Shams Charania: “Yeah, yeah, yeah—I’ll give you some examples. I’m not going to say that this was exactly what happened with Kidd, but among the five rejections, some of the scenarios I heard were: Teams would just hang up. Some would say no—and then hang up. In other situations, there was profanity involved. You know—some literal ‘F— no’ responses. In a few cases, it was the team owners calling directly and saying: ‘You’re not talking to our guy.’ So, listen—the Knicks probably expected some of these responses. Anytime you reach out to other teams for their head coaches, you’re going to be susceptible to some kind of reaction. They went through this whole exercise as an educational process, in their minds—to see which coaches they could potentially talk to.