It’s safe to say that Carmelo Anthony’s final season with the New York Knicks was not a happy one.
Anthony admitted that then-president Phil Jackson’s apparent attempts to force him out of New York more or less completely eroded his will to play for the Knicks.
“When I signed back with the Knicks, I wanted to be in New York and I believed in Phil,” Anthony told Marc Stein of the New York Times. “Then last year it went to: I was being pushed out. There were things being said about me that I didn’t know where they were coming from. And I still had to go in that gym and play and practice and deal with the media, answer all those questions every day.”
Anthony admitted that he and Jackson spoke “barely twice,” and he felt abandoned by the higher-ups in the organization as the rumors got louder.
“There was no support from the organization,” Anthony said. “When you feel like you’re on your own and then on top of that you feel like you’re being pushed out …”
Anthony said that Jackson had been willing “to trade me for a bag of chips,” and even after he left the franchise, there was no way back for the forward.
“I think at that point it was too far gone,” Anthony said. “I already had in my mind that I wanted to win, that I wanted to move on. We didn’t think it would take as long as it did, but my mind was already made up.”
Jackson did basically shove Anthony under the bus and torpedoed his trade value during the latter part of the season. You can hardly blame Anthony for being bitter about how things ended with the Knicks.
