Who is Taylor Jenkins?

Let's learn a bit more about the guy who may be the leading candidate for the Knicks' head coaching job.

Good morning! Let’s catch up on this weekend’s news before we dive into one of the leading candidates for New York’s head coaching job…

• New York will have formal interviews with Taylor Jenkins and Mike Brown early this week. They will also reportedly look into some current NBA assistants in their search.

• The Knicks would have been on Kevin Durant’s list of preferred teams, except they have no interest in trading for him, per Marc Stein.

• Don’t count out Jason Kidd to the Knicks just yet.

• Amidst reports that the Knicks weren’t willing to stop their pursuit of Chicago’s Billy Donovan despite the Bulls’ denial of their request to speak with him, he will reportedly receive a contract extension according to Marc Stein.

Who is Taylor Jenkins?

For a guy who is only 40 years old, Taylor Jenkins has been around the NBA for a while. His time in the league encompasses nearly half of his life, with his first dalliance coming as a 21-year-old summer intern for the San Antonio Spurs.

That’s not what makes him unique though. When Jenkins got that internship making final video edits of prospects before the 2006 draft, he wasn’t attending a basketball powerhouse and wasn’t playing college ball (unless you count his time on the intramural squad). Instead, Jenkins was just finishing up his junior year at the University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League school not exactly known for pumping out future NBA head coaches.

Not only did Jenkins go to Penn, but he attended the Wharton Business School, which consistently ranks as one of the best business programs in America. He could have very easily joined his classmates who were making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on Wall Street, but instead parlayed his summer experience into a one-year internship, which was followed by an assistant coaching stint under Quin Snyder with the Austin Toros of the G-League.

This untraditional path all started because Jenkins’ grandmother happened to know Spurs’ owner Peter Holt, but it was enough to set him on a course that may wind up under the bright lights of Madison Square Garden.

Right now, every Knicks fan is wondering whether he’s up for that challenge. Mike Brown, the other candidate who reportedly landed an interview for the job, is much more of a known quantity. Brown already had a 50-win season under his belt before Jenkins started that summer internship nearly two decades ago. He’s coached basketball royalty like LeBron James, Kobe Bryant and Steph Curry, has significant experience in some legit NBA cauldrons, and first started as an NBA assistant back in 1997, when Jenkins was just 13 years old. While we can’t be sure about whether Brown is the right coach for the job, there’s little question he’d be able to deal with the unique challenges of coaching a veteran laden team in this market with these expectations.

In that sense, for whatever stylistic differences might exist between Brown and Thibs, hiring the former Kings coach wouldn’t be a complete departure from what was here before. Jenkins, who has only been a head coach in the NBA’s smallest media market, could be seen as more of a risk.

But where there’s risk, there’s usually the potential for reward, and Jenkins certainly carries some of that. Like Brown, Jenkins is a product of the Gregg Popovich coaching tree that has produced multiple championship winning coaches. That tree includes Mike Budenholzer, who Jenkins is most directly associated with. After spending the 2012-13 season as the head coach of the Toros, Jenkins followed Bud to Atlanta, where he spent five years on the Hawks’ bench before moving to Milwaukee with Budenholzer in 2018. A year later, he was hired by the Grizzlies to guide a young roster that included second-year big man Jaren Jackson Jr and rookie point guard Ja Morant.

From that moment until the last year or so, Jenkins’ tenure in Memphis was an unequivocal success:

🏀 Year One: The Grizzlies entered the season with the lowest over-under win total in the West at 27.5 games. They surpassed that total in their last game before the All-Star break, when they sat 4.0 games up on ninth place Portland for the final Western conference playoff spot. Then, two games after the break, Jaren Jackson Jr got hurt, and Memphis went 4-6 in their final 10 games before the league shut down due to COVID. This was the start of what would become the singular theme of his tenure as head coach, with injuries to key players occurring as often as with any team in the league. Despite that stretch, the Grizz got invited to the Orlando bubble and advanced to the NBA’s inaugural play-in game, where they lost a tight one to Damian Lillard, Carmelo Anthony and the Portland Trail Blazers. Still, the arrow was pointing up.

🏀 Year Two: Despite the first season of the Morant era being better than anticipated, Memphis only had a 31.5 win over/under ahead of an abbreviated 72-game campaign. Again, they outpaced expectations, going 38-34 despite Jaren Jackson Jr only appearing in 11 games. The Grizz finished ninth in the West but still made the playoffs after upending the Spurs in the 9/10 game and overcoming 39 points from Steph Curry in the final play-in bout. They wound up losing in five to the top-seeded Jazz after stealing Game 1 in Utah, but it was another step in the right direction for a franchise on the upswing.

