There were boos. Lots and lots of boos at the outset. And toward the end, there were chants of “Fire D’Antoni.”
Welcome back, Mike.
“After the initial seeing everybody, and there’s a lot of guys on that team, when you coach somebody, you become close,” Mike D’Antoni said after his first appearance at Madison Square Garden since stepping down as Knicks coach last March. “And that was emotional. After that, it’s a ballgame. Boos are boos, and I didn’t expect anything different.”
That didn’t really perturb D’Antoni, who insisted he harbors no ill-will toward the Knicks and that given the chance, he’d do the same thing all over again. But something did tweak D’Antoni, who replaced Mike Brown after Brown was fired after five games.
“It was a little upsetting we came out flat again, for like the 10th time in a row,” said D’Antoni, who watched his Lakers (9-14) surrender 41 first-quarter points in the 116-107 loss to the Knicks.
His New York coaching experience, he said, contained virtually everything: a good opportunity, an attractive school for his kid, new friends. But it was missing the most important element: a “storybook” ending to his coaching tenure.
“It didn’t end up exactly the way I would storybook it, but I definitely don’t regret it and there’s no bitterness at all,” D’Antoni said.
The general thinking was that in New York, D’Antoni and Carmelo Anthony co-existed like brothers: Cain and Abel. So the coach left, and the player has soared to dizzying heights, playing like an MVP candidate. D’Antoni saw that first hand last night. Anthony, who eventually left with a sprained left ankle, scored 22 points in the first quarter.
“Carmelo was unbelievable first quarter. When Melo gets like that, that’s Melo,” D’Antoni said.
And if there is regret that D’Antoni didn’t survive and thrive with Anthony, the coach who at his inauguration last month said he hoped to revive Showtime in L.A., didn’t reveal any yesterday.
“It was a shortened season. We didn’t have a point guard to start the season. Things got sideways,” D’Antoni said.
And again, D’Antoni harped, there are no regrets. None.
“I definitely would do it all again,” D’Antoni said flatly. “It was reported that I said I shouldn’t have gone to New York. No, I said I shouldn’t have left [Steve] Nash. It’s a little bit different in the meaning of the story It was about Nash. Now if I could have brought him to New York, that would have been ideal. Now Phoenix will get mad at me, so you can’t really say anything. But I shouldn’t have left Nash in the sense that he’s special as a player.”