Knicks' Media Day Part II: Carmelo Anthony, Amar'e Stoudemire and Raymond Felton's return

Carmelo Anthony talked about sacrificing his scoring for the betterment of the team at Media Day.

“At the end of the day it’s about winning basketball games,” he said. “I’m done trying to score 30, 35, 40 points for us to win a basketball game. I don’t want that role anymore.”

Later, when pressed further about it, Anthony said he’s still going to score. Of course he is. Mike Woodson runs isolations and Anthony is one of the best scorers in the game. But other players have to get involved, like Amar’e Stoudemire. He needs to be the weapon he was two years ago for the Knicks to be an elite team. I still expect Anthony to do the heavy lifting in the fourth quarter.

“When I say scoring less, I don’t want to say I’m not going to score the basketball,” Anthony said. “I can never stop doing that. That’s what I do best.

“We definitely need that. It’s just a matter of being more consistent on the basketball court, picking my spots, kind of getting everybody else going – J.R. coming off the bench and do what he has to do. Amar’e’s been working on his offensive game, his post game. So to see if that’s working, to see if that’s going, to see if that’s worth doing because when he’s down there it kind of takes pressure of me to go down there every time and post up. I’m not saying I’m not going to score the basketball. Don’t take it out of context.”

Stoudemire was asked about Anthony scoring less.

“I think there will be some nights we need Carmelo to score 30 points,” he said. “We don’t want to take that away from him.”

Stoudemire then addressed the ongoing topic of whether he and Anthony can co-exist. He brought up the fact that they were brought together mid-season, then last season they didn’t have a full training camp.

After that, Stoudemire basically said what we’ve been saying: there are no excuses this year.

“I think this year is a great test for us to see if we can get it going this year,” he said. “We got a full training camp, we got our coaching staff and we got all our players that we’re going to have for a full year. So I think this year is going to be a great year for us.”

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The Knicks are an older team and Jason Kidd is the second oldest player. But I got a kick out of Raymond Felton calling Kidd “a father figure” when he was asked what it’s like to have the future Hall of Famer around.

“It’s been for one, motivation, and two, it’s been great,” Felton said. “It’s like a father figure. I grew up in high school watching J-Kidd play and he’s one of my idols. So to have the opportunity to pick his brain and learn the knowledge of the game from him it’s going to be big for me and my game.”

Felton also discussed why he’s expecting to have a big season.

“I’ve got a big chip on my shoulder this year,” Felton said. “Last season - I want to get it out there - I came into Portland out of shape. Being in a lockout year, I just got really relaxed, got complacent, didn’t work as hard because I didn’t think we were to have a season. I’m going to go ahead and say that - I was out of shape when we first went there. I played myself into shape towards the second half of the season.

“I’m in shape now, ready to go and I’ve got a big, big chip on my shoulder. so I look forward to this season and I’m definitely happy to be back in this New York Knicks jersey.”