Somebody do something, Olympic-size debt & Super mess ....
Is the new general manager of the Knicks, Steve Mills, going to try to do something to help the team and its coach at the trade deadline, or is he just content to let the season be somebody else’s fault?
If it’s true that James Dolan and Carmelo Anthony had a meeting about the Knicks the other night, Carmelo is the one who should have been asking the questions, not the owner.
He should have been asking questions about what the plan is to get the Knicks out of this.
He should have been asking just who is going to come up with that plan, and implement it.
He should have asked, after the Knicks have won exactly one playoff series in the 13 years that Dolan has been the big boss of basketball at the place, why he — Melo — should think things are going to change even if the Knicks change coaches.
We know there are 129 million reasons for Carmelo Anthony to stay with the Knicks after this season, and play out the rest of his prime here.
They can pay him $129 million for five years and any new team could only give him $96 million for four.
What Anthony really should have asked Dolan was this:
Give me one good basketball reason to stay. Only the Yankees, bless their hearts, can spend $155 million in salary and $20 million more in a posting fee for a pitcher like Masahiro
Tanaka and see him as a No. 3 starter. All winter long, we heard that
Hal Steinbrenner had to channel his dad, absolutely do that, 100%, and spend as much money as the media kept telling him to spend on the 2014 Yankees.
But you know how Hal could really channel the old man?
By making somebody or anybody accountable one of these days for the state of the Yankee farm system. Now that the Olympics have started up in Sochi, now that we have watched the wretched and silly excess of the latest Opening Ceremony for the Olympics, you have to ask this question:
Has the staging of the Olympics ever done anything except create a mountain of debt for the host country, a mountain so high they could stage the Alpine skiing events on it?
You know when the debt for the 1976 Summer Games in Montreal was finally paid off?
In 2006.
Tyson Chandler has had a lot to say this season about coaching, but don’t we need more playing out of the guy?
Seriously, because he won one title in Dallas, he is discussed sometimes around here as if he’s Bill
Russell.
When people say that the Knicks have pretty much the same team this season that they did last season, are they actually watching this season?
Chandler is diminished, J.R. Smith is diminished, so is Raymond Felton.
Kenyon Martin, who plays harder
than anybody Mike Woodson has, hardly ever gets to play because he’s been hurt.
Amar’e Stoudemire, depending on the state of his legs, fades in and out like sketchy cell service.
But this is all supposed to be Woodson’s fault.
The Knicks were out of the playoffs when he took over for Mike
D’Antoni and then he took over and they were 18-6 and in the playoffs. Then they were 54-28 last season. Now he can’t coach. The default position in the media is that the players have “stopped listening.” Right. That must be it. He should have spoken much louder the other night when Carmelo got shut out in the fourth quarter,
Iman Shumpert got shut out for the whole game, and Chandler scored two points against Robin Lopez. If New Jersey Transit can’t handle the traffic after the Super Bowl, and people spend hours trying to get home, how in the world do they think they can spike the ball and declare the logistics of the thing some kind of triumph?
For months we heard about how this was the mass transit Super Bowl and how people should only think about using mass transit to get to and from the game, and then mass transit can’t handle the traffic in Secaucus after the game.
By the way, the Seahawks win the big game and the Trail Blazers are playing this way, so clearly Paul
Allen — who owns them both — has his eyes set on world domination.
This time a toboggan run in Times Square when the Super Bowl comes to town.
Next time … Splash Mountain!