The war of words between Knicks coach Mike D’Antoni and Jordan Hill is on.
D’Antoni got his hackles up before yesterday’s Rockets showdown when The Post asked him about ex-Knick Hill’s recent remarks. Hill said he couldn’t strut his stuff in New York because D’Antoni isn’t fond of playing rookies.
“Where does that come from?” D’Antoni said. “Seriously. It’s something that cracks me up. I don’t play rookies? I don’t like to play bad rookies.”
Ouch.
Hill wasn’t bad yesterday and helped the Rockets beat D’Antoni’s Knicks 116-112 at the Garden. Hill was aggressive at the rim, scored on two putbacks that he converted into 3-point plays and finished with 13 points and five rebounds.
He was on the court when the Rockets got back into the game with a 45-point fourth quarter and played good defense down the stretch.
Hill seemed to be displeased at D’Antoni’s dig.
“What can I say?” Hill said. “That’s him. He’s entitled to his own opinion. If that’s the way he feels, that’s how he feels.
“I’m entitled to my opinion, so I’m just going to go out there and say what I feel.”
Hill said he wasn’t trying to use yesterday’s game as a way to get back at the Knicks.
“I’m not trying to make no point, man,” he said.
“I’m just trying to play basketball. I just want to go out there and have fun and play my game.”
Team president Donnie Walsh would disagree with D’Antoni’s assessment on Hill and probably got indigestion watching the athletic 6-foot-10 power forward bang around the rim.
Asked about Hill’s assertion D’Antoni held him back because he isn’t comfortable playing rookies, Walsh said, “He didn’t play a lot, so I can see why he’d say that.”
Walsh said he wished he could have kept Hill, whom he selected as the eighth pick in the 2009 NBA Draft.
“It’s part of the trade I really didn’t want to do,” Walsh said. “Bottom line is I did it. But I really didn’t want to give up on him because I like him just like Toney [Douglas]. Both are going to be good NBA players and [I] still think that about Jordan.
“What it came down to — you know what it came down to — it put us in a more flexible position this summer.”
D’Antoni, however, said he felt Hill was wrong to make a broad generalization about his disdain toward playing young players.
“I don’t have anything against rookies at all, I like them,” D’Antoni said. “Jordan was in a position, if you noticed, where we had Al [Harrington], Jared [Jeffries], David Lee, [Darko] Milicic for a while. We had about five guys. Rookies are usually in the pecking order of the last guy.
“He didn’t get a great chance, but we’re trying to thread the needle and make the playoffs,” D’Antoni added.
“I do like Jordan. I think he’ll be a nice player in the league. But that’s as far as it goes. For the record, I do like rookies. I like good rookies.”