Up to Carmelo to embrace change
CARMELO Anthony was talking about his new teammate and his newest sidekick, Derrick Rose, maybe 40 minutes after the Knicks had opened their season with a humbling 117-88 thrashing at the hands of the Cavaliers on Tuesday night. Specifically, he was discussing the period of adjustment confronting Rose, old team to new, old system to new, Chicago to New York.
“We want guys to feel comfortable with who they are,” Anthony said. “We don’t want to change anyone’s game. If Derrick is comfortable with the high pick-and-roll, we want to utilize guys’ strengths.” He paused. “That’s who he is and who he’s always been,” Anthony said. “We don’t want to take that from him.”
All of this had come under the umbrella of a specific theme: “We have to figure out who we are as a team. There’s so many moving parts right now, and we’re trying to figure it out.” One more pause. “We’ll come together soon enough,” he said. He was right on a lot of fronts, too. Rose was clearly rusty, although that was more a product of being 3,000 miles away from his teammates for the latter half of training camp. Often, he wound up defaulting to his old weapons, which resulted in a lot of — Rose’s word — “over-penetrating.” Even in a 29-point flattening there were signs of How Things Could Be.
It was just hard to notice because of the overwhelming supply of evidence of How Things Are Now.
And Rose wasn’t alone in that.
Just as often, especially as things got out of hand in the third quarter, Jeff Hornacek’s offense looked a little too much like Kurt Rambis’ offense — and Derek Fisher’s offense, and Mike Woodson’s offense, and even Mike D’Antoni’s offense.
Which is to say: Melo on the Iso.
Melo running the shot clock to zero.
Melo taking it himself as four teammates admire his handiwork.
Look: This is always going to be at least a part of who the Knicks are on offense, for as long as Anthony remains the focal point of the team. Isolation is the privilege of the offensive elite, and when it’s an accepted part of the grander scheme, it works fine.
Nobody much minds the six or seven times a game when Steph Curry disregards the Warriors’ offense, takes a couple of courtesy dribbles and launches from 27 feet. Nobody much minds (well, maybe Kevin Durant did, as it turns out) when Russell Westbrook turns segments of Thunder games into his own version of H-O-R-S-E.
And bank on this: If the Knicks are going to be as good as they believe they can be this year, there will be more than a couple of games that will come down to Anthony getting on the kind of roll he got on toward the end of the first quarter, when he scored 11 points in a row for the Knicks. And on a night when two-fifths of the Knicks starters didn’t score … well, someone had to create some offense.
But if we’re still having this conversation in February — or even mid-December, for that matter — then something will have gone terrible wrong with the Knicks’ development. Anthony has said all the right things about wanting to meld his game into the bigger picture. Once more thus summer, in Rio, he proved that isn’t just talk, either.
It’s a matter of record in his career: You present Anthony with an opportunity to be a part of something whole, he not only agrees ”toit, he embraces it. There have just been too many times in his years as a Knick when he searches for foxhole guys and instead ends up with Samuel Dalembert or Jose Calderon. His present array of teammates, specif ically Rose, ought to be the trick. But that’s also on Anthony, too. The whole season can’t be a series of reverting to default positions. Or else the whole season will quickly fall into default.