Metta Sandiford-Artest grew up Queensbridge and spent one season with the Knicks, so he’s always had a soft spot for the orange and blue – and in an exclusive interview with SNY, he had a message for the fellow Garden faithful about the team’s future.
“The league is full of competition, so I would just encourage the fans to stay off the owner’s back, stay off the organization’s back – irresponsible quotes and irresponsible responses just because you’re emotional one day and you want to attack the Knicks,” he told SNY’s Ian Begley. “Really just trust the process. The Knick fans, the real fans, kind of need to take a step back and just be supportive. Because with that support, when you feel that energy – I don’t care how long it takes – but with that support, I think it would be easier to bring a championship to New York.”
Sandiford-Artest is “always optimistic” about the team and wants to see them win a championship, a mission he finds “irrationally personal” because of his NYC ties. That said, he understands the pressure-cooker atmosphere that is the Big Apple, but urges the fans to not add to that unnecessarily.
“I’m always just trying to figure out ways to be supportive versus looking at all the problems. Like, what's the solution?” he said. “But it’s a tough crowd. We know that. The city's tough, the media's tough. A lot of times, the fans, they bite themselves in their own ass because they’re putting so much pressure on everything all the time.”
The former Ron Artest wanted to come back to NYC in 2013 to try to win a championship, but knows that outside of the Stat and Melo era, it’s been tough for the Knicks to find stars who want to come to Broadway over the last 20 years.
“Every human being is different. Everybody can't be like Michael Jordan or Kobe [Bryant] or like myself, where I was getting booted in my own arenas and I'll still shoot,” he said. “Not everybody's like that. So as a fan, if your objective is to win a title, then you gotta really take a step back.”
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But will we ever see a group like those 1990s teams that went to two NBA Finals on the backs of tough stars like Patrick Ewing, Charles Oakley, and Allan Houston?
“All those guys were tough mentally so they didn't really care about the boos or the writing in the paper. Those guys came to work, you know what I'm saying?” Sandiford-Artest said. “But I don’t know if in this day and age, we have those type of players. The current situation probably is not ideal, but I'm just like, okay, what can we do to potentially win a title? That’s what I think about."
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