A coaching resignation in November or early-December generally means one of two things: the guy jumped before he was about to be pushed due to incessant and unexpected losing or the guy simply came to the realization that it wasn't going to work anymore and who needed all the aggravation?

	Sprewell said earlier what Van Gundy knew about the Knicks' deficiencies.

We have to assume it was the latter with former Knicks coach Jeff Van Gundy, who Friday night pulled a shocker by giving up the only NBA head coaching job he ever had. He had time and money coming to him from the suits at Cablevision -- and it still did not matter.

This wasn't Danny Ainge surrendering control in Phoenix because he had lost his family. This wasn't Paul Westphal getting the ax in Seattle because he had lost his team. This wasn't Rick Pitino leaving $22 million on the table, infuriated with the lack of commitment from his players. This more looks like a case of a coach who simply had had enough and recognized that what he had wasn't going to be enough.

Sure, there also was the obligatory coach-front office friction that seems to accompany these things. Van Gundy had already displayed stunning survival techniques by living through a previous corporate coup d'etat when Ernie Grunfeld was fired. But there's also an inherent risk in bringing in a general manager with an existing coach, which is exactly what happened when the Knicks hired Scott Layden. Van Gundy was already there and entrenched.

When the Portland Trail Blazers wanted to talk to Van Gundy last summer about their opening, Layden wouldn't allow it. While Van Gundy might have balked at the job (surely not at the money, however) it still had to rankle him somewhat that he never got the chance to talk. With Portland struggling now, maybe that chance will come again at some point.

	Eisley

	Weatherspoon

The Knicks also made no off-season moves to address their glaring height and athletic concerns. Their three significant additions -- Clarence Weatherspoon, Shandon Anderson and Howard Eisley -- all were duplicative players in that the Knicks already had sufficient depth at their positions. They were not bad players. They simply were in the wrong place.

Latrell Sprewell's moaning about the team's lack of size was widely believed to reflect the sentiments of Van Gundy without the coach having to say them. Then, when Marcus Camby went down, as he always seems to do, the Knicks had no one to replace him (we are discounting Travis Knight and Felton Spencer for what should be obvious reasons.) Toronto had exploited the team's lack of size in a rare, first-round exit from the playoffs last spring.

What makes Van Gundy's decision puzzling is the timing. New York had won two straight and five of six since Camby came back, including an impressive victory in Milwaukee last Tuesday. No one had to tell Van Gundy that the Eastern Conference is wide open right now; who would have thought a month into the season that the Nets, Pistons and Celtics would be the front-runners? But he obviously saw something which made it clear to him that it was pointless to go on, a decision that was made after a brutal Friday practice in which players repeatedly made the same gaffes to the point where Van Gundy threw them out of the gym.

Sometimes, that's all it takes. Sometimes, it's as simple as being overly frustrated to the point of exhaustion. Sometimes you sense that the players are hearing, but not listening. There are plenty of examples of athletes who magically start to improve when a different voice is giving the instructions. The Celtics are a prime example of that.

A lot of coaches rooted hard for Van Gundy to make it -- and he did make it. He was a career assistant, not some ex-player who could "relate" to today's athletes. He was 5-foot-9 and balding, hardly a commanding physical presence. But only Joe Lapchick and Red Holzman won more games as coaches of the Knicks. When the Knicks did lose to the Raptors in the first round, it marked the first time in Van Gundy's tenure that the team didn't at least get to the conference semifinals.

He proved he could do it and, if history is any judge, he probably will get a chance to prove it all over again. Van Gundy is what he is and he does it pretty well. There are coaches in the NBA and then there are COACHES. Van Gundy is the latter. He is renowned for his tunnel vision and, with this announcement, no one is going to envision him announcing that he's going to pursue a lifelong passion of landscape architecture or visiting the great art museums in Europe.

He was a 24/7 coach. Celebrity Row at Madison Square Garden was, with the exception of Spike Lee, just another row of fans to him. He once confided to a magazine writer that he not only didn't own compact discs, but that he also didn't even listen to popular music (although he did know that Sting had left The Police.)

He was never a real player, like his two predecessors, Pat Riley and Don Nelson. But he came from coaching stock and he worked at it and worked at it until he got one of the plum assignments in professional basketball. He once called it the job of a lifetime.

As he now knows, lifetimes in coaching can be cruelly and unfairly brief. Only he knows why he did it and we have to think that, just as he did when he was coaching, that he studied all the angles and possibilities and came up with what he thought was the best solution.

Peter May, who covers the NBA for the Boston Globe, is a regular contributor to ESPN.com.