The New York Knicks intend to talk to Jay Wright about possibly leaving Villanova to fill their coaching vacancy, according to a Thursday morning report from the New York Daily News.
It's a conversation worth having, I guess. Can't hurt. But it should be noted that though Wright has acknowledged he does find the NBA intriguing, he's also made it clear, as recently as this week, that he has no intention of leaving Villanova while things are going so well. So, on the surface, this seems like an unlikely partnership.
"The NBA does intrigue me," Wright told The Athletic earlier this week. "That challenge is appealing. But it's not worth giving up working with these guys. The whole thing is -- to take a new challenge you have to give up what you have. I don't want to give up what I have. Would I like to coach in the NBA? Yes. But I have to give this up in order to do that -- and I don't see that happening."
Neither do I.
To be clear, I can definitely see Wright coaching in the NBA someday. And I suppose I could even see him coaching the Knicks if a too-good-to-pass-up contract was placed in front of him. In other words, never say never. But the truth is that no college coach currently has things rolling as well as Wright currently has things rolling. And it would just make little sense, from a quality-of-life perspective, for him to walk away from a preseason top-three team -- after winning two national titles in a three-year span -- to join a notoriously dysfunctional professional franchise that just fired Jeff Hornacek two seasons into a rebuild headed nowhere.
That's what I think, at least.
So, again, never say never. But the final words of any conversation between Villanova's coach and Knicks' officials are likely to be some form of Wright saying, "Thanks ... but no thanks."
