The New York Knicks are off to a 1-3 start this season, and they don’t appear to be handling it all that well. The Charlotte Bobcats, who were one of the NBA’s worst teams a year ago, beat the Knicks at Madison Square Garden on Tuesday night. That inspired Carmelo Anthony to call a players-only meeting.
On Friday, Anthony told reporters that he and others talked about how the team needs to “want it more” than the opposition and stop doubting themselves. That will be especially true now that Tyson Chandler is expected to miss 4-6 weeks with a broken leg.
“We shut the door after the game, talked it out a little bit,” Anthony said, via Marc Berman of the NY Post. “Try to figure out what was happening and going on. We just weren’t competing the way we know how to compete. We weren’t playing the way we know how to play. Hopefully the conversation we had after the game made everyone else realize, though it is early, there are things we need to fix and fix now.
“We got to want it. We got to want to do it. We got to believe in ourselves right now. We’re playing like we don’t believe in ourselves.”
Anthony, who is averaging 23.8 points per game so far, added that the meeting was only players because he doesn’t believe the coaches have anything to do with the team’s slow start.
“[It was] just players,” he explained. “It doesn’t really have anything to do with the coaches. It’s us out there playing. I felt we needed to sit down and talk and get that out of the way.”
Amar’e Stoudemire has played sparingly after undergoing another procedure on his knee during the offseason. He turned the ball over five times in just 11 minutes of play against Charlotte. Earlier this week, Charles Barkley said he believes Stoudemire’s talent is gone. If Chuck is right, the Knicks are screwed without Chandler. No wonder James Dolan is sick of looking at the team’s dancers.
