When we last saw Mike D’Antoni, he was resigning as the Knicks coach, seemingly as the fall guy in an alleged contentious relationship with his star player Carmelo Anthony. That was in March.
Now, after moping around in his PJ’s, D’Antoni is an assistant on Mike Krzyzewski’s coaching staff for Team USA. A team that, oh by the way, Anthony is also a member of. Awkward? One would certainly assume so.
Even Anthony acknowledged that things between the two could have been weird. He and D’Antoni hadn’t spoken since the resignation until U.S. basketball convened for camp in Las Vegas earlier this month. That’s when they found themselves in a situation that forced them to break the ice.
“I was on the elevator and he was coming onto the elevator,” Anthony told the New York Post. “We didn’t have much of a conversation. Then we walked to the meeting, then talked about it. It could have been an awkward moment, but it never was.”
Wait, by confirming things could have been “awkward” between the two, is Carmelo also confirming there were problems between them, even despite his insistence that he played no part in D’Antoni’s departure? Hmmm.
Anyway, Carmelo also added that playing under D’Antoni, who was also an assistant on the 2008 Redeem Team, has gone on without a hitch.
“It’s been good,” he said. “He’s been Mike. His system is what we run here. It works best for us. We’ve been running the system four, five years now. He controls the offense, Nate [McMillan] controls the defense. [Jim] Boeheim controls the zone. He gets no love because we ain’t runnin’ no zone.”
So, everything seems to be all hunky dory between Melo and D’Antoni in London, just like Melo said it would be. It’s almost kind of like how married couples on the rocks go on vacation to settle their differences.
H/T Ball Don’t Lie
