George Karl- all time great winner
Mike D'antoni- has pushed multiple teams to the next level, has gotten the most out of a lot of star players..... couldn't instruct Melo. Just won COTY.
Phil Jackson- The ultimate team and culture builder. And winner. Cut down by a fat lazy 32 year old.
Can't wait to hear what Phil says about Melo down the line. Here's some excerpts I posted yesterday of Melo's former leaders talking about what we're left as we've chosen Melo over Phil. Think about it. Melo threw a mutiny towards Phil and won. Melo has won the Lebron role for the Knicks for all intents purposes. Think about the culture this guy brings in as the clubhouse leader now? It's not bright days ahead.
"He was the best offensive player I ever coached. He was also a user of people, addicted to the spotlight and very unhappy when he had to share it."
“I want as much effort on defense — maybe more — as on offense,” Karl penned. “That was never going to happen with Melo, whose amazing ability to score with the ball made him a star but didn’t make him a winner.
“He really lit my fuse with his low demand of himself on defense,” he continued. “He had no commitment to the hard, dirty work of stopping the other guy. But since Carmelo only played hard on one side of the ball, he made it plain he couldn’t lead the Nuggets, even though he said he wanted to. Coaching him meant working around his defense and compensating for his attitude. I’d have to try to figure him out, too. How could I get more from him?”
He was such a talented kid. If he’d decided to lead the league in rebounding, or to become the best defender at his position in the NBA, he could have done either one.
But Kenyon and Carmelo carried two big burdens: all that money, and no father to show them how to act like a man."
"Our main problem was that he liked to separate himself from our team. A player can talk back to me, we can argue, but that’s between us. One player is a lot less important than how everyone performs together. I don’t think Melo cared enough about being a good teammate.
But he got away with some **** over the years because he made All-Star teams and averaged 24-6-3 (points, rebounds, assists). His incidents were spaced out, so listing them here may make them sound worse than they were. If all my screwups were compressed into one paragraph, I’d look pretty bad, too, but Melo had a pattern of bad judgment.
He got a DUI; he got busted at the airport for having a bag of weed in his backpack; he got in a bar fight; he got suspended for fifteen games for punching a Knick during our infamous brawl in 2006. And he did a
Kenyon when he refused to go back into the last minute or two in a game on the road against the Pistons. That didn’t make his coach too happy.
But his real WTF moment occurred in March 2009 in the third quarter of a game against the Pacers. Carmelo had not scored much all night but then made two in a row. It was time for him to come out for a rest so I sent in his backup, Linas Kleiza, as I usually did. At the next dead ball, LK went in. But Carmelo refused to come out! After long moments of people staring at each other in confusion, but before we got a technical foul for having too many men on the court, Kenyon, to his credit, walked to the bench.
Well, well, well. Here was a new wrinkle in the coach/player power struggle, one I’d never seen before. It was also an incredible F-U to me. We suspended him for the next game.
After the game, which we lost 100–94, I had to talk to the media about it. Should I show my disgust at Melo’s childishness and lack of respect? No. I tried to be calm and understanding of behavior I couldn’t understand at all. So I swallowed my tongue. “There’s a thin line between passion and emotional immaturity,” I said. “It happens all the time, to coaches, too. We snap and act like idiots on the sideline because of the emotional stress of the game.”
The positive side of this incident was that it embarrassed Carmelo. He played harder and better for a while. Not coincidentally, we made a deep playoff run."
now quotes many years later from Mike D'antoni-
“(Carmelo and I) don’t have a bad relationship. I speak to him. He’s a good guy,” D’Antoni, who coached Anthony as an assistant with Team USA, said last year on The Vertical podcast. “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.”
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“Anthony said the team needed to choose between him and D’Antoni.”
“I just went in and quit,” D’Antoni said.
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