After four years in the big apple, Coach D'Antoni has had enough. On Wednesday reports were released that Mike D'Antoni met with Knicks Owner James Dolan and resigned as coach. It is said that the resignation was mutual and was because the vision of the team was different on both ends. Ever since the Knicks brought in Carmelo Anthony last year the two didn't seem to be a cohesive fit when it came the playing system. All things seemed to change with the addition of Tyson Chandler and with the surprising emergence of Jeremy Lin which led the team on a seven game win streak putting them in the playoff mix. The knicks did all of this without their star player, Anthony, and with his return they are currently on a six game losing streak. Many in New York blamed D'Antoni for not creating an effective system and this essentially drove him out of town. Assistant coach Mike Woodson, former coach of the Atlanta Hawks, will now step in as the interim coach of the Knicks and many are hoping that he can turn around this slumping team of talent into what it should be.
http://sports.yahoo.com/nba/news;_ylt=ArOjj95YvsHfojkol2LHTG05nYcB?slug=aw-wojnarowski_mike_dantoni_knicks_resigns_031412
I'm sure that this was a force out more than D'Antoni choosing to quit.........although it is possible that he wanted to quit, because, for whatever reason, he could not win with Carmelo.
ReplyDeleteWhen you think about D'Antoni's success in Phoenix, he never had, and his system never required, an all-star forward or shooting guard that would slow down the game and do a lot of one-on-one stuff, which is exactly what Carmelo does.
Lin is actually a lot like Steve Nash in some ways, both about the same height and size, crafty, good jumpers, great vision.........although Lin is nowhere near Nash, I think that when Linsanity was happening we were able to see D'Antoni's Phoenix system come back to life.
But that system is not really a winning system, because it does not preach defense, which is what wins championships, so no matter if he got forced out or he quit, in order for the Knicks to win a championship anytime soon, they were going to have to get rid of him anyway.
I'm always interested to see how news of coach firings/dismissals/resignations/etc gets broken. In this case I believe it was a tweet from Yahoo's Adrian Wojnarowski, who I've found to be the best NBA reporter, breaking news constantly on Twitter.
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