Carmelo Anthony didn’t hold anything back.
The former Knicks star shot back and blasted Phil Jackson after the latter’s comments about their time together with the team.
“I’m sick of these folks,” Anthony said on the latest episode of his “7PM In Brooklyn” podcast. “That was bugged out. C’mon bro, what are we doing here? As a man, if I was that much of a hindrance to you, why didn’t you have a conversation with me when I was there? Instead of bringing me in your office, showing me Michael Jordan clips of the triangle and telling me what not to do in a triangle — because he did it wrong, this the s–t that he told me. Instead of doing that, let’s have a real man conversation — ‘Melo, listen, I want to go in a different direction.’ ”
Jackson detailed his fractured relationship with Anthony in “Masters of the Game,” his book set to be released on Tuesday, which The Post previously obtained. The book details Jackson’s take on the 75 greatest players in NBA history, one of which was Anthony.
Jackson served as Knicks president for four seasons. He was critical of Anthony and what he said was his unwillingness to buy into Jackson’s famed triangle offense while describing a conversation with owner James Dolan before a “mutual decision to part ways” in 2017.
“I had this meeting with Dolan, I said, ‘I don’t want Carmelo back on the team; we’ve got to find a way to trade him,’ ” Jackson wrote in the book. “I said, ‘Let’s sit with [Anthony’s then-agent] Leon Rose and explain we’re not going to win a championship. Carmelo wants a championship; he wants to be on a team that has a chance, and he should be; he’s a Hall of Famer.’
“I said, ‘Unfortunately my relationship with Carmelo is kind of busted, and if he’s going to be here, it’s probably best that I go.’ ”
The Knicks had a 90-171 record during Jackson’s disastrous tenure.
“We had a poorly structured team, teams, rosters, those years,” Anthony said. “And [Jackson] was at the helm of that. Nobody told you who to go get. You had this certain vision of wanting to play in a certain type of system, which is the triangle, which I love the triangle offense. At the time, it didn’t fit the style of the NBA. We was the laughingstock of the NBA for being in the triangle. And I had to fight that, and I had to take those bullets. Not you Phil Jackson. While I’m taking those bullets, you are in the stands tweeting, talking about ‘Melo breaking the triangle.’
“This is the s–t that I had to deal with. I never spoke on him, I never spoke about him. I had probably three conversations with the man his whole tenure. We didn’t have a relationship. So if I was that much of a hindrance to you, you should’ve came to me and said it instead of telling me to bear with you — ‘rock with me, stay with me, I got you, bear with me, we’re gonna fix this.’ ”
Anthony recalled a conversation with Kobe Bryant, who won five championships with Jackson when he was head coach of the Lakers. Bryant, Anthony said, recognized that the triangle was a bad fit for the Knicks and for the modern NBA.
“Because he understood what was going on,” Anthony said. “You cannot put certain personnel in the triangle and just tell them to go figure the triangle out, you cannot do that. You need certain guards, you need a certain big man, you need certain wings.”
Anthony waived his no-trade clause, and the Knicks sent him to the Thunder in September of 2017 — less than three months after Jackson left.
“I sat in your office with you with candles lit,” Anthony said. “We had Zen moments. Now you wanna talk some dumb s–t? Go sit down man. You know what should’ve happened? You should’ve came down and coached instead of sitting your ass up there in the stands. Come down here and coach. You wanna teach the triangle? Come down here and coach and see what you can do. But you know why? The team wasn’t good enough for you to come down from upstairs and come down and coach. Because you don’t coach bulls–t teams.”
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
