So a big time FOP (Friend Of the Podcast) team came into the World’s Most Famous Arena to face the Knicks rocking their NTA (Non-Throwback Alternate) “Statement” jerseys, once again. We’ll get into NTAs and everything around it, trust me, but first I want to jump into our opponent a little bit, the Memphis Grizzlies. Because there were a couple of storylines surrounding this game, and our opponent, that are near and dear to my heart as a die-hard Knicks fan and (editor’s note: everything else) hater.

I consider the Grizz a FOP squad right now due to the recent firing of head coach and a newly mounted personal antagonist of the podcast, David Fizdale, and all of the hoopla surrounding it.

Fizdale, just never liked the guy. He was always that hipster-y (editor’s note: version of Mike Woodson) looking lame being overly vocal for an assistant on the Heat bench during the Big 3 era. I never knew a single thing about him, not even his name until the Grizzlies hired him after the 2016 season. But I just never liked anything about him or what he represented to me.

He always came across to me as sort of a microcosm of that South Beach all flash no substance style that doesn’t jive with the New York state of mind. Working under the real life Darth Sidious (editor’s note: NERD ALERT (sound the alarms)) himself, Pat “The Rat” Riley, riding the coattails of a very talented team formed in the worst possible way - that also represented that bullshit extravagant South Beach style. Basically, I perceived the guy to be a cornball assistant on a very talented basketball team who happened to stand out because he was super extra during games and wore stupid hipster glasses.

He represented the polar opposite of the assistant coaches I like. For those who don’t know, I consider myself a bit of a assistant coach connoisseur, I enjoy many types of assistant coaches for many reasons. But my absolute favorite type of assistant coaches are the grind-it-out, up all night, true blood Basketball Guys. In the mold of Jeff Van Gundy assisting Pat the Rat with the dilapidated suits and bags under his eyes from reviewing game plan, watching film, and doing other Basketball Guy stuff all night.

Or Thibs following suit assisting JVG and then basically running the Celtics while Doc served as a motivator/figurehead. I knew he was destined for greatness right when the Bulls hired him shortly after we outbid them for snake oil salesman Mike “Pringles” D’Antoni. Or Patrick Ewing, of course, who never got the credit he was long due as a coach because of various stereotypes, including but not limited to (and I wont go into it all right now) not being the vocal stand out ra-ra flashy guy Fizdale was in Miami.

Natural basketball guys. That’s my favorite type of assistant coach. Fizdale never came across as much of a Basketball Guy. He certainly tried to act like one during games, but at the end of the day I couldn’t see him as a guy living and breathing basketball and doing the grind out work like a JVG or Thibs or Ewing. Those guys don’t give a fuck about being hip! It’s like Beasley with getting buckets, they got one thing on their minds at all times and one thing only: basketball.

Fiz was probably out on South Beach grabbing drinks with Lebron and Wade after games while knowing the Heat had the talent to win regardless. His entire presence just reeked of a dude in the right place at the right time purposely going out of his way to insert himself into the spotlight. The kind of guy Lebron would like but Marc Gasol wouldn’t.

Admittedly I don’t know much about Fizdale outside of my own presumptions. Don’t want to either. Sometimes I envision things in my head that aren’t true. Maybe it was unfair to him for me to judge him in that way, but fuck that. I’m entitled to my opinion and I’m sticking with it. More often than not, while my narratives aren’t always completely accurate, my instincts usually read people well. He’s a Lebron Guy and if there is one concrete rule to life I abide by based solely on presumption it is that being a Lebron Guy is a character flaw and means you can never be fully trusted.

Needless to say, it was ironic for me to see the “grit-and-grind” Memphis Grizzlies of all teams hire Fizdale to be their head coach after the conclusion of the 2016 season. Fizdale coached them to their routine 40 something wins, serve as playoff feeders to the Spurs or Warriors, blah blah blah, type season. This season, the Grizzlies have been struggling and dealing with injury issues to their catalyst Mike Conley, who at this point is so overrated for being so underrated that I feel like he is actually viewed quite accurately by most fans (if that makes sense, I think it does), on their way to a 7-11 start.

They actually started the season 5-1 before November hit and injuries amounted along with other issues, and then dropped 10 of their next 12 games including 7 straight leading into a matchup with Brooklyn on 11/26.

They were blown out by the dismal Nets and Marc Gasol was benched by Fizdale for the entire 4th quarter, which had Gasol publicly fuming after the game. Shortly after the game, the Grizzlies fired Fizdale. The team was falling apart, and the front office pointed out in a press conference, that this didn’t just have to do with this season, as the Grizzlies were 14-26 over their last 40 games and struggling significantly since last season’s all-star break.

Then Bleacher Report’s Ken Berger wrote one of those “inside scoop” articles detailing the story behind the firing that wasn’t told in the press conference. A lot of it isn’t important for where I’m going, but it did include the money quote that made waves on social media. "Gasol had been chafing for a long time… He had two pretty good coaches in Dave and Lionel, and he felt this guy was a little bit of a [phony]."

A phony! That was the exact word I was looking for when describing Fizdale before. A phony ass Lebron Guy posing as a Basketball Guy. This quote instantly made Gasol a newly mounted member of the exclusive (editor’s note: EXCLUSIVE) FOP fraternity of gentlemen and scholars, as posted at the time on our social media @the_leknicks. In a twisted sense of fate and irony, the embodiment of the “grit-and-grind” Grizzlies was now clashing publicly with the South Beach flash-in-a-pan “phony” Fizdale.

