Sports

Enes Kanter fears he will be killed if he goes to London game

LOS ANGELES — Enes Kanter revealed after the Knicks’ 119-112 victory over the Lakers he won’t be heading to London for their game against the Wizards on Jan. 17.

Kanter has an invalid Turkish passport because of his long-running feud against Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the political dictator in his home country. Kanter said he’s worried about “spies’’ in London.

“I talk to the front office and decided I’m not going,’’ Kanter said. “The freaking lunatic, there’s a chance I can get killed out there. I talked to the front office. I’m not going. I’m going to stay here and practice. It’s pretty sad. All this stuff affects my career in basketball. I want to help my team win, but because of one lunatic guy I can’t even go there to do my job. It’s pretty sad. They got a lot of spies there. I can get killed pretty easy.’’





A Knicks spokesman clarified that Kanter won’t be traveling to London because of “these issues.”

Kanter scored 16 points with 15 rebounds in the win, playing 27 minutes off the bench. Earlier this week. Kanter met with general manager Scott Perry over his demoted role and the team’s losing, but apparently London also came up. Kanter has not asked for a trade despite his displeasure in the team’s direction.

“The Pyramid of Success’’ poster hangs in Knicks coach David Fizdale’s office. The pyramid details John Wooden’s famous principles for building successful teams.

Fizdale is a Los Angeles native who stayed in state to play point guard for San Diego. He got the Knicks to practice at UCLA for two straight days — hopefully to gain karma from the ghost of “The Wizard of Westwood.’’





Fizdale sat down with the late Wooden when he was a young assistant coach at San Diego in about 2001, when the Hall of Famer met with the Toreros’ coaching staff.

“I was lucky enough my college coach, Brad Holland, was his last recruit to UCLA,’’ Fizdale said after the shootaround Friday at UCLA. “I was lucky enough to spend some time with Coach Wooden. I still have his autographed book and one of his cards of his pyramid and the whole pyramid in my office. I cherish those.”

Fizdale’s cousin, Roy Hamilton, played for UCLA in the 1970s immediately following Wooden’s retirement, and was teammates with former Bruins star David Greenwood. Fizdale wasn’t starry enough to get recruited by UCLA, but played the Bruins as a freshman at San Diego. Fizdale said he “dropped a couple of buckets’’ at Pauley Pavilion.





“Obviously this is a big part of influence on my life and my basketball world,’’ Fizdale said of the revered campus.

In a nutshell, “The Pyramid of Success’’ was Wooden’s recipe for greatness and focuses on the fundamentals and intangibles of trust, punctuality and not taking shortcuts.

“I just find it phenomenal, the thought that went into building it,’’ Fizdale said. “You have to go through some stuff to be able to figure out that that was what’s necessary. I think all coaches take a look at that pyramid to learn from it. It’s all of it, it’s a very holistic approach to basketball.”

Though Pat Riley is considered Fizdale’s Miami mentor, Wooden came first.





“It was just good conversations,’’ Fizdale said of their sit-down. “I forgot how old he was. I was still a young coach. I was young young. It was his presence and patience he had talking to us. It was just an honor to say I got to do that before he passed [in 2010].’’

Some Knicks officials attended UCLA’s home game against Stanford on Thursday. Bruins guard Kris Wilkes is considered a first-round pick.

Rookie Mitchell Robinson was ruled out hours before game time as he missed a ninth straight game with a sprained left ankle.

“We’re going to hold him out a little longer,” Fizdale said. “It’s more important for us to be cautious.”

Once Robinson returns, Fizdale will have a trio of centers to juggle. Kanter eventually could be the odd man out, but the Knicks coach suggested he would try to get all three of them minutes. Fizdale said he still wants to see more of Luke Kornet, who started his fourth straight game Friday against the Lakers and scored six points in 21 minutes.

“That’s going to be a juggling act that I’ve got to figure out, trying to get them all minutes and get them all where they all go, like they can get their feet wet and contribute,’’ Fizdale said. “That’s stuff that we’ve been talking about as a staff.”





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