While D’Antoni is not the direct cause of Amare’s injury/back spasm, does he deserve some blame? Amare averaged almost 37 minutes a game this year which was 2 minutes over his career average. These extra minutes may have caused Amare to wear down faster and be more prone to injury. This is the danger of going with such a short rotation. It would have made a lot of sense for D’Antoni to reduce Amare’s minutes when Carmelo arrived but that clearly did not happen. The regular season is a grind but you want to be ready for the playoffs. The Knicks had a good idea for a while where they would end up in the playoffs but D’Antoni seemed overly concerned about finishing above .500, and those extra victories are not so helpful now that they are down 0-3 to the Celtics.