Hornacek: Knicks' offense predictable without movement around Melo
New York Knicks head coach Jeff Hornacek didn't take too kindly to Carmelo Anthony's veiled shots at his play-calling.
Hornacek pointed the finger at his players for not executing the game plan in Friday's 105-102 letdown to the Philadelphia 76ers. Specifically, Hornacek noted that his team gets static down the stretch by standing around and watching Anthony isolate.
"I think maybe later in the game (we are predictable), but there’s different options off of that predictability or that set that they can do," Hornacek told Stefan Bondy of the New York Daily News.
"It can be into a corner pick and roll. But if we don't come off - if we just throw it to Carmelo and stand, then it becomes predictable. But the guys are supposed to come off that, get to the corner. Melo, if he doesn't have a good move there, that elbow shot, then he can go to the corner pick and roll and put pressure on them that way."
Anthony sang a decidedly different tune. He pointed to a lack of play-calling for New York's flaccid crunch-time results.
"We play the same way throughout the course of the game. And when teams make adjustments we're still playing the same way as teams make those adjustments defensively," Anthony said.
Lost in all the finger pointing is that the Knicks aren't necessarily a terrible band of choke artists. They perform the same in crunch time as they do in minutes of lesser importance. The bigger problem is that the Knicks simply aren't very good, and that remains consistent regardless of how much time remains.
Besides, as Hornacek points out, their crunch time failures mostly boil down to defense, as opposed to offense.
"The last five minutes of the game, four minutes of the game, ramping it up (on defense). We've seen it on the opposite end. There are times we get bumped. They're not calling anything so I think sometimes we don't give it up in the last four or five minutes of the game, get up in guys' legs," Hornacek said.
"We're still trying to play our normal defense in terms of, OK, I'm up, not necessarily letting the guy drive. But we should be able to step it up and really get after guys at the end. If you end up getting called for a foul, you get called for a foul, but I think things are too easy for teams late in the games."