‘It was crazy’: How a famous consulting firm contributed to the chaos of the 2013-14 Knicks

In September 2013, Knicks players and coaches started to notice people sitting around — usually on computers — during practices and, later, before games. These were people who were not part of the organization. Basketball players are highly attuned to their surroundings, especially in their workspace, and the presence of interlopers doesn’t go unnoticed. These people appeared without explanation.

That spring, the Knicks had reached the second round of the playoffs. They had just won 54 regular season games and capped off what proved to be the high point of the Carmelo Anthony era. For a full season, all was finally well at Madison Square Garden.

It didn’t last long, and the Knicks haven’t been back to the playoffs since.

The Knicks fired Glen Grunwald, the general manager of that team, in September 2013 and hired Steve Mills — a move that still confounds those around at the time. Phil Jackson was installed as the new team president in March 2014 and head coach Mike Woodson was gone a month later.

James Dolan had hired McKinsey & Company in the summer of 2013 in hopes of reorganizing how the Knicks and Rangers operated. He told the New York Post that the Grunwald firing was a result of the addition of McKinsey, whose employees worked around the team and, ostensibly, audited it. It was a unique circumstance. Professional sports teams are notoriously secretive — about proprietary information, about practice, sometimes even about starting lineups — and bringing an outside party into the inner sanctum raises eyebrows. It was no different around the Knicks.

“It was a little bit of an elephant in the room for the coaches and the players,” said Cole Aldrich, a center on the 2013-14 team. “It was kind of where did these people fit in? They’re around but they’re not part of us but they kind of are. Like, what? Because I know at the end of the day, Dolan was spending a lot of money to have these people consult for him and the franchise. It was curious because they were there, but what were they doing?”

The Knicks were not ruined by the presence of the people dispatched by the consulting company, but it did lend an awkward sheen to what amounted to be a long and disappointing season. While the Rangers made the Stanley Cup Finals in 2013-14 — the peak of a seven-year string of playoff appearances — the basketball team at Madison Square Garden did not enjoy success. The magic of the previous year had dissipated quickly.

Several key veterans did not return or retired. The Knicks got off to a 3-13 start, including a nine-game losing streak. J.R. Smith was suspended for the first games of the season. Tyson Chandler missed 27 games due to several injuries. Andrea Bargnani, the summer’s big acquisition, played just 42 games. After riding a 3-point shooting barrage to the Atlantic Division title in the 2012-13 season, they stopped taking as many in 2013-14, even though they shot just as well. Nonetheless, they missed the playoffs by only one game.

Still, when members of the team from that year look back on it, they wonder aloud about the nuisance that McKinsey & Company became. The addition of the consulting firm was never announced internally, coaches and players say. Instead, they noticed them sitting, computers in hand, at normal team functions. Members of the Knicks figured out who they were through guesswork and word of mouth.

“All that stuff was bad,” said one former Knicks staffer who was part of the 2013-14 team. “Now you bring in the McKinsey group. They’re traveling with us. Who are these guys? We never heard of anything like this in our life. They’re questioning everything.”

No one seemed to quite know what McKinsey was brought in to do. A spokesperson for McKinsey & Company declined comment. The Knicks declined to detail the work the firm did for the franchise.

“Both the Knicks and the Rangers have worked with McKinsey, and other consultants, in the past,” a spokesperson for the team said. “We are happy with the work they conducted and will always look for ways to improve our teams.”

An initial concern was more layoffs. The staffer worried that it meant firings were in the offing, an apprehension during a season that was bookended by the dismissal of the general manager and then the head coach and his staff.

“Everybody was on pins and needles,” the former staffer said. “We’re on pins and needles as it is.”

The concerns were based in reality. The Knicks have had a high turnover rate in the front office and among coaches, and Grunwald’s firing was still fresh.

“It was more about an initiative I have going on with both teams that I hired McKinsey & Company for,” Dolan told the Post then. “Because as I’ve gotten to look at both our organizations, it’s become apparent that we really need to reprocess both teams. We were using a lot of — not old, but ‘classic’ methods and now with technology, and what’s available to a team to help improve, I didn’t think we were taking advantage of those things.”

While McKinsey & Company are considered one of the top consulting firms in the world, they are much less well known inside the league. Their addition to the Knicks was met with confusion.

Aldrich, on his fourth team by the time he got to New York, was perplexed how McKinsey could help a basketball team. It was his first experience with them and he knew little about the company. Aldrich associated consulting companies with businesses, not sports. In fact, McKinsey had reportedly worked with the NBA for a decade by then to help it assess teams’ operations, and the company’s work helped the league determine how to pay out its luxury tax collection.

