Add Patrick Ewing and Bernard King to Charles Oakley's hit list.
Oakley, who already has an ongoing feud with Knicks owner James Dolan, switched gears to focus his disdain on two Hall of Famers, one of which he played with during the franchise's last glory days in the 1990s.
Oakley spent 10 years in New York and was an integral piece to the puzzle of one of the best teams in franchise history. But in a recent interview, Oakley said that Knicks team didn't win a title because of Ewing.
"We were held back because we had to wait for him," Oakley said on CBS Sports Radio. " Every superstar in this league, if you don't go through adversity, if you try to duck and dodge it, it's gonna damper your team. And we got dampered that way.
"If you're going to take 30 shots a game, you've got to put us on your back. And Patrick, he never put us on his back like he should have because any adversity, he ducked away from it," Oakley said. "Ask any beat writer, he basically gave the same answer for 80-f(ASTERISK)(ASTERISK)king-2 games a year."
The Knicks team Oakley is referring to is the best thing the franchise has had in over two decades. It was a team that scrapped, clawed, defended and won basketball games, year after year from the late 1980s through the late '90s.
The Knicks took a trip to the NBA Finals in 1994 with Ewing at center, John Starks in the back court and both Oakley and Anthony Mason in the front court.
"He was a high-maintenance player," Oakley said of Ewing. "Everybody in the world knows he was. You got to be special to play with Patrick. You had to do so much out of your ordinary just to be on the team, and that hurt us sometimes. As a team, we're supposed to be close and together. It wasn't that. We had to make sure he was happy. He didn't care if we was happy or not. That's a sad situation, and I see why the Knicks won't give him a job. He treated them bad _ inside out. Chris (Childs) will tell you. He was tough to play with, but he wasn't no problem to me because I understand. Mase (Anthony Mason) had a problem with it because Mase always hollered and cussed at him."
Oakley also holds a grudge against the Knicks legends who went to Madison Square Garden and sat with James Dolan just four days after Dolan had him removed from his seats, arrested and banned from the arena. That includes Bernard King, who Oakley said should have known better.
"I addressed it to him, too, at John Starks Foundation two years ago. He said, well you know, my wife wanted to go to the game. I said Bernard, this man made you turn off your Twitter account, and you're gonna tell me that out of 41 home games, this is the game your wife wanted to go to?"
"I wanted to smack Bernard. Serious. I lost so much respect for him. I can't even speak to him."
As for his relationship with Dolan, Oakley says he doesn't know what more he can do. He said he tried to shake the Knicks' owner's hand in New Orleans, but Dolan wouldn't extend the same courtesy back.
"I don't know what the grudge is about me. He said it's something I said in the paper. Every headline in the paper, I don't write them. My story's inside the paper, not the headline."
