The NBA’s version of a reunion tour is in full swing this week, as Paul George stole the mid-week headlines with a return to the Indiana Pacers. The homecoming trips wrap up on Saturday as Carmelo Anthony and the Oklahoma City Thunder roll into New York to play the Knicks, and a team now-accustomed to weird road games will see Anthony deal with disappointed, jilted Knicks fans.
The two teams have already played in Oklahoma City this season, and after the game Anthony declared his story with the Knicks effectively ended. But returning to Madison Square Garden is much different than Kristaps Porzingis checking out Oklahoma, which is why both Porzingis and Knicks coach Jeff Hornacek were asked about Anthony. Namely, they were asked about whether it’s fair to pin the struggles New York had with ‘Melo in town, especially considering Oklahoma City hasn’t been able to get things going, either.
“There is no one answer, it’s just different situations and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t,” Porzingis told Bleacher Report in a story published Friday. “It’s not like there’s one thing that can explain it, only one thing that you’re doing wrong. It’s not like that. It’s never like that.”
One of those answers in New York, of course, might be “Phil Jackson” if you asked both Anthony and Porzingis, but that’s neither here nor there. The point is that Kristaps isn’t willing to throw Anthony under the bus in either situation, but also that even those intimately associated with the failures in New York don’t know exactly what went wrong.
