Greenburgh, N.Y. – On the ninth day, he got his job back.
In another strange twist to the Stephon Marbury-Isiah Thomas rift, Thomas gave Marbury his starting point guard job back for tonight’s game against Golden State at the Garden.
“I just think he needed a reminder,” Thomas said after shootaround at the MSG Training Center. “I don’t think that it’s something that he doesn’t know how to do. He definitely knows how to play the position. He has great skill, he has great talent and we needed to remind him of what we need and expect from that position for us to be successful.”
The move isn’t necessarily permanent, but Thomas clearly is hitching himself even more firmly to Marbury.
“I think the things that he’ll deliver for us from a team aspect is exactly what we need,” Thomas said. “And if he’s not delivering those things again, then the bench awaits him. But it’s not just him. It’s every member of our team who doesn’t do it .”
Marbury, informed a week ago Monday on the team charter to Phoenix that he was losing his starting job, fled the team and returned to New York. He returned to the team for the last three games of the Knicks’ 0-4 West Coast trip, coming off the bench at shooting guard in each game.
Marbury said all the right things, except that he admitted “nothing good” came out of his benching.
“We were 2-3 when everything started, and we haven’t won a game since,” Marbury.
When asked about Marbury’s assertion that nothing positive came out of the tumultuous week sparked by his benching, Thomas asked the team’s P.R. representative if Marbury had said that. “Yes,” the P.R. man answered.
“OK, I have to make sure,” Thomas said. “I don’t know. I think as a player, you never want to be benched and you always want to play.”
The cynic would propose that Marbury’s reinsertion into the lineup was contrived to take the focus off a report in the New York Daily News that Thomas threw the team off the practice court Monday due to lack of focus and hustle. Thomas denied the report, as did Marbury a third person who was in attendance.
“No, I didn’t throw the players off the court,” Thomas said.
That’s an old trick of Thomas’ college coach, Bob Knight, who used to kick players out of practice all the time and also would bolt practice with the assistant coaches and leave the players to figure it out on their own. Thomas said he didn’t do that, either, and the person who witnessed the two-hour practice said the players were on the court the entire time.
Thomas did say he kicked the entire team off the practice floor “a couple of times” last season, but that now is not the right time for that.
“We haven’t thrown ‘em out this year yet, but maybe down the road,” Thomas said.
Marbury also addressed his absence from media interviews Monday after practice. It turns out he bolted the facility quickly after practice because his aunt – the grandmother of cousin Sebastian Telfair – passed away. Her funeral is scheduled for Wednesday, and there’s a chance Marbury will miss the trip to Detroit.
No other lineup changes. Should be an interesting night, to say the least.