Knicks’ Mark Jackson Is Learning to Find the Good in the Bad

Criticism is to be taken as a compliment, flattery of another kind for Mark Jackson. Questions that touch a nerve are to be deflected and his responses are to be played back as if by rote.

“We won 52 games,” he said. “I’m the point guard. I’m a better player.” The words came from a stiffened posture, the fibers taut in Jackson’s muscular neck.

The evidence is that he is better; the standard of measurement is different, too. Sometimes the evidence is in the heat of his face when he reads the papers, which he says he doesn’t do. “I’m a sensitive guy,” he said. It is his mindset as well as the set of his jaw.

This is playoff time. The terrible grind of the season has to be shrugged away. “It peps me up,” he said. “This is the time the great ones step forward. It’s what I have to do if I want to be on that level.”

This time the playoffs are for real, the show coming to sophisticated Broadway after a run in the suburbs. A year ago Mark Jackson was pure gold, there could be no criticism. Much less had been expected of him, and he proved to be a revelation.

He was something New York hadn’t seen in a generation of Knickerbockers. He could score, he could protect the ball and he could give the others the ball when they couldn’t help but score.

The Knickerbockers were carrying a banner in the playoffs, whether or not they had a serious chance to win. They were a sip of chilled champagne for fans who had been wandering in the desert. The critical eye winked. They would have crowned him mayor right then.

The transition for Jackson has not been without pain, only some of it from the arthroscopic surgery on his knee. “It can be very, very difficult handling success as well as adversity,” said Coach Rick Pitino, speaking of the whole team’s season of spectacular success and some distress.

When he completed an electric performance near the end of a sometimes perplexing season, Jackson announced, “I’m back.”

The statement covered a lot of things, most of them not physical. He is an emotional player who has been through his maiden voyage through the minefield of contract negotiations and through the trauma of finding that some of his humor was resented.

Early in the year, General Manager Al Bianchi felt the need to advise Jackson that he didn’t have to score at the expense of his passing to make a point.

For the season he averaged three more points a game than in his rookie season but two fewer assists. Sometimes he showed a tendency to serve tutti frutti when vanilla was called for. The newspapers told him that.

In the last game of the season the coach told him no “fancy stuff” until the last minute. “Then he did something I hadn’t seen in a long time and he turned to me and pointed that the clock was under one minute,” Pitino said. “He knows when he’s being too fancy.”

There was also the time when the coach told him it was time for him to come out of his period of “quiet and reserve” and be himself again. That means he should be wagging his finger, pounding the press table and doing his helicopter spin after big baskets.

Jackson feels his role is to be “psychiatrist on the court.” Being a sensitive guy means being perceptive of others. “I see who’s hot and who’s not,” he said. “If I see a guy down because his shots are not going in, I might pat him or say something and try to get him the ball for an easy shot to get him going.”

But there was the time during the doldrums, the spell of 11 losses in 19 games after the home-court winning streak was broken, when players felt the fatigue of the season. Jackson’s needle got under the skin of some, and their response hurt him. The press got wind of it.

Jackson withdrew. “Negative things drained me,” he said. “Not so much about me, but about the team. I don’t think things were made up, but they were blown out of proportion.”

Jackson recalled a bit of advice from Lou Carnesecca on ignoring the newspaper critics. “He said they wrap dead fish in it tomorrow,” Jackson said.

“I use it as motivation,” he said. He sat out 10 games for the operation on his knee and then came back on emotion. And then slipped back to the effects of three weeks off.

“Before he got hurt, he was at a peak,” Pitino said. “Now he’s on fire.”

Pitino is a master at the psychological ploy. He wants Jackson’s emotion to lift the team. Magic Johnson is a great player, but the gift of emotion he gives his teammates is greater. Jackson’s role is emotion polished by having been to the playoffs once before.

“You know you have to play at a level of intensity every time down the court on offense and defense,” he said. “You want to be sure you get a shot every time down the court. You know if it’s a close game in the last minutes, the earlier minutes of the game are what got you there.”

He’s a sensitive guy. He has filed the criticism. “I take the criticism as a compliment; they want more from me,” he said. “If I want to be with the great ones, I have to expect more of myself.”

It’s the lesson of a year.