New York Knicks looking forward to beat the New Orleans Hornets tonight
Rivalries will be renewed and more may kindle when the Hornets and Knicks gather in a matchup at New Orleans Arena, LA at 8:00 pm on Friday night.
New Orleans coach Monty Williams used to play rookie for New York when the New Orleans Hornets won six straight games. He was indeed a lucky charm for the New York Knicks.
The New York Knicks are now trying to come back in this state and they will look to beat the New Orleans on Friday night. The New York Knicks (10-9) are over 500 at this time in the season for the first time since Jan, 4, 2005 when they were 16-15. The Knicks
accomplished seven of their eight overall games as they defeated the New Jersey Nets on 111-100 on Tuesday night.
“We are playing better and we can see we can get a lot better than this," New York coach Mike D'Antoni said. "We're all excited now, but reality is we'll go to New Orleans on Friday. That's going to be hard to win."
Poor Knicks, despite working hard on their defense and shooting they haven’t been successful in winning six straight games on the road since their seven-game run on Dec. 27, 1994 to Jan, 22, 1995. Williams used to play as reverse for the Knicks during that
season.
Williams, who once played for the Knicks is now a coach to the New Orleans Hornets (13-5). It turns out that he has been doing his job perfectly.
Williams has improved the New Orleans as a team under his coaching. They are slowly moving to the top of the league as they have been defending themselves very well. They are limiting the opposite teams to a shooting percentage of 43.1. This progress came
after their last season’s 48.3 percent mark that was NBA’s third-worst.
The Hornets have made the best home record and are at a tie in NBA with an 8-1 mark after they clinched a 89-73 victory against the Charlotte Bobcats on Wednesday.
"The hometown crowd is great," New Orleans center Emeka Okafor said. "It gave us that boost that we needed."
The Hornets sure have grown into a defensive team as they outscored the Bobcats while limiting them to 40.8 percent from the field. New Orleans Hornets scored 24 in the fourth quarter while limiting the Bobcats to 11.
"It's not going to be pretty all the time," Williams said later. "As a coach you'd like to have everything look nice and execute offense and guys come off screens and hit jump shots, but in the NBA you are going to have games like that and we are just glad
we came out on the winning side."
David West had 22 points and Chris Paul dished out 14 assists for the Hornets.
Paul and Felton to rekindle the long way rivalry
Paul and Raymond Felton who is the point guard of New York Knicks will renew a rivalry that started back in college. This rivalry began when Paul was at Wake Forest and Felton was at North Carolina. Both of them were drafted as fourth and fifth picks in
2005. Since then Paul has worked hard and played like a rebel and by doing so he has groomed into a three time all star.
Felton has an average of 18.2 points and 8.1 assists and he is having one of the best seasons of his career with New York these days. This tends to happen when you are playing with players as good as Amare Stoudemire, who has secured an average of 36.0 points
in the previous two games.
Stoudemire when playing for the Phoenix Suns last season successfully averaged 26.3 points on a shooting percentage of 62.7 while playing against the Hornets.
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