A Players-Only Meeting? That Can't Be Good News From left, Paul Pierce, Reggie Evans and Shaun Livingston during a Nets loss on Monday. A players-only meeting followed the game. When Chuck Daly was coaching the Orlando Magic in the late 1990s and his team was mired in a rough patch, he learned that a couple of his players were itching for a players-only meeting. Eric Musselman, one of his young assistants, recalled how Daly recruited him to relay a message to Horace Grant: permission denied. Players-only meeting? Daly groaned. Not good. Not needed. Its efficacy has been debated. Its origins are unclear. But the players-only meeting, a staple of losing teams everywhere, has remained an enduring tradition in professional sports, much to the disappointment of countless coaches. Like fungus, the players-only meeting refuses to die. It is alive and well in New York, where the Knicks and the Nets have had losing in common this season. Lots of losing. Lots of angst. And one locker-room summit apiece, as each team sought to solve its problems behind closed doors without the coaching staff. Carmelo Anthony may have set an unofficial record by organizing a players-only session for the Knicks just four games into the regular season, after a loss to the Charlotte Bobcats on Nov. 5. Anthony said he wanted to get everyone together to "figure out" what was going wrong. Anthony used the same language after the Knicks were clobbered four days later by the San Antonio Spurs, and again after Wednesday's loss to the Indiana Pacers. Therein lies a danger. If a players-only meeting is considered an emergency measure, what happens if the team continues to free-fall? Consider the Nets, who called for a players-only meeting after Monday's loss to the Portland Trail Blazers. Kevin Garnett, a 19-year veteran who has seldom been a muted locker-room presence, described his teammates as being "fired up" and speaking with intensity. Garnett said he wanted to gauge their commitment. "It shows you who's within, who has the rope and who's going to let go," he said. I think it really goes out and separates the ones that are willing to fight. And so far, everybody's in here, man. Everybody's in the conversation. We don't have one or two guys floating throughout. We're in here. Sadly for the Nets, the meeting did not seem particularly effective, as they lost on Wednesday to the Bobcats. The Nets and the Knicks are not alone. The Cleveland Cavaliers staged a meeting last week after a 29-point loss to the Minnesota Timberwolves. It reportedly got contentious. Dion Waiters missed the next two games with what the team described as an illness, but denied that he was involved in a physical altercation. The N.H.L."s Columbus Blue Jackets had one of their own after losing by seven goals to the Edmonton Oilers on Tuesday. "You never hear about players-only meetings when everything is going well," said Tony Barone Sr., a former coach of the Memphis Grizzlies. "If you have one, the first reaction is always: "What's wrong?" It's never: "Hey, that's great. You guys must really love each other." " Few coaches would ever admit to being happy about players gathering on their own to air various grievances, Barone said. For a team that is already fragile, it can create dangerous divisions: between the coaching staff and the players, and even among teammates. The only way it works, Barone said, is if a respected veteran calls the meeting and makes a point of using the pronoun "we." The meeting has to be positive, he said. It cannot turn into an hourlong blame game. "If you've got a whiner leading it and he gets five or six numbskulls going along with him, that's a disaster waiting to happen," Barone said. One of the oddities is that players meet by themselves all the time: on the road, in the weight room, over meals. Musselman, a former coach of the Sacramento Kings and the Golden State Warriors, said he learned long ago that the locker room should be the players" sanctuary. When Musselman was an assistant under Doc Rivers, he recalled that Rivers permitted the coaches to be inside the locker room for only pregame and postgame talks. Otherwise, that space was off-limits to them. As Cole Aldrich, a center with Knicks, observed this week, "We spend more time together than we do with our own families." Andrew Keh contributed reporting.