The team improved from 38 wins his first year to 52 and an Atlantic Division title in his second. They swept the eventual NBA champion Pistons during the regular season in ’88-89, but couldn’t get past the Bulls and Michael Jordan in the second round, losing in six games. Those Knicks shot tons of 3-pointers — they were nicknamed “The Bomb Squad” — and played a fun brand of up-tempo basketball. “It was electric,” Pitino said. “The Garden was awesome, and we swept the Sixers [in the first round of the 1989 playoffs] and Mark [Jackson] and Patrick [Ewing] took the broom and made all the back pages of the papers. The guys got along great, we had great chemistry.” -via New York Post / August 3, 2023

He doesn’t regret leaving — Pitino won a title at Kentucky and reached the Final Four three times in eight seasons — but he does wonder what might have been had he stayed. As he reminisced about those two years, he couldn’t help but smile. “The Bad Boys won the championship; we were 4-0 with them,” Pitino said. “If Jordan didn’t take over Game 6, I thought we could’ve won the championship. But nobody knows that answer [of how long I would’ve been with the Knicks]. … I loved coaching them.” -via New York Post / August 3, 2023

“The message was that, everywhere, wherever you go on the planet, people are watching you. This is the biggest sports story on the planet. It was because of Michael Jordan’s transcendental, amazing star power. It was because of the other characters: Scottie [Pippen’s] beautiful way of playing the game, Dennis [Rodman’s] maniacal way of playing the game, Phil’s spooky whatever-you-wanna-call it aura. Everywhere on the planet, people were interested in what we were doing, and we felt that responsibility. “That was more powerful to me than crowds in front of a hotel, or a crowd in the gym. It was that sense that everyone was watching, and everyone was digging the fact that we were doing it in an egalitarian way, and we were sharing the ball. And, while we still might’ve run 23 down the stretch to close out games, we were playing a brand of basketball people loved to watch, and having a ball doing it.” -via ESPN / August 2, 2023