NEW YORK — Chauncey Billups can’t play Game 4 for the Knicks against the Boston Celtics, but he would like to return to New York next season.
“Yeah, sure,” he said in the locker room before Game 4. “I would love the opportunity to really try it up with these guys. Not like play 30 games after a trade. Like really have a season, have an opportunity to really get a fair shake with these guys. I would love to.”
GREENBURGH, N.Y. — The running joke in the Knicks’ press room is that Landry Fields has struggled ever since he began doing a daily postseason diary for the New York Post.
But the reality is that Fields has not been the same player since the Carmelo Anthony trade.
His ineffective play has just reached a new low in the playoffs.
By ALEX KLINE
When Johnnie Vassar decided to leave his home state of Illinois for prep school in Massachusetts, the state did not forget about the talented guard.
Now a freshman at Lawrence Academy, Vassar is one of the top point guards in the country. On Saturday, he returned home to take an unofficial visit and picked up his first scholarship offer.
“I just finished my visit to Illinois,” he said. “It went really well and they offered me, as well.”
GREENBURGH, N.Y. — The Knicks are in the playoffs for the first time since 2004, and their stay could be just as short.
The Nets swept the Knicks in four games that year, and the Celtics are on the brink of breaking out the brooms again this year.
New York is in an 0-3 hole entering Game 4 Sunday at Madison Square Garden, but Carmelo Anthony would like to push the series to a Game 5 Tuesday in Boston.
“The most important thing is just how much pride we got,” Anthony said Saturday after practice. “I don’t want to get swept. We don’t want to get swept so we gotta go out there and leave it all out there on the court, see what happens.
GREENBURGH, N.Y. — As the Knicks hurtle toward a potential sweep at the hands of the Boston Celtics, team president Donnie Walsh says he’s not certain if he will return next season.
“I haven’t got any crystal balls at all so I don’t know,” Walsh said Saturday with his team facing an 0-3 deficit entering Game 4 Sunday.
“But I wouldn’t make a big deal out of that…There are a lot of factors involved, some mine, some franchise, so whatever comes out of it, comes out of it.”
Knicks owner Jim Dolan has until April 30 to exercise or decline the fourth-year option on Walsh’s contract.
Chris Martin, a 6-foot-1, 180-pound shooting guard from Elizabeth (N.J.) St. Patrick, has verbally committed to Marshall coach Tom Herrion.
“Yes,” Martin said by text.
A sharpshooting guard originally from Washington, D.C., Martin is the third St. Patrick senior to go Division 1, following Michael Gilchrist (Kentucky) and Derrick Gordon (Western Kentucky).
He also considered VCU and UAB, among others.
NEW YORK – After Amar’e Stoudemire signed a five-year, $100 million contract last summer, he stood in front of Madison Square Garden and boldly proclaimed, “The Knicks are back.”
Ironically, it is now his own troubled back that may pave the way for the Knicks to get swept by the Boston Celtics in their first-round playoff series.
No NBA franchise has ever come back from 3-0 down, and that’s exactly where the Knicks find themselves after Friday’s 113-96 blowout loss at Madison Square Garden.
“There’s no way I’ll be 100 percent by Sunday,” Stoudemire said of Game 4
