Sports

Who is Mike Miller? Unknown Knicks coach’s odyssey from small-town Illinois to limelight

Three years ago, when his parents were moving, Jeff Foster faced a chore that showed no regard for his status as a veteran of 13 grueling NBA seasons with the Indiana Pacers.

He had to clean out his old closet.

So he did. And he came across a stockpile of papers from his college playing days.

“I still had all my scouting reports from college and the plays that were drawn up,” Foster said. “It was interesting to see from hindsight of a 13-year NBA career how similar it actually was to the scouting reports we had in the NBA. They were great.”

The author of those scouting reports and playbooks from Southwest Texas State (now Texas State) was Mike Miller, the 55-year-old basketball lifer currently directing the Knicks on an interim basis. It’s the latest stop on an improbable journey that started in a small Illinois town and now has progressed to the glittering stage of Madison Square Garden.





“He hasn’t had an easy path in coaching,” said TV analyst and former Knicks coach Jeff Van Gundy, who had Miller on his 2018 USA World Cup Qualifying Team coaching staff. “Give him a lot of credit for all the work he has put in to get to this point. He’s a no-nonsense, straight-shooting, not-looking-for-any-limelight guy. He just wants to coach basketball and do the best job he can to help the players.”

After glamour stops such as Southwest Texas, Eastern Illinois and the G League outposts of the Spurs and the Knicks, Miller is trying to right the latest basketball train wreck to infiltrate the Garden. He’s doing it in one place that by all accounts he despises: the spotlight. And he’s doing it, by all accounts, the one way he knows how: with hard work.





“Totally committed. No one outworks him,” said Jim Wooldridge, who hired Miller on three different occasions at Southwest Texas, Kansas State and UC Riverside. “Very selfless. He’s not a self-promoter. … No one will be better prepared. The players, if they don’t already, will understand it’s not about him, it’s about them.”

But who is this guy? He sidesteps publicity like downed electrical wires. He appears more comfortable discussing advanced calculus than discussing Mike Miller. He was hired as the G League Westchester Knicks’ head coach in 2015 — he was G League Coach of the Year in 2018 — then was elevated to David Fizdale’s staff as an assistant for this season. When Fizdale was whacked after 22 games, Miller became interim head coach.





“I watched some of the press conferences, and Mike’s not about himself,” said Mel Blasi, a lifelong friend, high school teammate and current golf coach at Central College in Pella, Iowa, after a 20-year run at Western Illinois University. “He’s about, ‘Who do we play next and how do we get ready for the game?’”

So Miller is as flashy and high-profile as oatmeal, but he is downright effective with his low-key style.

“What I’d stress about Mike is his approach every day and how he handled every part of his role,” said Brian Pauga, who was general manager of the Spurs’ G League affiliate in Austin, where Miller was an assistant coach for two seasons. “The preparedness and how even-keeled he was in high-pressure and low-pressure situations were impressive.”





Hard work, preparation, sound demeanor and knowledge are key ingredients at any level.

“Very good teacher, poised on the sidelines. His team was prepared every night. He did a really good job in the G League,” said one veteran NBA executive who watched Miller with Westchester. “He put in the triangle [offense] when he got there. They actually ran it better than the Knicks did.”

There is a reason for that — and it was what made Miller appealing to Phil Jackson, who hired him in 2015. But more on that later. Again, who is this guy?

“I’ve heard nothing but good things about him as a person, and from what I’ve seen, he knows his craft,” the exec said. “I can’t remember a coach in New York the public knew so little about. I don’t even think the Nets ever had a coach nobody knew anything about.”

So here’s a look at this mystery man who suddenly finds himself occupying one of the highest-profile jobs in all of New York sports, manning the sideline for one of the NBA’s marquee franchises.

Monmouth, Ill., population 9,444 in the most recent census, sits more than 200 miles southwest of Chicago. It’s blue-collar middle America (and the birthplace of Wyatt Earp).

“Monmouth is a nice little town, the county seat of a rural county,” said Mike Mueller, 70, Miller’s basketball coach at Monmouth High School, which went to the state championship and lost in 1982. “It is a slice of mid-America.”

