Asked about Carmelo Anthony's remark about having to learn too many schemes, Mike D'Antoni said, "Anytime you put a team together who haven't had a training camp or [a lot of] practices and the expectations are where they are, you have a tendency to be, oh my gosh, because you're not honed in totally and we're trying to figure out what's good for them."
From the day after the trade, D'Antoni worried about the defensive ramifications. After two losses to league-worst Cleveland and Indiana, his worries have been validated. D'Antoni said yesterday that "offensively and defensively we looked scared at times."
"We're all frustrated," D'Antoni said. "We have to get better defensively. We're going to be a good offensive team. Our major concern is can we be good defensively, and we'll see."
"I knew it would take time, particularly defensively," Knicks president Donnie Walsh said. "You can sit and talk about it all you want but when you get on the floor you have to react real quick, and it's hard for the new guys coming in to react to one another that quickly. They played differently in Denver. It's hard to adjust."
"We're trying to get good at it in a short period of time," Anthony said. "Nobody said it was going to be easy. Guys are still trying to figure it out."