LeBron sees Knicks as playoff threat as rivalry re-heats - New York Daily News

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LeBron James (l.) will see old friend Carmelo Anthony Sunday and maybe again in first round of playoffs, where he won’t take Knicks lightly.

MIAMI â€" It might be a preview of No. 2 versus No. 7 in the East Sunday at the Garden, but this time, LeBron James isn’t thinking that the Heat’s potential first-round opponent, the Knicks, is merely breakfast.

More like lunch.
James has too much respect for Carmelo Anthony to think the Heat will have an easy time if the two old rivals meet in the first round in two weekends. There will be no mention of putting away the Knicks and comparing it to “finishing our breakfast,” which is what James did when the Heat made short work of its first-round opponent, the Sixers, last spring.
“We’ve seen so many different teams from the Knicks this year,” James said late Friday after the Heat demolished the overmatched Bobcats, even as Dwyane Wade, Mike Miller and Udonis Haslem took the night off. “It’s a different team now, but a really good team.”
The Heat is also a much different team, and not for the better, than the one the Knicks last saw on Feb. 23. That night, Miami ate Jeremy Lin alive, effectively putting an end to Linsanity.
“I can’t remember another game when it was just hard to take dribbles,” Lin said afterward.
The dominating performance moved the Heat to 27-7 and nobody in the NBA looked better. Not the Bulls. Not the Thunder. Not the Lakers. Not the Spurs. Not the Celtics.
The Heat bullied Lin, ran the break and wiped the floor with Mike D’Antoni’s team.
“I remember that game like it was yesterday,” James said. “We can get back to that.”
Can they? If so, then the Heat is going to end up playing in the Finals again. After Miami took apart Lin, the talk at the All-Star Game in Orlando that weekend was all about the Heat rolling to another Finals.
But since then, the Heat is 14-10 and now all the talk in Miami is about, well, Ozzie Guillen, who seemed to be lobbying for the Havana Sugar Kings managerial post when he praised Fidel Castro, Public Enemy No. 1 in these parts for only about the last 53 years. There’s been a good deal of conversation about the Florida Panthers making their first playoff appearance in 12 years. There’s also the typical pre-NFL draft hysteria concerning the Dolphins, who still are looking for Dan Marino’s replacement, 12 seasons after he took his last snap.
As Dan Sileo, the old Miami Hurricane football player, and now a loose cannon on an afternoon radio sports talk show put it, “If there wasn’t all this talk about Ozzie the Communist, then we’d be getting on Erik Spoelstra.”
And that observation came several hours before Spoelstra’s team collapsed in overtime in Chicago, making Miami 3-8 on the road since the All-Star break. That unsightly log includes losses to the Lakers, Chicago, Oklahoma City, Indiana, Boston and the latest debacle in Chicago, when the
Heat allowed C.J. Watson to tie the game on a 3-pointer in the last seconds, after James missed a foul shot that would have iced a signature win.
Now it’s another major test for the Heat in its lone Garden appearance of the season â€" unless the seeds hold over the final handful of games.
“I don’t know if it’s like a statement game,” James said. “But we want to play better than we have on the road and it’s a good place to play, knowing that more than likely, we’ll play them in the first round.”
David Stern might just like the matchup.
It would be a renewal of the blood feud that we haven’t seen since 2000, the last time the Knicks won a playoff series. The old-timers down here are still carping that in the waning moments of Game 7, Clarence Weatherspoon ended up taking the biggest shot of the season for the Heat.
More than a decade later, the players are friends. Melo and James have been racking up big scoring games against each other since their high school days. The only fight would be over where they’d dine after games. But the Heat is coming to New York with a specific goal in mind.
“We don’t want them to get any confidence on us,” Chris Bosh said.

Somebody then asked if playing the Knicks in the post-season would be a daunting challenge, compared to the typical No. 7 seed.

“I wouldn’t say daunting,” Bosh said. “We know that they’re good. We know what they’re capable of. They’re on a roll and that makes the importance of Sunday’s game â€" it increases it because it’s a playoff matchup.”
This time, rest assured, there won’t be any talk of finishing breakfast.