Miller, a strong defensive wing with a terrific shot as well as a standout baseball pitcher, grew up in Monmouth as the middle of three sons of Ron and Connie Miller. He went to Immaculate Conception grade school, then to Monmouth High, where he was a standout for the Zippers.

“Mike was my star. He averaged 22 points a game as a 6-5 wing. He could shoot it deep before the 3-point shot,” Mueller said. “But he didn’t get a lot of attention from the Division Is.”

Miller also forged friendships that have survived and flourished. When he married his Texas-born wife, Kelly, his best man was John Kinney, a former Monmouth teammate.

“There were like six or seven of us there and they drew straws and they drew my name and he said, ‘Aw, crap, not him,’” Kinney said, laughing.

Miller and Blasi headed to Southeastern Community College in Burlington, Iowa, a school that had won two national championships.

“They were one of the top junior colleges in the country at the time. For a two-year school, it was a big deal to be going to Burlington,” Blasi said.

Coming out of Burlington, Miller got a basketball scholarship offer for East Texas State (now Texas A&M-Commerce). Blasi could have gone there as well, but he chose to follow his golf dream after qualifying for the National Junior College Golf Tournament. So Miller went off to Texas, taking a major step in his coaching journey.

“This is amazing,” said Dave Giles, 69, Monmouth’s unofficial basketball historian, who worked camps with Mueller and kept the book at high school games. “From college on, this was Mike’s dream, to coach basketball at the highest level he could achieve. He’s paid his dues.”

Miller’s journey took a detour at East Texas State, which did not have a baseball program. Miller played basketball, but during the summer, his 90-mph-plus fastball, athleticism and imposing size attracted coaches at University of Texas-Arlington. He got a baseball offer. He transferred. He showed great promise as a pitcher, but pro scouts felt he really lacked experience. Maybe he could have advanced if he stuck with it.

“Baseball was basically fun, but basketball is what I always wanted,” Miller once told the Dallas Morning News.

At UTA, Miller made a important choice. He began coaching basketball as an assistant at Cistercian Preparatory School, later becoming the head coach and winning a conference title. He was a year shy of graduating UTA, but only needed one semester at East Texas. So he transferred back and graduated.

Kinney suspected back in high school that Miller had a love of coaching. It was confirmed when he watched Miller in college.

“Coach Mueller had us go over to the YMCA, and we coached third- and fourth-graders while we were in high school. I think that had a lot to do with Mike coaching,” Kinney said. “Then I went to see him coach a high school team [in Texas] and thought, ‘Wow, he’s going to get there.’”

That prep school experience was the start of a 30-year coaching odyssey.

Miller coached as an assistant for one year at Western Illinois in 1989-90, and he did almost everything: He scouted. He did film work. And he learned. He moved to Sam Houston State for another year, this time handling recruiting, before the ax fell on the staff.

Enter Wooldridge with his first job offer. Wooldridge, who had gotten a late start after accepting the Southwest Texas job in the summer, needed a staff. Miller needed a job.

“That job at Southwest at the time was not a very good job. I don’t think honestly Mike wanted to be there, but we kept talking and I hired him as an assistant,” Wooldridge said. “It was the best decision I ever made, and you’re seeing an end product. You’re seeing who he is. And he was that way as a young coach.”

The two worked together for three years until Wooldridge left for his alma mater, Louisiana Tech, after posting a 25-7 record and earning an NCAA bid. He urged Southwest Texas to hire Miller. Folks listened, and, over the likes of Steve Alford, made Miller, then 29, the second-youngest head coach in the country (Marshall’s Billy Donovan was the youngest).

Wooldridge frequently imported junior college kids. Miller opted more for raw high school prospects that he could mold. He lasted six years at Southwest Texas, winning two Southland Conference titles and earning Conference Coach of the Year honors in 1997, when the Bobcats went to the NCAA Tournament but lost in the first round.

