LaMarcus Aldridge says Knicks canceled free agent meeting with him

The New York Knicks needed to fix things this summer, and they failed to do that in the most spectacular way possible.

When the New York Knicks entered this offseason, they needed to find a major piece to slide alongside Carmelo Anthony to start righting the ship. This piece appeared to be the embattled LaMarcus Aldridge, who was one of only a very small percentage of players to seriously entertain the idea of signing with the Knicks.

Not only did the Knicks fail to sign Aldridge, it appears they thought they were too good for him and pushed him away — ultimately to San Antonio. As the story went, the Knicks wanted Aldridge to exclusively play center for them, which was something he didn’t want to do. From here, we heard that Aldridge took this as a sign that the Knicks didn’t want him and he canceled a meeting with them.

As it turns out, that’s not the whole truth.

“They didn’t want to meet with me,” Aldridge said on the Russillo Show on ESPN Radio. “Some people said it was me. But it was both parties agreeing that we shouldn’t meet.”

There was a pretty decent chance that Aldridge wouldn’t have signed with the Knicks anyways, but leave it to the dumbest team in professional sports to make sure they didn’t land a top target — basically out of sudden spite.

This has to grind the gears of Knicks fans. The bravado of Phil Jackson has to be annoying beyond all belief at this point, as he believes he’s running a team that is in some sort of powerful position when they’re not even close. New York is a mess and Phil Jackson is working a special kind of magic to make them even worse than we thought they could be.

We’re all hoping that the Knicks get better, because this past season was just utterly depressing to watch and things aren’t getting much better.

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