Is it just me, or are the New York Knicks treating Stephon Marbury as if he were strapped with explosives? Coach Mike D'Antoni keeps sort of hinting around that it might be, you know, nice if Marbury would be willing to suit up and play for the injury-ravaged team, but he won't come out and tell Marbury that he has to play. And Marbury, who is scheduled to earn $21 million, refuses to take the hints.
And so the dance continues. D'Antoni, in his first year as New York's coach, clearly wants to be rid of the player who isn't so much a locker room cancer as a locker room Ebola virus. Unfortunately for D'Antoni, Marbury is quite well-versed in the protocol of destroying a team without technically violating league rules.
The Knicks fined Marbury nearly $400,000 on Friday because, after breaking down the semantics of the latest passive-aggressive meeting between coach and player, it determined that Marbury had, in fact, refused to play in Wednesday's loss to Detroit. The players association is planning an appeal because, although Marbury preferred not to play, he didn't refuse to play.
"If he said I have to play, guess what, I'm going to get on the court and play, period," Marbury told the New York Post. "If I refuse to play, I'm getting suspended. I never told him I'm not going to play. Those words never came out of my mouth. That's insubordination."
So is telling the Post that he wouldn't trust D'Antoni to "walk my dog across the street." It would be, you know, nice if Marbury didn't say such things.