“Some of the things he stressed to us he also lived by,” said Donte Mathis, who played for Miller at Southwest Texas before playing 13 years overseas. “You could watch the way he walked, the way he talked, and it was a reflection of everything he said. A lot of time coaches read a lot of quotes, read a lot of books. They copy and paste parts, but he was living a lot of what he was preaching.”

Foster echoed that.

“I had the opportunity to play for a lot of different coaches in the NBA, and some of them were completely different when they weren’t coaching. With Mike, what you see is what you get,” Foster said, praising Miller’s developmental touch. “I went to Texas State, I was 6-9, 170 pounds with no aspirations of the NBA. He and his staff molded me into a first-round pick, a guy who was able to play in the NBA for 13 years.”

During his last two seasons in Commerce, there were lessons for Miller that helped down the road. Wooldridge left Louisiana Tech and took an NBA job with Tim Floyd in Chicago. Also on the Bulls staff was Tex Winter, the architect of the triangle offense. Miller contacted Winter.

“Mike watched the Bulls play,” Wooldridge said. “He started the process of learning the offense and using the offense at Southwest Texas. Then I go to the Bulls and Tex is there, so Mike comes to Chicago a couple times and learns more and more. … Mike Miller was probably in the one percentile of the people who knew that offense from start to finish.”

All that “absolutely” made him attractive to Jackson, said Wooldridge, currently athletic director at Riverside City College in California.

After Louisiana Tech, Wooldridge moved to Kansas State in 2000. When he sought to build his staff, he knew whom to call. Again, Miller impressed players.

“It was all about the details,” said former Kansas State guard Clent Stewart, 33, now a high school coach in Bartlesville, Okla. “He ran a lot of our guard work, footwork … epitome of hard work. Put your head down, work hard and good things will happen. Don’t worry about the external. Don’t worry about wins and losses — if you put in the work, that will come. And I remember his scouting reports were phenomenal.”

Miller took the head coach job at Eastern Illinois in 2005. It did not go well. The Panthers had six losing seasons in Miller’s seven years at the Ohio Valley Conference school. When he got canned in 2012, his son Joey, who had set a school single-game freshman scoring record with 28 points, transferred. Father and youngest son (Matt is the older son) later reunited when Joey joined the Westchester Knicks roster in 2016-17.

Without a job, Miller got a call again from Wooldridge, who brought him to UC Riverside. But after one season, Miller decided on a total reversal. He told his three-time boss he wanted a shot at the NBA. So he hooked up with Pauga, who was thrilled to get a résumé with so much experience for a G League assistant coach job.

“He had been in college for 25 years and he wanted to try something new. We connected with him early in the spring and just built a relationship,” Pauga said. “We were excited, especially to have someone held in such high regard by the people he’s been around.”

Jackson called next. And it didn’t take long for Miller to make a mark in Westchester, where his work helped get him a spot on Van Gundy’s FIBA staff — though the two had never met. It landed him at the Garden next to Fizdale.

“I was studying G League players for USA Basketball, so I saw his team play a lot on film,” Van Gundy said. “I was very impressed with how well they played. The G League, there’s no glamour for either players or coaches. To get guys to play unselfishly and for the team is not easy, and that’s what I respected so much about Mike’s teams. They really played well together.”

Sort of like how the Knicks have played the past few weeks. They had a successful road trip, came home and stomped the Hawks under the direction of a man with 11 coaching stops on his resume. But most expect the Knicks to make a big-name splash for the long term.

“I’ve always believed when you know your stuff and you’re sincere, reliable and trustworthy like Mike is, players will respond,” said Van Gundy, who waved off the stigma of the “interim” label. “I would look at it just the opposite. They could also walk in at the end of the year and say, ‘You’ve done a helluva job, you’re our coach.’

“Mike is a no-nonsense, positive guy. He’s excited about the opportunity to get better today from yesterday. This is going to be absolutely great for his career. Hopefully, he’ll be in New York for a long time, but if not, this can only benefit his career.”

For more on the Knicks, listen to the latest episode of the “Big Apple Buckets” podcast:





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