The team has called a press conference for Tuesday, likely to announce the signing of former Chicago Bulls and Los Angeles Lakers coach Phil Jackson to an undisclosed front office position.

"Knicks have announced a Tuesday news conference to introduce Phil Jackson as new top basketball executive," Yahoo Sports' Adrian Wojnarowski tweeted. He then tweeted, "New York is calling it a 'press conference to make (a) major announcement,' at 11 a.m. inside Madison Square Garden."

Rumors of the offer and Jackson mulling the decision over have been headlines for weeks, with Wednesday reports announcing the deal as official.

Sources told ESPN that Jackson will oversee basketball operations, replacing current general manager Steve Mills in that role, though Mills is expected to remain on staff.

Jackson's living situation was the hold-up in him accepting the Knicks' offer, according to an earlier report from the New York Post. His fiancée, Los Angeles Lakers president Jeanie Buss, obviously lives in California. Jackson plans to live in New York during the season with periodic, cross-country commutes.

The former Bulls and Lakers coach typically had tense relationships with those running the front offices of his teams. He was initially friends with Bulls GM Jerry Krause, but that relationship soon soured to the point where Jackson and Krause stopped speaking. Similarly, Jackson and Lakers head honcho Jerry West had a frosty, if less confrontational, relationship. By the time Jackson left the Lakers in 2011, team president Jim Buss was eager to cut all ties to Jackson, including his assistant coaches.

Jackson was not heavily involved in the day-to-day business of running those teams, of working the ins-and-outs of the salary cap and the collective bargaining agreement, or of evaluating players in the draft. Those are all must-haves for a modern league executive.


WOODSON TO HOOSIERS?


Get ready for the ifs: If Phil Jackson takes a job in the New York Knicks front office and if he fires head coach Mike Woodson and if Indiana University men's basketball coach Tom Crean does not return to the school, then Woodson could come back to coach at his alma mater.

Whew.

Jackson has signed a deal, according to reports, for a front office job with the Knicks, who have been in utter disarray for most of the season. When the deal is finalized, it's well within the realm of possibility he cleans house. That would put Woodson out of a job.

Meanwhile, in Indiana, Crean could be out of a job at the end of the NCAA season. He led the Hoosiers to a Big Ten title and No. 1 NCAA tournament seed last season, but this year his 17-15 team was kicked out of the conference tournament in the first round.

Prominent Indiana boosters would rather see Crean leave and are pushing to buy him out to bring in Woodson as the coach, according to the New York Daily News . Woodson played for Bobby Knight at Indiana in the 1980s. He's never coached at the college level.

You might want to start a scorecard to check off all those "ifs" if you're waiting for this one to happen.


ODOM RETURNS TO U.S. WITH INJURY


Last year was a rough one for Lamar Odom. This year doesn't seem to be going well, either. 

The NBA veteran has only played two games with his new team in Spain and is already on his way back to the States with back issues, according to ESPN. Odom is expected to miss at least a month, which led Laboral Kutxa Baskonia to allow him to return to the U.S. for further evaluation and testing, per the report.

The former Sixth Man of the Year didn't have any NBA suitors for the 2013-14 season and instead signed a two-month deal with Baskonia in February. He's logged 23 minutes in the two starts and his short contract could mean he doesn't return to the team. The Spanish league has two months left in its season, so Odom could have his contract extended. He told ESPN in February he planned to finish the rest of the season in Europe before determining whether to make an NBA comeback.

Odom, 34, rose to stardom with the Los Angeles Lakers and was part of a nixed three-way trade in 2011, then went to the Dallas Mavericks, where more minor drama ensued. He spent a year with the Clippers and was close to returning to the team last fall.

But his personal life hit tabloids hard when rumors of infidelity and drug use ran rampant and wife Khloe Kardashian finally filed for divorce in December. The drama continues to play out on her family's reality show "Keeping Up with the Kardashians."

The finale, which Lamar Odom will reportedly not watch, airs Sunday.


NASH: 'I WANT THE MONEY'


Lakers guard Steve Nash is no dummy. At age 40, and having played only 10 games this season mostly because of a back injury, Nash is clearly winding toward the end of his career. But he is not retiring, he said in a Grantland video, because, “I want the money.”

Indeed, Nash is right. In July 2012, Nash was a free agent, hotly pursued by the Raptors and Knicks before the Lakers swooped in with a sign-and-trade offer that pleased both Nash and his old team, the Suns. Nash was awarded a three-year, $27 million contract.

But once leaving Phoenix, Nash has been unable to stay healthy. He played only 50 games last year, before stumbling into this injury-riddled year. The Lakers announced Nash won’t play again this season, following up a week in which Kobe Bryant's return was ruled out, too.

In the video, several talk-radio voices make the point that Nash, who won back-to-back MVPs in 2005 and ’06, is hurting his legacy by limping through the end of his career, and that there would be dignity in walking away now. But Nash, acknowledging that point of view, also says that the Lakers, who still owe him $9.7 million, knew he was on the downside of his career when he was signed.

It’s a fair point by Nash — injury risks run both ways and guaranteed contracts are part of the league’s collective-bargaining agreement. Players who are hurt in the final year of a contract obviously damage their value, and teams have no compunction about paying them less than they would have made had they not been injured.

Similarly, players who get hurt in the middle of a contract are not obligated — by rule or by tradition — to surrender the rest of their deal by retiring.

The Lakers do have a relatively new option available in the current collective-bargaining agreement — the “stretch provision.” That allows the Lakers to waive Nash after July 1, and spread the payment of his final year over three seasons, or $3.23 million per year. Nash would then be free to sign with another team.

Contributors: Cassandra Negley, Sean Deveney