When Phil Jackson rejoined the Knicks as their president in 2014, he brought considerable bona fides with him: his record 11 championships as the coach of the Chicago Bulls and the Los Angeles Lakers. At his introductory news conference he pledged to “create a team that loves each other and plays for each other.”

Jackson had other things going for him, too. He was already enshrined in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, and he had long been an iconic figure for New York fans, who remembered his contributions as a player in the team’s glory days in the early 1970s. By recruiting Jackson, the Knicks were dipping into their past in hopes of building their future.

And who better than Jackson to end the franchise’s ragged run of underachievement and dysfunction? The fact that Jackson, over the decades, had cultivated a Zen master image only made his return more intriguing.

But after three years of mismanagement and miscalculations, and after many cryptic tweets and mangled relationships, the Jackson era in New York came to a sputtering, unceremonious end on Wednesday when the Knicks announced that he was out as team president.