(Charles) Oakley, who spent a charitable Friday morning cooking and serving Thanksgiving dinners to seniors in the lower East Side, said that for a while he “cried and tried” to get a job in the Knicks organization, with no luck.

The 48-year-old has heard it’s because he’s too critical of his former team — a no-no at the Garden, as Marv Albert also discovered.

“They say I’m hard on them. I say, I’m not hard on them; that’s just the way the game goes and people have opinions,” Oakley said. “Ex-players I talk to, they say, ‘Management, they like you. But sometimes it’s the way you say things, the way you do things.’

“(Dolan) shouldn’t be mad at me because all I did was come before him and play the hardest and the best I could do. I’m going to be a Knick for life, though, no matter what people say.”

Oakley was also critical of the way the Knicks have treated (Patrick) Ewing, who was offered a D-League coaching job instead of the Knicks’ assistant gig given to LaSalle Thompson.

via Stefan Bondy of the New York Daily News