About two hours before the Knicks opened their preseason schedule Wednesday night with a 100-81 victory over Bauru Basket of the Brazilian league, Coach Derek Fisher met with his players, he said, to address an issue that had nothing to do with basketball.
“I’m here, I’m focused and it’s not something that’s going to take me away from who we are or what we’re trying to do,” Fisher recalled telling his players. “I assured them of that.”
Fisher revealed that he had met with the team after he was asked during his pregame news conference about published reports that Matt Barnes, a former teammate, had confronted him on Saturday night at the Los Angeles-area home of Barnes’s estranged wife.