So a head coach we didn’t like was having public and private conflict with the max contract face of the franchise and the team was struggling, so he gets fired. Tale as old as time, right? End of story…

Not quite! OF COURSE, Lebron had to weigh his feelings on the matter on social media, to back his boy and make everything about himself, as he has a slight tendency to do. He sent out an all-time ridiculous tweet by my standards, “I need some answers. Feels like my man was a fall guy.”

So now, apparently it’s not enough for GM Lebron to handcuff his own organizations into allowing him to micromanage every single one of their moves. Now apparently OTHER franchises have to report to GM Lebron as well. The Grizzlies’ front office should have instinctively known to contact GM Lebron for his thoughts and insight on the move before it was made. How dare they!

As we have gone over in great detail, GM Lebron is well known for demanding moves to be made by the front office’s that employ him without having any of the personal accountability of actually being a part of the front office. This puts his front office in the tricky no-win situation of risking him (once again) leaving them in his dust if they refuse to give in to his demands, or giving in and risking Lebron leaving them in his dust anyway if he (once again) fails to be a component GM.

This is quite ironic actually, because playing that role of de-facto GM without having the personal accountability of a GM, literally sets up every single GM he has had minus Pat Riley and every single coach he hasn’t personally hand-picked since the original (I wont say OG because nothing about it was gangster) “The Decision” to be his personal fall guys in the event that things don’t play out the way he wants. Because you know Lebron isn’t going to hold himself accountable.

David Blatt? MAJOR fall guy. David Griffin? Saw the writing on the wall and dipped out before he ruined his entire reputation around the League by making even more shitty moves at the behest of GM Lebron and becoming a fall guy himself. Even Kyrie left his ass because he was tired of playing fall guy to Lebron on the court while not getting the amount of credit due when they won.

I mean Lebron is ALL about fall guys. If irony were made of strawberries, we’d all be drinking a lot of smoothies right now. GM Lebron trails only Hypocrisy Lebron as the most ridiculous and delusional of all versions of Lebron.

But moving past the irony of it all, even if Fizdale was a “fall guy” (and I don’t think he really was in this instance, personally), NBA coaches are fired as fall guys ALL THE TIME. It is practically part of the job description. At the very least a major occupational hazard.

NBA coaches are always the first piece to fall whether that is due to their own personal incompetence holding back a team from realizing their full potential (not quite as common but still happens quite often, two examples with the 90s Knicks immediately come to mind when Stu Jackson was fired from the Knicks prior to Pat the Rat who completely turned the team around and also when Jeff Van Gundy took over from the fired Don Nelson), but more often, coaches are fired as the first piece to fall before a dysfunctional front office is exposed and let go of themselves.

Fuck, look at the Knicks, I personally think Jeff Hornacek is a good coach, but in the beginning of the season and even before the season I was clamoring for him to get fired on the podcast. Not because I felt that any of the Knicks ineptitude was personally his fault, but because, as a Phil Jackson hire, he has to fall before the dysfunctional cockroach Steve Mills can be truly exposed, and I felt this was better to happen sooner rather than later.

I even used the exact term “fall guy” to describe the predicament. But I don’t want The Roach ruining this franchise for longer of Porzingis’ formative years than he has to, and make no mistake, Hornacek will fall before The Roach does. He is “the last guy’s hire.” If things fall apart, he will get canned so The Roach and Perry can save face and hire “their guy.” That’s just how this shit works.

It’s the NBA hierarchy. A part of me still knows this to be true, despite the fact that I have publicly credited Hornacek for his coaching many times this season and think he has played a tremendous part in the Knicks surprising, if not overrated, decent start to the NBA season.

This shit just happens in the NBA. Everywhere. I mean, the Nets last 8 coaches starting with Lawerence Frank (a great coach in my opinion) all the way up to Kenny Atkinson, save for Jason Kidd, who is simply a mad genius who saw the writing on the wall between the Nets descent and the Bucks ascent despite heavy criticism at the time (not from me, I thought it was a genius move from the start), were all fall guys to mismanagement and organizational dysfunction well outside of their control. Between tearing down a good team in Jersey to move a shitty team to Brooklyn (something Jason Kidd also called them out for at the time as a player) and then Billy “The” King (FOP) and Prokhorov’s failed attempt at an arms race with the Knicks.

I can go on and on with other examples. Honestly, I had a couple more but cut it out for the sake of length. It’s the nature of the biz. Coaches in the NBA and other professional sports are basically hired to be fall guys. Happens ALL THE TIME. When things go wrong, the front office isn’t going to fire themselves (editor’s note: coaches are WAY more expendable than players for a fanbase), and even if the owner does step in and fire the front office, the coach is still usually fucked.

It’s an occupational hazard and they are well aware of that going into it. So even if it did happen with Fizdale (again I don’t think so relative to other examples), it’s not like it’s outside the norm of NBA realm. Nobody does it worse than Lebron, and it is equally if not more ridiculous for GM Lebron to demand “answers” from another NBA franchise.

So that’s the backstory behind Memphis Grizzlies and Marc Gasol - FOPs. Fuck Lebron.