If this is really it for Melo, Jax is

The harsh reality facing Carmelo Anthony is that there’s nothing here for him anymore. For purposes of winning at basketball, for purposes of structure and sanity, there are 27 other teams that are a better fit (taking out the Nets and Kings). If he wants to dwindle down those options to a couple, that’s Anthony’s rarefied right because of the no-trade clause.

But this is one of the few battles Phil Jackson is poised to win as a failed NBA executive — disenfranchising the franchise player.

“I don’t even know my role. I don’t know my role to be honest,” Anthony said Wednesday. “I’m just here to help those guys and keep those guys positive and motivated and I’ll get in where I fit in.”

Anthony is only 32 years old, too young to serve as a mentor player/coach to the likes of Ron Baker, Maurice N’Dour and Chasson Randle. He knows that. There’s too much basketball left in his legs to take on a reduced role for the sake of a rebuild — for more losing and better lottery odds. To use Anthony’s words from Wednesday, “I see the writing on the wall.”

“I don’t think me going out there, trying to score 30 and 40 every night and playing that way is going to help (my younger teammates) out at this point," Anthony added after he scored just nine points in 28 minutes of a loss, one that mathematically eliminated New York from the playoffs for a fourth straight year.

That quote is what letting go of the rope sounds like. Anthony is nothing if not a scorer.

The Knicks shopped him prior to the trade deadline and they’ll do it again over the summer, likely with more success. Anthony is arguably the greatest Knick since Patrick Ewing, and like Ewing, the goodbye feels more like a shove out the door from the