Dear Mr. Jackson:

To start, I suppose it’s best to note that we understand why you’re making this move. Even at the team’s lowest of lows, accepting a position to run the front office of the New York Knicks is rife with potential. Both personal and professional potential, to say nothing of the chance to do great things for the long-suffering Knicks fan base that has, in recent decades, been surpassed in number by the fan base you helped resuscitate in Los Angeles nearly 15 years ago.

At age 68, there are no more books to write. You already topped off the clincher last year with your final coaching memoir, and between the thousands of pages you’ve already written and the innumerable interviews that came along with your endless book promotions through the years, just about every anecdote has been exhausted. We know what strain of hallucinogen you took on the beach in Malibu after the Knicks lost to the Lakers in the 1972 NBA Finals, we were treated in great detail to your first meeting with Dennis Rodman, potential Chicago Bull, and we know all about the ins and outs of having to babysit Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant for lo those many years. Even if they were for only five in total.

Coaching at any age is a burden, sideline stalkers age in President Years despite the five-star accommodations, and there’s no point in returning to the Knicks as coach of a terrible team with no front-office security – as your mentor Red Holzman did from 1978-82 after stepping away for a year. Your personal coaching tree may not be as great nor as significant as Larry Brown’s or Gregg Popovich’s, but there certainly are enough determined would-be coaches out there you would be willing to hire to help propagate your sacred hoop philosophy: sharing the ball on offense, talking to each other on defense.

What’s left, then, is a front office position. Not as a full stroke general manager, of course, because sussing out potential second-round picks and glomming onto the NBA’s lengthy collective bargaining agreement should be someone else’s game. Not necessarily a young man’s game, but certainly for someone younger than you. No, the point, at your age and with your accomplishments in hand, is to be a big-picture guy. Let someone else crunch the numbers, let some other coach walk bleary-eyed into a hotel conference room the morning after a game to discuss that night’s opponent.

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Then there is the Pat Riley conundrum.

We get it. Riley was a national darling as a star in Kentucky during college, while you toiled away from the eyes of the nation at North Dakota. You and Riley battled during two different NBA Finals as players, and while he was gifted the luxury of Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in Los Angeles, you spent the better part of the 1980s driving your CBA or Puerto Rican league teams from game to game in a van. Econo-style.

Even when you finally returned to the NBA, it was as an assistant, someone to be laughed at down the sleeve by Stan Albeck (who refused to hire you) and Doug Collins (who had to be goaded into bringing you along).

Of course, you’re just as slick as Riley now, but in the 1980s the initial idea that in Los Angeles this Armani-wearing would-be Republican could be making bank as a motivational speaker at the same time that your (literal) Woodstock ideals were being lost on Eric Money of the Albany Patroons had to dig at you. And then, even after three championships and well on your way to three more in Chicago, it had to hurt to see Riley reconfigure the Miami Heat and turn them into championship contenders, even if your Bulls denied the team a title. And the success of this current Heat team, created just one month after your final Finals triumph as a coach, has to drive that stake in deeper.

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