Not so happy anniversary for Knicks, Melo

GREENBURGH, N.Y. -- It was exactly a month ago that Carmelo Anthony played his first game in a Knicks uniform.

Madison Square Garden had an electric, almost playoff-like atmosphere as a sellout crowd greeted him as if he were a savior. The telecast of the Feb. 23 game against the Bucks was the highest-rated regular-season game on MSG Network in 16 years. Knicks die-hards seemed convinced that their long wait was over, that it was just a matter of time before Anthony and Amar'e Stoudemire turned their team into a title contender.

Turns out, this transformation is going to have to be measured with a month-by-month calendar, not a stopwatch. Sixteen games into the Anthony era, the Knicks' coach, president and players all admit that the team is not coming together as quickly as they had hoped. And Anthony indicated Tuesday at practice that he wasn't exactly sure what he was getting into when he came to New York.

"I didn't really know what to expect, to be honest with you," Anthony said. "Everything just happened so fast. But that's something I try not to think too hard about. It's a process, it's a long process. That's something I keep telling myself, keep telling the guys on the team."

So far the process has seen the Knicks go 7-9 since the trade with Denver that brought Anthony and Chauncey Billups. The Nuggets, meanwhile, are 10-4 since the deal. The Knicks enter tonight's game against Orlando having lost three straight, including a demoralizing loss to the Celtics on Monday after which coach Mike D'Antoni admitted his team had panicked in the fourth quarter when the Celtics were mounting their comeback.

Yesterday, D'Antoni was decidedly more sanguine. So was Stoudemire, who likened the situation to what the team went through at the beginning of the season when they opened 3-8 while getting a new group of players to play together.

"I understand that nobody likes to lose," he said. "We just have to concentrate on getting to the playoffs and then making our run in the playoffs."

The Knicks currently have the seventh seed in the Eastern Conference, and unless disaster happens and they fall completely out of the playoff picture, will play Miami, Boston or Chicago in the first round. Right now, it's hard for anyone to imagine that a team that falls apart late in games like it did Monday would be able to survive a first-round series against one of the conference's elite teams.

The Knicks have a particularly brutal schedule in March, playing 18 games, including the makeup of a snowed-out game against Orlando. Donnie Walsh said that he knew that it could be a rough month when he was thinking about making the trade but figured it would be good for the team in the long run.

"I knew that if we were still trying to find ourselves that it could be difficult," he said.

There has been a lot of talk in the blogosphere about how not everyone on the team -- read: Anthony -- has been willing to make the sacrifices needed for D'Antoni's offensive system. Stoudemire did not completely knock down the notion that everyone wasn't on the same page.

"Yeah, we're getting there," Stoudemire said when asked if everyone was in tune with the coaching staff. "We're still trying to get a grip on it. We know we can be a really good team. It's just a matter of us staying together and to figure out how to win."

The question is whether the Knicks will be able to do that before the start of the playoffs in less than a month.

Said Stoudemire: "Can we do that? We don't have a choice. We have to get it together before the playoffs if we want to make something special out of this year."

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