Pablo Prigioni, and though the Knicks played off-the-charts ball with Prigioni on the court last season, those numbers did not carry over into 2013-14. Prigioni is a limited player, the kind who can thrive in 18 minutes but get exposed in 35. It should be no surprise that they imploded defensively in fatal late-season losses against Cleveland and the Lakers, the latter of which featured perhaps the lowest point of the Woodson era not involving a fire extinguisher or Bargnani’s headless defense — the Lakers’ 51-point third quarter.
Woodson’s idiosyncratic scheming didn’t work, and the failures weren’t just about the endless on- and off-ball switching the Knicks used as a crutch. Switching isn’t bad on its own, and can be an effective salve for a team lacking in skilled defensive personnel. But the Knicks lazily switched when there was no reason to do so, not even a real screen, and they suffered Keystone Kops–level communication breakdowns in every quarter of every game. Two Knicks would chase one guy on a botched switch, leaving openings across the court.
Teams also tore New York apart on the pick-and-roll. The Knicks ranked dead last in points allowed per possession on plays finished by both pick-and-roll ball handlers and screen setters, per Synergy Sports. It would be hard to pull off that double indignity without trying. Even more damning: This was all a repeat of 2012-13, when New York ranked 19th in points allowed per possession and couldn’t contain the simplest high pick-and-rolls.
Opposing ball handlers got to the middle of the floor whenever they wanted, something Woodson told me in preseason was
not a serious problem. Woodson employed an unusual scheme in which the big man defending the screener, typically Chandler, would stick very close to home instead of sliding over to contain the ball handler. Woodson wanted that containment to come from other players, even if it required uncomfortable rotations. Sometimes those rotations never came, and ball handlers waltzed to the rim around Chandler’s non-help
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