🏀 Year Three: Despite consecutive seasons surpassing expectations, the Grizzlies again got little respect going into October, with a 41.5 win over/under that pegged them ninth in the West. Again, a significant injury played a role in their season, with Ja Morant missing 25 games amidst an MVP campaign. Thanks to Tyus Jones and a rotation that went 12 deep, Memphis went 20-5 in games Morant missed and finished second in the West. They won a tough first round series against the Wolves before losing in six to the eventual champion Warriors. That Golden State series arguably turned with a one-point loss in Game 1, when Morant missed multiple layups in the final 20 seconds, and a three-point loss in Game 4, which Morant missed due to injury, along with Games 5 and 6.

🏀 Year Four: Another year, another serving of (slight) disrespect, although this time it was a more upbeat prediction of 49.5 wins, tied for fifth best in the West. The Grizz again finished second in the conference despite a combined 64 missed games from Ja, JJJ and Des Bane. A chunk of Morant’s absence was particularly notable as it came in the aftermath of multiple gun-related incidents. Shortly after the controversy and before an additional incident that would result in a 25-game suspension to begin the following season, Memphis lost to the seventh seeded Lakers in round one. All four of the Grizzlies’ top scorers struggled from the field in the series, including Morant, who missed Game 2 (which Memphis won) and shot 11-for-40 combined in the Game 4 & 6 losses.

🏀 Year Five: Perhaps the karma was written on the wall with no Ja for the first 25 games and a disastrous offseason trade for Marcus Smart to be his replacement. Whatever the reason, the 27-55 Grizzlies had the most injury-plagued season in NBA history, setting records for the most players used (29) and the most starting lineups (51) in a single season. Despite the overwhelming cumulative total of missed games, Jenkins had his remaining players going hard far more frequently than they had any right to, as Memphis finished the season a more-than-respectable 12th in defensive rating.

🏀 Year Six: It appeared at first that the ‘23-24 season would be a one-year blip. Through New Year’s Eve, Memphis was the only team in the NBA in the top five in both offensive and defensive rating. For nearly three months, from December 7 to February 28, the Grizzlies were no lower than third in the West despite two rookies starting a majority of their games. They were fourth in net rating at the All-Star break, with twice as many wins as losses, and in second place as late as February 27. A month later, with Memphis tied for fourth despite 30 missed games from Ja Morant, Jenkins was out of a job.

It begs the question of how the longest-tenured coach who hadn’t won a championship - someone who accomplished so much while overcoming so many hurdles with so much consistency - could be discarded so quickly?

There are no shortage of mile-markers to commemorate the decline: an 11-20 record against above-.500 teams this season, a precipitous post-All-Star drop on both sides of the ball, and several distressing losses, both of the close and blow-out variety.

But those were symptoms, not root causes. For the genesis of the issue, it feels like we need to go back to last summer, when Memphis was coming off that playoff loss to Los Angeles. In the offseason, the front office forced Taylor to replace five assistant coaches - Brad Jones, Blake Ahearn, Scoonie Penn, Vitaly Potapenko and Sonia Raman - all of whom had been with Jenkins since he got the job. In their place, six new assistants, including two prominent voices with somewhat competing visions, were hired. One was Noah LaRoche, a Spurs consultant who brought in his own player development personnel and a spaced out offense, and then other was Tuomas Iisalo, who came from Europe and was touted as a pick & roll savant. Jenkins didn’t know either coach before interviewing them for key roles on his staff. LaRoche was fired along with Jenkins, while Iisalo is the new head coach.

The story goes that Jenkins was tasked with melding two different offensive visions, and according to the ESPN report immediately after his ouster, he may never have stood a chance to make it work:

"Players aren't stupid," another source said. "They know where this is heading when you fire five assistants after the season." And when the job is getting players to buy into new offensive concepts, already uncomfortable for most NBA players, being taught different schemes by two assistant coaches immediately undercut Jenkins' authority.

Morant, according to the same report, wasn’t a huge fan of the new offense. Unsurprisingly, he reportedly began to tune out the coach, and whispers circulated that Jenkins had lost the locker room. Players talked openly about “taking ownership” on defense, but it never happened. We know what happened next.

How much of this was really Jenkins’ fault? If you go by the Grizzlies fan base, opinions were all over the map. On one hand, there was talk early in the season about whether he was the greatest coach in franchise history, followed by reaction to the firing that said it made no sense. On the other hand, there was criticism of his rotation decisions (specifically that he played his prominent players too few minutes, if you can believe that) and now articles clowning the Knicks for giving the man an interview.

Like any coach, Jenkins surely isn’t perfect, but it’s hard to look at the totality of his tenure and feel like he received a fair shot. Between Morant’s off-court issues, constant injuries across the roster, and the front office cutting his feet out from under him, we probably shouldn’t draw any conclusions from how his last season in Memphis went down.

Is he the right coach for the Knicks though? That’ll be left for Leon Rose to decide, but it’s entirely possible that Taylor Jenkins is a very good coach who simply got a raw deal.

Only one way to find out for sure.

🏀

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”