On this forum there is a high level of knee jerk reaction to any quote and utterance made and often taken out of context. Seems to me that when you take the totality of the comments from Phil, Mills, Fish and Melo it's clear that most of the panic is wrong and not very helpful. We really don't need to have all of the ultra negative and panic strewn comments that the Media is all too happy to foment with leading articles and quotes taken out of context.
“I try to keep myself away from thinking like that, but as a human being, those thoughts definitely come into play,” he said. “You sit down at night, and you’re thinking, ‘Did I really make the right decision?’ and things like that.”But things have changed that frame of mind, he said. For instance, Anthony said he was surprised and confused when the team’s president, Phil Jackson, first moved to dismantle the team’s roster, notably sending J. R. Smith and Iman Shumpert to the Cleveland Cavaliers in a trade. Anthony joked that it was difficult to ever know what Jackson was thinking. He said as he came to understand Jackson’s motives, it was as if smoke had cleared.
“The moves that he made, once he started explaining to me behind closed doors about what was going on, his thought process behind everything, it started to make sense,” Anthony said. “So I don’t second-guess it.”
The plan will be critical this summer, as the Knicks will have a top-five draft pick and close to $30 million in salary-cap space. Anthony has gained clarity on these circumstances, too, joking that his personal office looked like a general manager’s office, with names and hypothetical outcomes moving around on a big board.
Anthony said he would defer to the front office this summer, help it if it needed him to recruit players and offer feedback when asked. He described the draft class, without mentioning anyone specific, as “powerful.” He noted that it was a great situation, but one that also brought its own pressures. He acknowledged that trading the draft pick provided intriguing possibilities, but his preference seemed to lean toward keeping it.
“I think you need a draft pick,” he said. “If we get a top pick, we take our chances with who we’re going to draft, regardless of who that is, and then we build other pieces around that with the money we have that’s left.”
Anthony said his knee felt much better. He has begun doing light workouts on his legs, and he said he could return to the court just before June. Even his inability to play basketball all these months, he said, provided him more clarity on the game.
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“It was a lot of basketball I was able to watch, a lot of clarity, and a lot of things I saw from the outside looking in that maybe I wouldn’t have seen out there playing on the basketball court,” he said.
A reporter brought up the idea that Jackson’s triangle offense had come under criticism as an outdated system that relied upon midrange jump shots. Anthony agreed that the game was evolving, but he said the offense could work given the right personnel.
“If this is the system that we’re going to run, then we’re going to run it,” Anthony said. “I don’t think it’s something that will be changed, and we all have to accept that.”
It was not the most stirring endorsement of the team’s system. But Anthony noted that too much emphasis was placed on the system and that other teams used similar concepts without the same scrutiny that the Knicks had been receiving.
Anthony said his layoff from the game had even given him a newfound clarity regarding the desires of the team’s fans, many of whom had started wishing for the team to lose games to give it a better chance at a high pick.
“I understand what was people’s frustration with us winning a couple games down the stretch,” he said. “But for me, as a competitor, you can’t come to me and say, I need you to lose these games. There’s no way. I would look at you like you had 10 heads.”
Now if you add to this the full comments made by Phil over the season it's clear that this isn't some crackpot approach to team building. All we've read from Phil is sound and reasonable principles and discipline for rebuilding this team. Phil has said that he values the pick and wasn't soliciting trading it, but would listen to offers. He wants players with multiple skills, smart and team oriented. They aren't going to just chase big names but look for players that with the system and culture. Basically just sound decision making. Nothing that would support this running idea that we have clowns running the organization and they won't be able to make good decisions. It really needs to stop.
What are you even talking about? What does any of that have to do with what this team does over the next few months to revamp the roster? You seem to have decided to just ignore everything that is going on with the franchise in order to only focus on the most negative aspects of the recent past. I can understand disappointment but given what is about to happen there should also be some sense of opportunity. We have an opportunity for major change and likely in a positive direction. Why not focus on that?
4/16/2015 10:52 PM