Amar'e, Carmelo lead Knicks' rout of Jazz

Carmelo Anthony no longer had double vision. Instead, he and Amar'e Stoudemire saw 30-30. The two Knicks stars had their best shooting and scoring nights as teammates as the Knicks beat the deflated Jazz, 131-109, Monday night at the Garden.

"I think it's coming together," Stoudemire said. "Offensively is not a problem for us. We can score with ease."

The proof was on the stat sheet. Anthony finished with 34 points, his high as a Knick, and five assists, and Stoudemire had 31 points and three blocked shots - all of this before the start of the fourth quarter - as the Knicks (33-29) won consecutive games for the first time since the blockbuster trade. The two stars totaled 24-for-31 shooting, and each of Anthony's assists went to Stoudemire.

"He can pass. Amar'e can pass," Mike D'Antoni said. "It should blend together and it should be nice."

Just as nice was Anthony's blistering 12-for-16 shooting performance. It came a night after he struggled with double vision and headaches after being poked in the eye by the Hawks' Al Horford early in Sunday's 92-79 win in Atlanta.

"I took my Tylenol," he said, "so it helped out."

With Chauncey Billups (thigh bruise) out for a fourth straight game, Toney Douglas continued to provide relief at point guard with 20 points and 6-for-9 shooting, including 5-for-7 from three-point range. He had six assists and one turnover.

Anthony, Stoudemire and Douglas totaled 85 points and 30-for-40 shooting. The Knicks shot 13-for-26 from downtown in the game en route to their highest point total of the season.

"This has been good for Toney," D'Antoni said of the second-year guard. "This has to be a confidence-booster. He's played well the last two games and we've had two good wins with him leading the team."

The win, the fifth in eight games since the Anthony trade, coupled with Charlotte's loss to the Clippers, brings the Knicks' magic number to clinch a playoff berth to 12. When it's been seven years since your last postseason appearance, it's never too early to start counting it down.

"That's a big number, man," Anthony said with a grin. "I've been in races like this where it came down to the last game. In the West, 50 [wins] wasn't getting you in the playoffs the last couple of years. So now my mentality is to focus on just playing it out to the last game and seeing what happens there . . . We don't want to look too far ahead right now."

Utah, meanwhile, is a franchise going in a completely different direction. The Knicks faced the Jazz for the first time in the post-Jerry Sloan/Deron Williams era. Without Sloan on the sideline and Williams running the point, Utah no longer is the devastating pick-and-roll team it used to be.

Considering how much trouble the Knicks have had in defending the pick-and-roll, the fact that Utah has gone away from it had to be a welcome sight.Al Jefferson had 36 points and 12 rebounds for the Jazz (33-31), which played the second half without Andrei Kirilenko (back spasms). Devin Harris, who came over from the Nets in the Williams trade, was notably ineffective against the Knicks' defense, which again showed some matchup zone early on. He had four points and seven assists but was 0-for-7 from the field.

With Smokin' Joe Frazier sitting courtside a day shy of 40 years since his epic win over Muhammad Ali at the Garden, the Knicks applied an early knockout punch. Their explosive fourth quarter in Atlanta on Sunday night seemed to carry over into the first quarter against the Jazz; they scored 40 points and shot a sizzling 68.2 percent from the field to take an early 18-point lead. The game was over midway through the third quarter after Stoudemire scored eight points in a 10-0 run in a 1:50 span that gave the Knicks their biggest lead at 87-56.