The Mike D’Antoni era in New York was not a prosperous one, the “Seven Seconds or Less” coach ended his tenure as the Knicks coach with a dismal 121-167 record. Now D’Antoni said he ended his Knicks coaching stint in 2012 because Carmelo Anthony forced him to leave.
D’Antoni was only Melo’s coach for two years, but in that short amount of time, the two clashed.
At the end of the relationship, D’Antoni claimed that “Anthony said the team needed to choose between him and D’Antoni.”
So D’Antoni made management’s decision an easy one.
“I just went in and quit,” D’Antoni said.
Last summer, D’Antoni blamed Anthony for sabotaging the Knicks. During an appearance on “The Vertical” podcast D’Antoni said Anthony held resentment toward Jeremy Lin and he couldn’t convince Melo to move to power forward to accommodate the point guard.
“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,” D’Antoni said.
This is the second time in the last few months that one of Melo’s coaches went after the scoring machine. In December, Carmelo’s former Denver Nuggets coach George Karl took a shot at Anthony.
In his book titled Furious George, Karl said Anthony’s immaturity stemmed from an upbringing without a father.
“Kenyon (Martin) and Carmelo carried two big burdens: all that money and no father to show them how to act like a man,” Karl wrote.
