Mike D’Antoni, conceding that he’s not proud of “the work” he put in as Knicks coach, pinned a lot of his failures at the Garden on his deteriorated relationship with an uncompromising Carmelo Anthony. The current Rockets coach also acknowledged what Amar’e Stoudemire previously stated: there was resentment from players, including Anthony, for Jeremy Lin.
“It was there, it’s real,” D’Antoni said on a podcast with Adrian Wojnarowski of The Vertical. “The problem that we had was that for Jeremy to be really good, which he was, he had to play a certain way. It was hard for him to adapt.
“Amare, Melo, whatever, had to play a certain way too to be really, really good. So there was that inherent conflict of what’s better for the team? What isn’t? Can they co-exist? Can they not? And again, they could have co-existed if Melo went to (power forward), which he really didn’t want to and Amare came to back-up Tyson (Chandler at center), which he didn’t want to. So now it’s like, what are we going to do? We could see how to go and I didn’t know how to get there and with losing again and you’re trying to prod them and you’re trying to tell em to play harder and all the coach’s speak and communication just like deteriorated.”
To jog the memory: D’Antoni went a disappointing 121-167 as Knicks coach, leaving in 2012 about a year after the team acquired Anthony. In his final season, Linsanity emerged and the style of play was briefly more in line with D’Antoni’s philosophy of pace and space. Anthony, who was injured for the birth of Linsanity, did not want to change for Lin’s sake and apparently let D’Antoni know about it.
“(Carmelo and I) don’t have a bad relationship. I speak to him. He’s a good guy,” said D’Antoni, who later coached Anthony as an assistant with Team USA. “But I had one vision that I wanted him to play one way. He wanted to go the other way. I couldn’t get to my way.”
After D’Antoni left the Knicks rather abruptly, the team finished the season 18-6 under Mike Woodson and surged into the playoffs. Lin left the following summer and the Knicks responded by winning 54 games with Anthony as an MVP candidate. Lin signed a three-year contract with the Nets earlier this month.
“It’s funny, right after I resign, Amar’e gets hurt and they move Melo to (power forward) because he had to, and that’s okay with Melo because Amar’e wasn’t there. And they exploded,” D’Antoni said. “And it was like, oh man, I resigned two weeks too early. Then we could’ve overcome our problems.”
Still, D’Antoni said he needed to leave for the Knicks to succeed.
“I just didn’t see a way out. And I knew because of where it was that if I stepped back, and I told (former GM) Glen Grunwald this, that if I step back and let you guys go, then the focus will be on something else other than me, the focus will be in the right place and people will play harder and take responsibility because I’m not there,” D’Antoni said. “And Woody pretty much continued what we did because you can’t change that far into a season anyway. And I thought, they can get a pop we can make the playoffs. We were good enough to make the playoffs. So I think it was the right thing for me to do for the organization. I felt that I was on my last year. I look at the guys I like on that team and say they deserve better than this, they deserve to be in the playoffs, and why am I holding them back? And I just thought relationships deteriorated where I couldn’t get the most out of people.”
