Melo was greater than NYC deserved
Carmelo Anthony, currently out of work the way his old friend (well….) Jeremy Lin is, probably feels that he is the least-appreciated great player the Knicks ever had. That happens to be right, and so is what he said on “First Take” the other day:
“I feel like I still can play, I know I still can play. My peers know I still can play.”
It doesn’t mean he was even close to being the biggest star in the game in his time, or a perfect teammate. Even at his best, he made you think he was the kind of ball-stopper that James Harden is in Houston. Knick fans who still haven’t gotten over Linsanity will never forgive him for what they decided was ‘Melo’s role in running Lin out of town.
Anthony will always be one of the most polarizing figures in Knicks history, the kind of figure that Alex Rodriguez was with the Yankees, especially after A-Rod became the captain of the Biogenesis AllStars. Except there was never any scandal like that with Anthony, a better guy than A-Rod ever was or ever will be, no matter how many times we have to hear from J-Lo’s boyfriend how he’s evolved.
There was just something about Melo that just made Knicks fans really, really angry. But no matter how angry he makes them still, and how happy they were to see him go, you better know this about the guy:
He was great during the only Knicks season worth talking about in the last two decades. That was the 2012-13 season, when the Knicks, led by Anthony and coached by Mike Woodson (who doesn’t
have a coaching job right now), won 54 games and won the team’s only playoff series since the spring of 2000 and should have ended up playing LeBron and the Heat in the Eastern Conference finals that year.
The Knicks didn’t make it, of course. They got upset by the Pacers in the conference semifinals, after they didn’t sweep the Celtics in the first round at home when they had the chance. So the Pacers came into the Garden and stole Game 1, and finally there was a huge moment at the end of Game 6 in Indianapolis when Roy Hibbert stuffed Carmelo. The Knicks lost the game and the series and their season and haven’t been any good since.
It was still some season. Jason Kidd ran the offense and J.R. Smith – him – won Sixth Man of the Year. And Carmelo was something to see. He averaged 28.7 points a game and seven rebounds. LeBron won MVP that year. Kevin Durant finished second in the voting. Anthony finished third. The last Knick before him to even sniff an MVP was Patrick Ewing.
You know everything that happened to Anthony and around him at the Garden after that. Phil Jackson came back to run the team and signed Anthony to a max deal even though he clearly didn’t want to. Phil, a joke and complete failure as team president, began the process of being the latest executive to run the Knicks into the ground. Anthony was on his way out of town. And people immediately developed amnesia about the player Anthony had been when the Knicks won the Atlantic Division and actually mattered again, as if he were the same kind of bust-out case as a player that Jackson was as an executive.
Listen: Anthony came to New York from Denver to get paid, not because of any of the phony romance and mythology about the Garden being a mecca. And, man oh man, did he ever get paid. He ended up in Oklahoma City after he left the Knicks and then Houston, where he got blamed for everything except Hurricane Harvey, spending 10 games with the Rockets that felt more like 10 minutes. Now he is 35, and looking for a job. It is ironic that both he and Lin are out of work in pro basketball at the same time, especially since Anthony got blamed for not only running Mr. Linsanity out of the big, bad city, but Mike D’Antoni, too. The fact that all three of them ended up in Houston, and that D’Antoni is still there, is some sort of weird cosmic basketball joke.
But there is this idea now that Anthony is some sort of career loser. Only he is not. He wasn’t a loser in Denver, even if the Nuggets only made it to the conference finals once. Did he become the complete player in the pros that he was as a freshman at Syracuse, when his team won a national championship? Everybody knows the answer to that, even