Knicks: Time to take action
The Knicks want to turn anthem kneeling and ESPY speeches into solutions.
It’s unclear what New York’s players plan to do to piggyback the social change movement in professional sports, but, according to GM Steve Mills, Carmelo Anthony and his teammates have expressed interest in initiatives beyond symbolic gestures.
“I’ve spoken to Carmelo a number of times about this issue and I think he’s an example of guys who has been outspoken about issues and the community coming together,” Mills said, “but also rather than symbolic gestures, about moving forward and trying to have a dialogue and moving forward to make things happen.
“And so I think we respect our players and their ability and right to express their opinion. But we hope as a group we can get past that part of that and actually come together to make a difference with some of the issues that are out there. So that’s the conversation we’ve had with him and we’ll have with the other players as well.”
Coach Jeff Hornacek, who has worked with players in the offseason, echoed that sentiment. “I’ve talked with several of the players and I think they’re all kind of in that same agreement that the awareness is out there now and what can we do to further it and actually try to do something about it and make it better,” Hornacek said. “So they seem to be past the stage of taking a stance and making awareness. They want to help. It’s great to see the players think like that.” Anthony was at the forefront of the movement this summer with an Instagram post calling on athletes to make a statement even if it means alienating endorsers. He then repeated that message with LeBron James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Paul at the ESPYs, before hosting a town-hall meeting in L.A. that brought the police and community together. President Phil Jackson, who spoke with Anthony on Friday about these issues, said that any protest or action arrives after a consensus with the players. More than a third of the players on the roster are not American. “We are trying to measure what our players want to do. We want them to do something that they all feel genuine about. We have five or six guys who are international depending on which side of the fence Joakim (Noah) wants to sit on. So we have a disparate group of guys where some of them are involved in this, some of them are not,” Jackson said. “So I’ve asked for a little bit of a consultation and we’ll talk about it at some point as a team. But we want to do something that’s unified and representative of who we are. We want to be respectful in its own way to our citizens and people around, our family.”