Asked if he could provide an answer as to why he felt Patrick Ewing was a bad teammate, former Knicks fan favorite Charles Oakley was happy to elaborate.
“I’ll give you 20 answers,” Oakley told Tiki and Tierney on Tuesday.
Oakley, who said Ewing was never offered a prominent job with the franchise because “he treated them like ass,” doubled down on his comments from his 2020 appearance on WFAN in saying that Ewing was mainly about himself during his legendary run in New York.
“He never helped the guys out on the team,” Oakley said. “He never got us together. It was always ‘just give me the ball.’
“I played with Patrick and the Knicks for 10 years, and we probably went to dinner two or three times with him.”
Ewing is of course royalty among Knicks fans as arguably the greatest player in franchise history, but Oakley is another fan favorite, lauded for his toughness and effort over a 10-year stint in New York, which saw the Knicks reach the postseason in each of those 10 years. But Oakley says it took a similar effort to get his longtime teammate to do anything for his Knicks counterparts.
“It was hard to get him to do something…it was hard for him to open up,” Oakley said. “He didn’t start opening up until I saw him in Washington when he was coaching with the Wizards.”
Oakley and Ewing enjoyed plenty of success together in New York, but according to Oakley, Ewing wasn’t as dedicated to the good of the team as he was to himself, and said the Knicks’ trademark toughness from those 1990s teams was much more due to himself, Anthony Mason, and others as opposed to Ewing.
“When I got to New York, I’m, thinking ‘I’m gonna get to play with Patrick in New York,’” Oakley said. “But when I got to play with him…the toughness you saw, he didn’t bring that. We protected them.”
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