Carmelo Anthony must change his game to thrive with the Thunder. Can he do it?

There’s a player named Carmelo Anthony playing for the Oklahoma City Thunder now.

Just like that, Anthony’s wish to finally leave New York has been granted. We’ve waited nearly two years for the Knicks to trade him, and we’ve accepted over the past few months that the possibility of a trade had turned into an inevitability.

To the Thunder? At least for the public, this trade materialized in the span of 24 hours, and the suddenness has begot a hundred different questions about everything that went down.

It’s the question that has been the undertone of every Carmelo trade rumor of the past year or two.

We know facts about Anthony: He’s 33, he’s a power forward who would rather play small forward, he loves to take shots, and he’s so much better wearing a hoodie. We know about his pedigree and his 10 All-Star appearances. We know he hasn’t won much in his career, but we also know that he starred on playoff teams in Denver and a 54-win club in New York. Granted, only one Denver squad and that 2012-13 Knicks team made it past the first round.

As Anthony squandered seven mostly bad years in New York, we’ve lost track of who Anthony the player really is. Somehow, Anthony constantly made headlines while in New York and still became a national afterthought for what he was doing on the court.

But now, Anthony finally has left. In Oklahoma City, he’s suddenly relevant again for basketball reasons, not just tabloid fodder. We finally can find out who he is again, basketball wise.

Honestly, he needs to do the same thing.

Anthony is, in some ways, an improved version of Enes Kanter, one of the players traded for him. Kanter’s role for the Thunder was simply to score, and he was so effective at it that the team would sometimes try to play him next to Steven Adams. Because Kanter is a slow-footed 6’11 player, it rarely worked. That the Thunder even tried it showed their need for offense.

There are concerns with Anthony’s game, of course. Anthony has spent the last three seasons boasting a True Shooting Percentage around 53 percent, too inefficient for someone who takes as many shots as he does. He’s still foremost an isolation player — he had the third-most isolation plays in the league, though he did average 0.99 points per possession. (Russell Westbrook had 127 more isolation possessions and averaged 0.94 points per possession, for what it’s worth.)

Will those numbers will follow Anthony to his new home? Maybe not. This season, Anthony will fall into a secondary scoring role for the first time in years. He shot nearly 43 percent on catch-and-shoot three-pointers on 3.5 attempts per game, and that second number that should skyrocket.

Oklahoma City would be smart to carve out secondary scoring roles for Anthony, like punishing post mismatches and experimenting with him as a roll man, something he hasn’t done much the past two seasons. Anthony will never stop shooting his jab step mid-range jumper, sure, and there are times where that’s beneficial. But with other scoring outlets, it can’t be his only means of production.

Basically, the team needs a helluva coaching year from Billy Donovan entering his third year.

Some of Anthony’s best basketball since coming to New York has come in another uniform: the Team USA one. Surrounded by other stars, Anthony adapted perfectly. He balanced his isolation scoring with transition pull-ups, hardly ever missed, and ended up becoming Team USA’s all-time leading scorer last year.

That’s the Anthony that the Thunder are hoping they get. Despite benefitting from last year’s full Westbrook experience, Oklahoma City was only the 17th best offense in the league. In the starting lineup, they need Anthony as a spot-up shooter to help open up the Westbrook-Steven Adams pick-and-roll again.

When Westbrook leaves the floor, Anthony can serve as a pure scorer who ties together a defensive-minded bench unit. The Thunder bench was horrible in Westbrook’s minutes off the floor last year; with George and Anthony in tow, that should never be a problem for this team again.

We don’t know if Anthony can be that player — his time in New York was so radically different that we really can’t say either way — but the Thunder are betting on it. So is Carmelo! It was his no-trade clause that he waived to come here. He liked how Oklahoma City was set up.

Can he find himself again?

Let’s make one thing clear: If Anthony opts into the final $28 million left on his deal, he could be the last man standing in Oklahoma City. Westbrook still hasn’t accepted a huge long-term extension that has been on the table since July, and George has been linked to the Lakers by a thousand rumors. Both can hit free agency next summer.

It’s a cash problem, which still rules everything around the NBA. In some ways, this emerging superteam is the Thunder’s penance for breaking up an earlier, younger, even more dangerous one five years ago. Oklahoma City will be millions over the salary cap next season ... and may pay nearly that same amount in luxury tax, too. The small-market Oklahoma City Thunder.

Westbrook, George, and Anthony. The Thunder have those three players and an expensive team to boot. Yet I’m still not comfortable saying that they’re definitively better than a top-four team in the West.

Oh, sure, they might be. After the Warriors, it’s not quite clear how the Spurs-Rockets-Thunder trio will shake out, and Oklahoma City has other key questions to answer. After all, Westbrook is a reigning MVP who must undergo a not-entirely-subtle change to his approach.

But most of the unknowns will come to rest on Anthony. He’s on the best team with the best teammates of his career, in an environment so starkly different from New York. There’s no triangle-pushy team president, no weird power dynamic with a young Latvian franchise player. Anthony knows, for the first time, he’s not the top option on his team.

But he might be the most important, because so much of the Thunder’s success rests on him.