But this was not enough for professional basketball players and coaches. Instead, they saw people without the pedigree to evaluate them and no background in the sport.

“It was quite interesting,” said Dave Hopla, the team’s shooting coach that season. “I wouldn’t have a problem if a consulting firm came in and it was Hubie Brown and John Thompson or something, but not a consulting firm with some girl from MIT and some guy from Stanford that don’t even know the first thing about basketball.”

The discomfort lasted throughout the season. McKinsey workers were a constant sight at practice. They traveled for road games. Coaches, Hopla said, felt like they intruded on their time.

Aldrich bristled at what he saw as context-less exercises. He remembers that records were kept for practice drills, like spot shooting, throughout the season. The nominal results, he believed, did not tell the whole story.

“How can you go from, say you make 42-out-of-50 in November and then a few days in January, February, where you’re kind of just like, ‘I don’t really give a shit about this, I’m just going to do it and get it over with,’ and now you’re shooting 29,” he said. “They will look at that as you’re regressing as a shooter and you’re getting worse, but there’s so much more that plays into shooting the ball.”

Jeremy Tyler, a 22-year-old in his third NBA season that year, didn’t think of them as a distraction but questioned who the people constantly around the team were. He remembers the sports science and technology the Knicks used, but doesn’t know if McKinsey was behind it. Still new to the league, he thought it was normal.

Coaches seemed to feel most put-upon. Each one, multiple people said, had to meet with McKinsey & Company representatives at one point during the season. They wanted the coaches to write notes and turn them in. Their presence caused discomfort.

“The whole thing is fucked up,” the former staffer said, and later added: “It was bad. It was fucking crazy shit. It was unique.”

Hopla said every workout he put a player through was followed by rigid note-taking. He was asked to assess the workout based on a stoplight system and fill out a piece of paper by circling red, yellow or green to describe how the workout had gone and the player’s attitude, with room for a write-in comment. It was just an example of what he thought was an overload of paperwork.

Each day, he said, he had to write reports about what he intended to do with a player. An injury report from the team trainer later in the day could scuttle those plans.

At one point during the season, Hopla remembers taking a photo of his hotel room on the road because he couldn’t see the floor underneath the stoplight sheets and the daily reports. He needed two rooms, he joked — one for him and one for the reports.

“It was crazy,” he said. “If we would’ve took all the time writing reports when we could’ve worked the guys out — we missed the playoffs by like one game that year. It had nothing to do with basketball. It was filling out form after form. I wrote a book and I never wrote as much as I did with the New York Knicks.”

Hopla says that for a seven- to 10-day stretch, coaches were told not to watch film with players. NBA players, Hopla believes, are visual learners, so that loss hurt. Instead, there was busywork, like tests for players about their offense and the calls they made. Staff-wide meetings, pulling in other parts of the organization, became a constant. Pablo Prigioni became a saving grace because his desire to get up shots after practice would occasionally preclude Hopla from attending the meetings.

The consultants’ presence eventually started to wear on the Knicks. Midway through the season, Hopla took the reports he was supposed to leave on a desk for a McKinsey employee to pick up and put them in the men’s bathroom. Fed up with the tasks, he felt that’s all they were good for.

He remembers one scene before a game when a McKinsey consultant was sitting courtside, typing, when a basketball ricocheted off the rim and hit his computer. The consultant asked for a heads up.

The basketball court’s no place for a computer, Hopla remembers Amar’e Stoudemire saying.

“There would be a person out on the sideline, whether it’s a game or practice or walking through something, always on the computer, off to the side,” Aldrich said. “It doesn’t make me feel comfortable but in the sense that, ‘Oh, these people are always watching me.’ We’re used to people watching, but on the day-to-day there’s very few people around. There’s players, coaches, trainers and a handful of other people that you’re used to seeing every day. It always was curious to me how you have somebody who was very, very smart, who was very good at what they were doing but as a player’s standpoint never played sports. I guess I hate to stereotype that but looking at the individuals that were on the sidelines, it wasn’t a 6-5 guy who, oh he played football, he played basketball.”

It’s too easy to definitively say that McKinsey contributed to the 37-win season and a regression from the year before. Hopla believes it did, saying its entry to the organization was part of a perfect storm of events that went wrong for the Knicks that season. The former Knicks staffer says McKinsey didn’t affect the Knicks in trying to win games; the company only impacted the working atmosphere.

What’s certain is that the people who were a part of the Knicks that year remember an awkward season. To this day, the discussion of McKinsey can elicit strong feelings among some. Maybe, the Knicks were at the forefront of organizational restructuring. To those that were there, it just felt like an experiment.

“We were,” Hopla said, “like a guinea pig.”

(Photo: Jim McIsaac / Getty Images)