The past week of ever-more-absurd Knicks drama managed to suck in all sorts of fringe characters, including Michael Graham — the former Georgetown enforcer, D.C. restaurateur and lottery winner.
Why Graham? The one-time Hoya took shrapnel from Jackson’s much-publicized tweet, which was subtly aimed at Carmelo Anthony but which used Graham as an example of a player who can’t be reached.
Bleacher's Ding almost rings the bell, but I learned you don't change the spot on a leopard with Michael Graham in my CBA daze.
— Phil Jackson (@PhilJackson11) February 7, 2017And Graham has since fired back, in several outlets, including on an appearance with the local Nuts and Bolts podcast.
“I mean, I wish him luck,” Graham said of Jackson. “I understand he’s probably frustrated because he can’t put together a team up there in New York, making bad decisions and all. Like I told everybody, I think he’s a great coach. He’s weird at times. He played the game for many years with the Knicks, and I respect him because of that, but that don’t make him God’s gift to basketball because he got 11 championships.
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“If you think about it, those 11 championships, he had taken over teams that were already built,” Graham went on. “So I could have coached that team, my 2-year old could have coached that team, they still would have won. And I guarantee you that he did not bring that nonsense to Michael Jordan and Scottie [Pippen] and Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal. So it is what it is. They made him who he is today, you know? Like I said, he didn’t have to put together a team, and right now he has to do the hard work of putting together a team, and I think he’s frustrated.”
Now for some of the context. Graham played briefly for Jackson with the Albany Patroons in the minor league CBA, after he flamed out with the Seattle SuperSonics, the NBA team that drafted him. The Washingtonian included this anecdote in a lengthy Graham profile two years ago:
On New Year’s Eve 1986, Graham and his coach, Phil Jackson, got into it in the middle of a game. A few days later, the Patroons axed him after only 11 games.
Jackson, who went on to lead the Chicago Bulls and Los Angeles Lakers to a combined 11 championships, is considered by many to have been the best coach in NBA history. But even as he used his memoir to describe leading the likes of Michael Jordan and Dennis Rodman, he still devoted space to Graham, the star he’d failed to mold back in the minors.
“Nothing I said made any difference,” Jackson wrote. “Whenever I tried to talk to him, his eyes would glaze over and he’d retreat to some dark inner corner nobody could penetrate.”
The coach described pulling off the highway the night he let Graham go and starting to cry at the thought that he might have ended the player’s promising career: “Here was a kid who was born to play basketball, someone who had enough talent to be a star in the NBA, and yet despite all my sophisticated psychology, I couldn’t reach him.”
Graham said he hasn’t spoken with Jackson since the late ’80s, when they ran into each other at another minor league game. “That’s the last I’ve physically seen of Phil,” he told the podcast. He said he didn’t see the tweet until former Georgetown teammate Gene Smith texted him about it. “When I first saw it, I couldn’t believe it,” Graham said. “I was like Gene, what the heck is this, what is this all about?” He said his playing career went downhill in the late ’80s after some family tragedies, that “I had a lot on my mind and basketball wasn’t it.”
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Graham also said this burst of attention has been “totally out the blue,” but he said Jackson did him a favor by getting people interested in his life again. “He really woke up the dead,” Graham said.
That didn’t stop Graham from taking a couple jabs at his onetime coach, agreeing that Jackson’s time with the Knicks has exposed holes in his basketball IQ.
“I really do,” Graham said. “Not to talk bad about him, but I really think that’s what it is, because you sign Joakim Noah to a four-year deal, $72 million, and this guy’s averaging [22] minutes a game. You sign Courtney Lee to a big contract, you sign [Anthony] to a [mega] contract with a no-trade clause? I mean, how are you gonna be able to build a team if you’re relying on these guys?
“I really think Phil wants to be the star of that team,” Graham went on, “The Team That Phil Built, The House That Phil Built. When I was in the CBA playing for him, he always wanted that [Knicks] job, but they would never contact him. He always wanted that job. I mean, I remember this cat when he was driving an old broken-down station wagon, and to me he was a lot better then than he is now.
“Back then he was weird. . . . He would come give us books, have us meditate, all the stuff that he would do, Phil had his teams doing. I didn’t mind. I thought it was really good, something different. It’s hard to really figure out Phil, and I’ve talked to quite a few reporters [this month], and he’s not a likable cat in the NBA now, man. Nobody likes him.”
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