Way back in 1999, Bill Fitch, who was Jackson’s college coach at North Dakota, told him: “There’s not going to be any more midrange shots. It’s going to be a 3-point shot or right around the basket — that’s the way the game is evolving.”

Image Phil Jackson watching the Knicks play the Wizards in December at Madison Square Garden. Credit... Brad Penner/USA Today Sports, via Reuters

Having won six titles with the triangle in Chicago, Jackson did not want to believe that. He could not understand why teams would not emulate the Bulls after what they had done.

“He pretty much predicted the state of the game,” Jackson said of Fitch. And the overall N.B.A. game, in Jackson’s opinion and much to his dismay, did become much too predictable, much less pure.

On the afternoon that a blizzard was supposed to blow into New York, Jackson chose the Redeye Grill, on Seventh Avenue at 56th Street, near where he lives and about 25 blocks north of the Garden. The restaurant was almost empty, devoid of disgruntled Knicks fans — though Jackson said most people he had encountered on Manhattan streets had been respectful and supportive, unlike the more venomous attacks on social media.

His fame and his 6-foot-8 frame make it difficult to hide — as past Knicks executives have done in the face of failure. Winter notwithstanding, he always loved Manhattan, “the energy it brings.” So Jackson walks the streets, mingles with the masses.

To the loyal and long-suffering Knicks fan base, he would express a belief that the team, in requiring what he called “a three- to five-year” reconstruction, would eventually rise as he uses the ample salary cap space he will have by next summer and the increased resources he will have by 2016-17, when the N.B.A.’s new television contracts kick in.

A sound argument can be made that if the Knicks were going to be bad, they might as well have been very bad in a rare year in which they have their first-round draft pick. With a prize rookie, a couple of well-chosen free-agent signings and a healthy Carmelo Anthony, this could all look very different by next season.