David Murphy: Jay Wright as coach of the 'Nova Knicks? Makes sense for everyone except Wright.

David Murphy, The Philadelphia Inquirer on Jun 5, 2025

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PHILADELPHIA — Jay Wright to the New York Knicks makes sense from every perspective except one.

Jay Wright’s.

He shouldn’t want this job. The city of Philadelphia shouldn’t want it for him. The list of reasons is as long as the one in the other direction. In fact, they are one and the same.

The money? Nope. There is as much money in television as there is in coaching, these days.

The glory? Be sure to ask Tom Thibodeau about that.

The Villanova connection? That’s a bug, not a feature. Life isn’t a Disney movie. It’s a Tom Wolfe novel.

I’ll expand on each of these in a second. First, let me defend my premise. Whether or not Wright ever emerges as a legitimate candidate to replace Thibodeau as Knicks head coach, people are going to assume it a fait accompli right up until the moment Leon Rose and James Dolan announce they’ve hired somebody else. They’ve assumed it ever since Jalen Brunson joined Josh Hart and Donte DiVincenzo in New York a couple of years ago to form ’Nova Knicks 1.0. Now that Mikal Bridges has replaced DiVincenzo, you have to twist yourself into a mental pretzel to think that Dolan and Rose wouldn’t be interested in hiring the coach who led that group to a pair of national titles.

Heck, Wright himself knows this. It’s one of the reasons he has largely refrained from commenting publicly on the NBA exploits of his former charges at Villanova. Wright has always possessed a rare combination of media savvy and honor. He understands that you can’t prevent perceptions from burning, but you can prevent them from the oxygen they need to erupt into an inferno. The best thing he could do for Thibodeau was hold his breath.

Now Thibodeau is gone, fired by the Knicks one year after they gave him a contract extension and two weeks after he led them to their first conference finals since flat tops were a thing.

“Our organization is singularly focused on winning a championship for our fans,” Rose, the Knicks’ president, said in a statement. “This pursuit led us to the difficult decision to inform Tom Thibodeau that we’ve decided to move in another direction.”

That’s a lot of words to use when two of them would do.

We’re desperate.

And, hey, they should be. The Knicks traded five first-round draft picks for Bridges and then traded away a couple of key players in DiVincenzo and Julius Randle and then lost to a Pacers team that was pretty much the exact same team that beat them in the playoffs last year. When all three of your stars play about as well as anybody could have hoped and you still end up losing, there isn’t much you can do besides run it back or fire the coach.

From that perspective, Wright makes perfect sense. Nobody knows Brunson and Bridges better. Nobody has had more of a chance to sit back and study them from afar and think about how they might combine for that extra 5 or 10% that the Knicks need to become legitimate title contenders. Worth a shot, right?

Right. Which is why it makes no sense for Wright. His was a legitimate retirement. Talk to anybody who has spoken with him since he walked away from Villanova three years ago. All of the reasons he gave back then still stand.

Talk to Wright himself.

“I get it,” Wright told The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Jeff Neiburg in February. “I do know, in my mind, I do not think I’ll coach again. I’m so sure about it.”

A lot can change in a year, so consider the more recent comments from Seth Davis, who was on set with Wright throughout this year’s NCAA tournament coverage on CBS.

“I have been working with Jay Wright on TV for three years,” Davis wrote on X, formerly Twitter, after Thibodeau’s firing on Tuesday. “Based on every conversation we have had I would say there is a greater chance that I will be the next Knicks coach than him. The difference is if they call me I will say yes.”

Look, there’s a price that makes just about anything worth it. But that price would need to be awfully high to compensate for the work-life balance and hourly rate Wright enjoys as one of the TV faces of college basketball. New York is a pressure cooker even when a head coach isn’t reuniting with three players whom he coached to college glory, where success and failure will be measured solely by whether he can take a team to the NBA Finals from a conference that had two 60-win teams this season. Think about the egos and insecurities that exist in an NBA locker room. Think about the difficult decisions a front office must make when crafting its roster each summer. Then think about the dynamic it would create to hire a coach who has as deep of a relationship as Wright has with Brunson, Hart and Bridges.

In the words of the late, great Wolfe: “You can’t go back home ... to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting, but which are changing all the time — back to the escapes of Time and Memory.”

Wright wouldn’t be going home again by coaching the Knicks. He’d be wise not to try.