Anthony wishes Hornacek stood strong

PORTLAND, Ore. — As every Knick tries to find a reason for the team’s collapse, Carmelo Anthony added to the discussion, questioning the flipping back and forth from coach Jeff Hornacek’s speedy, modern offense to Phil Jackson’s moderately paced triangle.

It’s no shocker Anthony indicated he was liking the uptempo “early offense’’ Hornacek carried with him from Phoenix and team president Jackson accepted upon Hornacek’s hire. The plan — now foiled — was to blend the two attacks in what Hornacek termed in training camp as “triangle aspects.’’

In the week leading into the All-Star break, the order came down from above to reemphasize the triangle, and Anthony now says it was “hard to readjust a whole system on the fly.”

After their fourth-quarter flop Wednesday night in Utah, Anthony declined to acknowledge next season’s training camp, perhaps because he doesn’t know which team’s training camp he’ll be a part of.

“I don’t even want to talk to that or next training camp,’’ said Anthony, who scored a modest 16 points in Utah despite logging 36 minutes. “It’s too much. I don’t want to talk about that. I don’t want to talk about next training camp and what’s going to happen next year. That’s hard for me personally to think about that. We still have these games to deal with, and it’s hard to look toward next season.’’

Hornacek alluded to training camp at the Wednesday morning shootaround, suggesting the Big 3 — Anthony, Derrick Rose, Kristaps Porzingis — can lead a team into the playoffs only if the trio changes and buys into the pass-cut-read-react triangle system. None of the three is known for his passing ability.

Hornacek says he regrets throwing too much at his players last training camp, and Anthony seems to regret the flipflopping on offense as his Knicks tenure looks like it could be entering its final 11 games starting with the loss to the Trail Blazers on Thursday.

“I think everybody was trying to figure everything out, what was going to work, what wasn’t going to work,’’ Anthony said. “Early in the season, we were winning games, went on a little winning streak we had. We were playing a certain way. We went away from that, started playing another way. Everybody was trying to figure out: Should we go back to the way we were playing, or try to do something different?’’

Anthony suggested he liked the Hornacek way.

“I thought earlier we were playing faster and more freeflow throughout the course of the game,’’ Anthony said. “We kind of slowed down, started settling it down. Not as fast. The pace slowed down for us — something we had to make an adjustment [to] on the fly with limited practice time, in the course of a game. Once you get into the season, it’s hard to readjust a whole system.’’