Farewell, Mike D'Antoni

Carmelo Anthony isn't a "coach killer," as people have called him since Mike D'Antoni resigned as the Knicks' coach on Wednesday. But Anthony isn't the type of superstar who can succeed no matter the situation; like nearly every player, he needs to have the right team around him. Anthony's greatest weakness is that he needs a disproportionate number of shots to score his points. He thus needs a supporting cast of teammates who can pick up 12 points through a game's interstitial spaces, without having plays called for him, which was the case when he was on the Denver Nuggets, who had players like Nene and Arron Afflalo. Not so with Amar'e Stoudemire, Jeremy Lin and most of the Knicks' other players. However, now that Anthony has hit his ceiling with Nuggets and appears to have hit it with the Knicks, the interesting question is whether he can ever win a championship.

Another interesting question is why the Knicks chose to spend so much money four years ago on a relatively well known coach like D'Antoni, when they knew they'd surround him with subpar players for the first two years simply to clear payroll and then pair him for the next two years with a superstar like Anthony, whose approach to the game is inherently different than D'Antoni's. D'Antoni takes a lot of criticism for being the type of coach who can't win a championship. He promotes offense over defense, when stingy defense makes the difference in the playoffs, the argument goes. But D'Antoni maximized the talent of those great Suns teams last decade, when most of the players were fast, athletic and not terribly interested in defense. They were the league's most exciting team for several years, made two conference finals, and probably would've made the NBA finals in the 2007 playoffs if not for Robert Horry's hip check of Steve Nash late in the fourth quarter of Game 4 of the Spurs-Suns series, which then led to the silly suspension of Stoudemire and Boris Diaw for briefly walking on the court. D'Antoni also has a great mustache and gets comically worked up about officials' bad calls, which is often. He deserved better than the Knicks gave him, not that the Knicks' executive leadership has been competent for the past 12 years.