Phil Jackson won 11 NBA titles as a coach, with legends Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, and Shaquille O’Neal playing under him. Quite often, a coach’s success is attributed to the team they coach, but Jackson not only managed to do it with multiple teams, he did so with multiple generations.
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Jackson’s resume highlights that he was more than capable of evolving and changing with the times. But then what went wrong during this stint with the New York Knicks? We are talking about his tenure as president of the club from 2014 to 2017.
Jackson, known for dealing with egos in the locker room, fared poorly while managing Knicks stars, most notably Carmelo Anthony. And yes, Jackson has also claimed that Melo drove him out of the Big Apple.
The decorated coach had a famous fallout with Anthony and wanted him out of the Knicks equation. But, as we now know, that wish never quite materialized. And he parted ways with the Knicks, even though Melo was traded to the Oklahoma City Thunder just months later.
Jackson practically blamed Anthony for his lackluster tenure with the Knicks. Melo, however, has an issue with this blame game.
“When you are dealing with power and people want power and people who dealt with power their whole life, who only know how to deal with power their whole life, if anything starts to challenge that power and bring awareness to that power, you disagree with it,” said Anthony.
Melo then elaborated on what caused the divide. It had nothing to do with ego and more to do with basketball and what Anthony felt was an outdated system that Jackson was trying to implement in New York.
“Instead of bringing me to [the] office, showing me Michael Jordan clips of the triangle and telling me what not [to] do in a triangle because he did it wrong. This is s*** that he told me,” Melo said, before adding that he did not want to take a shot at his teammates, but they weren’t good and they knew it, too.
“We had a poorly structured team. Teams! Rosters those years. And you were at the helm of that. You had this vision of wanting to play in a certain type of system and which is the triangle… At the time, it didn’t fit the style of the NBA,” the Hall of Famer explained.
Anthony, still seemingly annoyed, added that the Knicks under Jackson were the laughing stock of the NBA for being in a triangle. “And I had to fight that. I had to take those bullets. Not you, Phil Jackson. While I am taking those bullets, you are in the stands, tweeting, talking about Melo breaking the triangle,” he added, laughing condescendingly.
The 10-time NBA All-Star explained that while he is a fan of the triangle attack, it needed certain types of players to work, which the Knicks simply didn’t have at the time.
Further taking a dig at Jackson, Anthony said, “You should have come down there and coached. Instead of sitting your a** up in the stand, come down here and coach. Coach the triangle. You want to teach the triangle. Come down here and coach.”
Well, it remains to be seen if Jackson will have a response to Anthony’s side of the story. It is unlikely that Melo is going to wait for another book to drop. So perhaps, it’s best not to beat a dead horse!
