Gastineau’s plight, Muss up the Hall & that Federer guy...

So this is what Carmelo Anthony says to Al Iannazzone of Newsday the other day as Anthony, who has a notrade clause in his contract, moves up on the no-trade deadline in the NBA: “I think it will be more on the front office. I have the power, but still I would talk to them. We would be in communication if they feel like they want to go in a different direction, they want to start rebuilding for the future. If they tell me they want to scrap this whole thing, yeah, I have to consider it.”

The first question you would ask, if you were asking Carmelo or Phil, an obvious one, would be this: What direction? If you are using some sort of basketball GPS at Madison Square Garden the only directions you really get are the ones that take you from one rebuilding plan to the next, from one coach to the next, from one savior to the next. You go from Isiah Thomas to Larry Brown to Donnie Walsh to Carmelo to Mike D’Antoni (and how’s he doing with a real team in Houston?) to Mike Woodson, the only Knicks coach who’s done anything in 15 years, to Glen Grunwald to Phil Jackson to Derek Fisher to Kurt Rambis, someone only Jackson seems to see as a budding Jackson, to Jeff Hornacek.

Now we get this dance between Carmelo and Phil in the media, and not just in Newsday. It starts to read and sound the way things did a million years ago with George Steinbrenner and Reggie Jackson, except that George and Reggie actually won together, helped make the Yankees big again – together – before things started to come apart at Yankee Stadium and the Yankees, by the late 80s and early 90s had turned into, well, the Knicks.

Carmelo nor Phil will win this time, This is such sad news about

and dementia. Just the latest for a former football star. Not the last. Now that is our ambassador to the Court of St. James I just hope that London doesn’t somehow end up in last place in the AFC East.

At least when passed up that shot against the Wizards, he blamed and not

I loved learning that the Giants defensive backs didn’t want to go boating with

But since they didn’t make the trip to Florida, ask yourself again how

and the guys let get behind them. The throw that made to last Sunday afternoon, third-and-twenty, running to his left, twelve seconds left on the clock when the play started, was better than any Hail Aaron pass he as the Knicks keep losing. There has been this conversation, especially over the past couple of weeks, one growing louder by the day, about whether or not Phil is the problem or Carmelo is the problem: The executive who as an executive was once one of the greatest basketball coaches of all time, or a star player who isn’t what he used to be, either, even if he can break an all-time Knicks record for scoring points in one quarter.

And the truth is, they are both the problem, for vastly different reasons, even if Carmelo is a lot better still at what he does than Phil Jackson is at running the Knicks. The truth is that the Knicks will be better off when both of them are gone. The truth is that they both need to go, Carmelo now and Phil Jackson when the season is over.

By the way? I think that if Carmelo stays, and stays healthy, he will score a ton of points the rest of the season. I know he is the face of everything that has gone wrong for the Knicks, even if he shouldn’t be, but it doesn’t change that he is one of the most talented offensive players ever threw.

And the kind of play he makes better than any quarterback who ever lived. Talking about ballplayers who used steroids or might have used steroids is always all the rage around Hall of Fame time, but it is worth pointing out again that

ought to make it to Cooperstown someday.

Mussina pitched the way he did for as long as he did, all the way through what it is a rule to call the steroids era in baseball, spending his entire career in the meat grinder that the AL East became.

And when he left the friendly confines of Orioles Park at Camden Yards, he came to New York and there was the right-field wall at Yankee Stadium practically brushing up against the back of his uniform.

And even with all that, when he decided it was time to go, he won 20 games in his last season as a Yankee.

There is more to his resume than in team history. I think that if the big kid, Kristaps Porzingis, stays healthy, the Knicks might very well make a run at the playoffs before this season is over. Carmelo talked about rebuilding with Al Iannazzone. But the moment that Phil Jackson threw all that money – and no-trade power – at Anthony, at his age, there was never going to be a rebuilding plan at the Garden, not even around Porzingis. Jackson was just another guy doing the thing that everybody except Donnie Walsh tried to do, when he and D’Antoni actually did try to rebuild as they were setting themselves up for a shot at LeBron that was always going to be pure folly: Jackson was the latest executive at the Garden trying to produce a Quick Knicks Fix. So now here they are, after Jackson brings in Joakim Noah on a four-year contract worth more than $70 million. Noah gets paid and here comes his former Bulls teammate, Derrick Rose, to New York looking to get paid. So instead of Porzingis playing center, where h e this, of course.

But it’s a Hall of Fame resume, one hundred percent. People keep saying that

might turn out to be the most powerful Vice President since

but I’m thinking that distinction might go to Steve Bannon. Hopefully there are going to be a lot of Grand Slam matches this year like the one produced in Australia the other night against when you didn’t know what year it was with Fed, or how old he is.

If you love tennis, you have to love the Australian, just because somehow there seems to be a match going on at any time of the day or night. You take nothing away from

or from especially not on a day when the Patriots are playing their sixth straight AFC championship game.

But has there ever been a softer place for a great coach and a great belongs, and Carmelo playing power forward, you have Noah playing center when he is healthy enough to play center and, well, the only positive thing — as the Knicks don’t even have as good a record as they did a year ago at this point in the season under Derek Fisher — is that Jackson no longer talks about the triangle offense to the point where you think your head might explode.

The reason for this is that Jackson, who promised a new open culture when he took the job, and when he got paid, doesn’t say much of anything these days except when he acts as if he takes a wrong turn and actually has to answer some questions shouted at him by beat reporters. The reason for this is that Jackson has been pouting for months, because he doesn’t like the way those same reporters have the nerve to point out what the Knicks’ won-loss record has been since he became the Chief Operating Zen Triangle Savior at the Garden.

So it is left for Carmelo to answer questions about his status and his future, and it’s become big news when Jackson finds time in his busy schedule to take a meeting with a guy he spent $120 million on not long ago. It was left for Jeff Hornacek to answer questions about Derrick Rose after Rose went missing from a home game without informing his bosses that he planned to do that.

If Jackson can find a good team willing to take Carmelo Anthony and Anthony is willing to go play for that team, they should both jump at the deal. Anthony should go. Then Phil Jackson should go. Then somebody else can either come in and actually rebuild, or we can all move on to the next Quick Knicks Fix.

As for the current one, to quote Jackson himself, how’s it going? quarterback to land than the AFC East? Seriously? Don’t you get the feeling that their real bye to the conference title game starts about the middle of September?

If isn’t any good at picking football players, that must mean that a lot of guys on a pretty talented Texans team must have drafted themselves. Incidentally, the Hall of Fame debate about guys like and

really has become like so many debates of this time in American life:

If you don’t agree with all those who want Bonds and Clemens in the Hall, like yesterday, you’re not only wrong and small-minded and just plain stupid, you’re also some kind of enemy to the state.

I think it is fair to say that the city of Los Angeles hasn’t exactly embraced the San Diego Lannisters with open arms. The prevailing sentiment about

team moving up the coast was presented both succinctly and eloquently by my old friend

in the Los Angeles Times: We. Don’t. Want. You. Finally today: A birthday shoutout to my Pops, who will be 93 years young this week.

I call him every day, and every day I ask him the same question: “How you feeling?” Every day the answer is the same: “I feel great.”

He fought for his country, as bombardier, as a kid, and still believes in the best of it, even now.

He is the most positive person I have ever known.

Every conversation of ours ends the same way: “Sure do love you,” he says. I sure do love him back. There have been more famous American lives than his.

There has never been a happier one than his.