Melo: I was ‘fired’!
Carmelo Anthony gave Stephen A. Smith a long and thoughtful interview Friday morning, mostly covering why he’s unsigned and why he never ended up on a superteam.
The most interesting part came almost five minutes into the interview, when Anthony says “I felt like s—-” after the Rockets cut him.
“Your services are no longer needed,” that was an ego hit, that was a pride hit, I started questioning myself after that. Can I still do this? What did I do? I asked him, what did I do?
I felt like I was fired…other people go through that on a day-to-day basis, people get fired. I honestly feel like I got fired from that job.”
Anthony says he spiraled out from there, thinking that “at that point in time, I was like, ‘I don’t wanna do this no more.’ I don’t wanna deal with the politics of playing a sport that I love, and I felt like the game didn’t love me back at that point in time … I felt like I loved the game more than the game loved me.
“Now, I love the game too much to be away from it. I just love the game … I’m in it now, I got a new life about me. It took me a while to get out of that situation emotionally.”
Anthony says he’s willing to accept any role on a team now, but that getting pushed out of Houston was a “major, major ego hit.”
Much later in the interview, Smith brought up one of his pet takes: that Anthony should have signed a shorter extension in Denver in 2007, which would have enabled him to sign with the Heat in 2010.
Later, Anthony says that he took a longer deal with the Nuggets because of “immaturity … from a business standpoint not understanding where the game was going at that particular time, and still having the street mentality of, I’m not leaving no money on the table.”
The counterfactual Melo does engage in is 2014 free agency, when he says he was on the verge of signing with the Bulls:
“Then I started getting whispers behind the scenes” about the dysfunctional situation in Chicago, and those whispers were borne out: Tom Thibodeau was fired a year later.