Carmelo Anthony has seen Knicks built up, torn down, built up again

NEW YORK -- As Carmelo Anthony met with reporters at New York Knicks media day, he was asked how he felt to be playing for his fifth coach in six years.

“Don’t remind me,” Anthony replied.

But it is a useful frame to consider all that Anthony’s Knicks have gone through since the star came to New York in a massive deal in February 2011.

The Carmelo Anthony Knicks have been built up around him, torn down and then, this past summer, hastily built up again.

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It all has led to a sense of renewed optimism for the veteran, though precisely how excited he should get, let alone the rest of the team, will have more to do with health than anything else.

“I don’t think there’s been this type of excitement surrounding our team since I’ve been here,” Anthony says. “I haven’t felt like this in a long time.”

For all the talk about the many new Knicks — Derrick Rose, Joakim Noah and Courtney Lee to name a few — or even the toast of 2015-16, Kristaps Porzingis, the Knicks really do rely on Anthony to be the primary scorer and engine of the team.

Notably, though the team sagged to a 32-50 record last season, Anthony was just about as good as ever. Coming off a significant knee surgery that hampered him throughout 2014-15 and limited him to 40 games, Anthony played in 72 last year. He scored at his career norms while averaging a career-high 4.2 assists a game. His 20.3 player efficiency rating was a stone’s throw from his career rate of 21.1.

So for the Knicks to take a step forward this season, it isn’t really about Anthony getting any better, but making sure his supporting cast helps him succeed.

Notably, a team that talked rebuild for a long time has fast-forwarded its process. This is nothing new in New York, but whether it works, as team President Phil Jackson says, will have a lot to do with injuries.

“In our situation, it is definitely worth the risk,” Jackson says. “We have had two seasons that have not been successful, and we needed to move forward and win. Realistically, we know we’re going to be competitive because we have some very competitive players.”

But Jackson and the Knicks don’t know that. Not when there are significant questions about the two biggest keys to that leap forward in Rose and Noah.

For Rose, the questions are several-fold. He was cleared of on all counts in a Los Angeles civil court case involving allegations of sexual assault. The accuser was seeking more than $21 million in damages ($6 million in compensatory; $15.5 million in punitive), and Rose chose not to settle, electing to go through with a trial that started Oct. 4.

Now that he is back with the team, he still has some work to do to get ready. As a player, he's not close to the one who was voted MVP in 2010-11. That season, his player efficiency rating was 23.5. Last year, it was 13.5.

Carmelo Anthony thriving in Jeff Hornacek's offense

As new Knicks coach Jeff Hornacek points out, a healthy, explosive Rose would free up Anthony to do more than serve as an emergency point forward, a common occurrence last season.

“For Derrick, I think the one thing he’s excited about is to do some things that are helping him get ready,” Hornacek says. “His body’s good. Watching him play pickup games, he’s had those bursts of energy.”

Rose, too, focused on the positive and pointed out that this is Anthony’s team.

“My job is to come here and help him win,” Rose says. “In practice it’s to push him, be on him when I see that he’s being lazy or something like that, and it’s vice versa. He’s going to be on me when he needs to push me. It’s no bad blood. I’m just here to help him win.”

The Knicks also are hoping that Noah can do more of the bullying inside, to keep Anthony from so much of the pounding he regularly received with his second efforts on the offensive glass. Noah, however, was limited to 29 games last season.

But add in Lee, the type of perimeter shooting ace and defender the Knicks lacked last season, and improvement from Porzingis, and the pieces are there to make this the Knicks’ best season since they last made the playoffs in the 2012-13 season.

But perhaps how tenuous their situation remains was clearest in Hornacek’s explanation for how they’ll deal with injuries: They won’t have them, and rest will come from blowouts. It’s hard to be more optimistic than that.

“First of all, I don’t think we’re going to have injuries,” Hornacek says. “Some of these injuries are flukes. Guys have worked hard. If an injury happens, it happens. But we feel that guys are going to push each other.

“I don’t think there is going to be any minutes restriction. Ideally we’d like all the guys to play less minutes and keep them fresh all year. Hopefully, we get good enough quickly enough that we can be maybe be beating some teams and then cruise in the fourth quarter and then get their rest that way.”