Carmelo Anthony was one heck of a basketball player when he joined the Knicks, it all started going downhill for him pretty quickly from there.
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By the time Anthony came to the New York Knicks from Denver Nuggets, the then 4x All-Star was a proven star who could lead a franchise to newer heights.
By 2011, the Knicks were in dire need of a superstar to lead them to the Playoffs and possibly to a championship. Having made it to the post-season just two times in the last 10 years, the team couldn’t have let the opportunity of signing Carmelo slide.
He did lead them to 3 straight play-offs appearances but could not get anywhere close to even the Conference Finals, let alone championships.
Also read: Thanks to LeBron James, Carmelo Anthony lost the ROTY despite winning ROTM 8 times!
And after they missed even the Playoffs in 2014, the team hired Phil Jackson as the team President to turn things around. But nothing turned out half as fruitful for both parties as it was with the Bulls of the 90s or the Lakers of the 2000s. Jackson’s silly reason for not liking Anthony was one reason for it.
Phil Jackson hated Carmelo Anthony for learning triangle offense from Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant
In an appearance on All The Smoke podcast with former players Matt Barnes and Stephen Jackson, the 10x All-Star revealed a reason why Jackson hated him.
“Me and Phil probably had three conversations, man. When we talk, we would sit in the office, lights out, couple of candles. We would watch film. And he would teach me how to break the triangle. So I learned it.” Melo said on the podcast. “But I think he was a little sick that I learned it before from Kobe from MJ. You know, I used to sit with them and ask them, ‘what’s up with this triangle?’”
He continued, “I feel Phil hated that I figured it out on how to get to my spots, how to get what I really wanted out of that. So, he used to always say I was manipulating the offense. He wasn’t flying with that,”
Now, that is really silly for disliking a player who could have shone like the previous superstars he had coached.
But the triangle offense must be a massively big deal for the person who kind of brought it into the trend when he joined the Bulls and won more championships as a coach than anyone else.
