Shaquille O’Neal claims he never heard of Russian rookie center Timofey Mozgov, but he still believes the Knicks can make the playoffs after their summer transformation.
“Any Mike D’Antoni team is going to be a very exciting team to watch,” the Celtics’ new center said before he sat out the Knicks’ preseason home opener last night at the Garden. “With the addition of [Raymond] Felton, Ama’re [Stoudemire] and [Danilo] Gallinari starting to come into his own, they should be a playoff-contending team.”
As a free agent in early July, the 38-year-old O’Neal had a chance to join the Knicks, who vigorously were shopping for a free-agent center, but he chose Boston. He acknowledged he did talk to D’Antoni, who had coached him in Phoenix.
“There was [interest], but I thought Boston was a better fit for me playing alongside three first-ballot Hall of Famers,” O’Neal said. “It’s going to be a fun year. I wanted to play for Doc [Rivers]. I thought it was a better fit for me.”
“Me and Mike, we’ve always had personal intricate conversations,” O’Neal said. “I said there was an interest. In the end, I chose Boston.”
In truth, the Knicks may have been able to snap O’Neal if they had Stoudemire and LeBron James as a package. But instead they added Mozgov, not O’Neal.
O’Neal, who has a bad hip, pretended to not know whom the Knicks’ starting center was.
“What Russian guy? I don’t know who he is,” said O’Neal, whose new self-proclaimed nickname is “The Big Shamrock.”
O’Neal was in rare form. He joked he wasn’t playing because, “I’m going to do a photo shoot like Amar’e tomorrow, so I got to get ready,” referring to Stoudemire’s nude magazine cover.
O’Neal may be available Saturday in Hartford when the Celtics face the Knicks, though it’s unclear if Mozgov will start again. O’Neal showed his distaste for European centers when he was asked if the position has changed.
“I think I killed off all the centers,” he said. “All the centers want to play European-style basketball. There’s only 1.5, two real centers left — Dwight Howard and Yao Ming. And even now and then Yao wants to step outside and shoot jumpers. The days of the Patrick Ewings, Rik Smits, Kevin Duckworths. Those days are gone, thanks to me.”
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Ex-Knick Nate Robinson,
who re-signed with the Celtics after his excellent performance in the NBA Finals, wouldn’t give his opinion on whether the Knicks’ two-year cap purge was worth it.
“I don’t know,” he said. “My time here was great. I loved it. I wouldn’t trade it for nothing. But now I’m a Celtic and it’s even better.”
Robinson still is close with injured Eddy Curry
.
“I talked to Eddy a lot,” he said. “He’s a tough dude. For him to go through what he went through in the past couple of years, I wouldn’t want to wish it on anybody.”
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D’Antoni said he’s leaning now more to a nine-man rotation, with an occasional 10th guy in the mix. It’s still more than his past seasons when he went often with seven.
Asked why the change in philosophy, D’Antoni said, “If there’s a big difference between my seventh guy and eighth guy, I’m very tempted to go with seven guys. But if you have a high quality of players you feel can contribute and there’s not that big a dropoff, I’ll go eight, nine. Nine is a nice rotation. We can go nine and maybe 10 once in a while. I don’t think there’s a big drop-off.”