Robinson had just had 27 points and 4 assists in 33 minutes Monday to lead the Knicks to a 99-91 victory against the injured and inept-shooting Detroit Pistons. D’Antoni was asked if Robinson would receive more time as the point guard.
“Well, as much as my blood pressure will stay,” D’Antoni said only half joking. “I don’t want to pop an artery or something. But he gives us something we need, and that’s athleticism.”
It is that same athleticism that will take the 5-foot-9 Robinson to Dallas next month for the All-Star break and the slam dunk contest. But as Larry Brown once pointed out, the rules of that event, which Robinson has won twice, are far different from those in a real game. Brown was not the only Knicks coach to fume over some of Robinson’s antics.
D’Antoni sat Robinson on the bench for almost the entire month of December. But now Robinson has not only reclaimed a spot in the rotation, over the last two games he has taken over much of the point guard duties from the struggling Chris Duhon.
Duhon, the nominal starting point guard, played only 20 minutes in Monday’s annual Martin Luther King’s Birthday matinee, none of which came in the fourth quarter.
He shot 0 for 3 for 0 points and has shot a miserable 3 for 21 over his last four games. Numbers like those are enough to make even D’Antoni contemplate putting the ball, and to a large degree the game, in Robinson’s hands.
“He loses confidence easily,” D’Antoni said of Duhon. “He just needs to get over it.”
But D’Antoni did not say anything to suggest that Duhon would suffer the same fate as Robinson in December or Larry Hughes this month, when they found D’Antoni’s tight and at times baffling rotation impenetrable. In fact, D’Antoni said, “We’ll stick with him, and he’ll be fine.”
Hughes, a veteran shooting guard who has been benched since Jan. 1, allowed his frustration to bubble up Saturday when these same teams played in Detroit. Hughes had not played for eight games, then played eight minutes Saturday before going back to the bench.
After the game, he called D’Antoni’s rotation “a joke.”
The next day, he left practice before the end, when the news media is allowed into the gym, and although the Knicks said he was taking an extended bathroom break, Hughes acknowledged Monday that he did not want to talk because the issue was still too raw for him.
Before Monday’s game, he backed off a bit and said he did not want to keep asking D’Antoni about his playing time because those were the actions of a chronic complainer.
“I’m just frustrated,” said Hughes, who did not play Monday. “There’s no other way to put it. I want to be out there playing and help the team win. I want the opportunity to do that, that’s all I’m looking for.”
D’Antoni tried to play down the situation, suggesting that the New York news media amplified the controversy. But he called Hughes’s comment in Detroit “regrettable.”
“Guys are going to squawk,” he said. “You win 60 games, and they’ll still squawk. You know, the shrimp cocktail’s not good enough on the plane. Most places, it goes over people’s heads. Here, it becomes a national story. That’s fine and that’s how it is, and we can deal with it. It just doesn’t change anything.”
Meanwhile, Robinson, who in the first half electrified the 19,302 fans with an ally-oop dunk off a perfect pass from Duhon, seemed oblivious to D’Antoni’s recurring suggestions that he gave coaches hypertension with his style of play.
“I know when to shoot and when to pass,” he said.
He also knows when to sit. Robinson called his 14-game banishment on the bench, which ended when Hughes’s began, a humbling experience. He spent much of his time sitting next to his friend Eddy Curry, who was in the same situation.
Curry has not played since Dec. 17 and he probably will not for at least another two months. On Monday, he had arthroscopic surgery to remove loose cartilage from his left knee, similar to the surgery the Mets’ Carlos Beltran had recently.
Curry, who will earn $11.3 million next year, is expected to miss six weeks, half the time Beltran is expected to be out. But unlike Beltran, when he comes back, he probably will not play very much anyway.
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