Carmelo Anthony is by universal acclaim one of the game's great pure scorers, a terrifying shotmaker who can take over any game he plays. What Melo has is unattainable for 95 percent of the universe.
Carmelo Anthony can’t win
The Knicks star wants nothing more than to gain acceptance among the league’s elite. That may be impossible.
Kelley L Cox-USA TODAY Sports
But what he wants is even further out of reach. That is acceptance into the rarefied circle of the game's truly elite players alongside LeBron James and Kevin Durant.
For Melo, exclusion from that company constitutes blatant disrespect. For others, it’s an indisputable conclusion. The distance between those two extreme stances is not that far, yet it may as well be an infinite chasm.
The limitations of his approach are obvious -- an indifference to defense that borders on neglect, and not so much a refusal to share the ball as a predisposition to score from anywhere on the court. He has adapted over the years, notably exchanging some of his ball-stopping two-point attempts for more efficient threes, but he has never seriously changed his game the way other stars have at transformative moments in their careers. A decade into his career, Melo is more or less as he was: a great scorer, just not a top-five player.
New Start for Knicks
Ranking players is a time-honored yet soulless exercise in basketball wonkery that strips the fabric of players down to their essence. Outside of the very best, it comes down to semantic arguments about order. Does it really matter if someone is 79th or 57th once you get past the top 20? Does the top 10 matter when the top two are so clearly differentiated from the rest? That the very best happen to play roughly the same position as Melo only adds to his dismissal, if not distrust, of the system.
Anthony caused a stir early in training camp by declaring himself the most underrated superstar in the NBA, which was the wrong read on a number of levels. His argument really just amounted to a rather callow defense of his reputation. Melo went with the familiar athlete trope: attacking analysts who don’t play the game. Inconvenient writers who focus on his defensive shortcomings and lackluster postseason track record have long been the bane of Melo’s existence.
Besides being unoriginal, his rebuttal is not all that current since there has actually been a favorable revision of his place in the game in recent years. At this point in his career, Melo is neither overrated nor underrated. We all see him for what he is, and with that has come a greater appreciation of his talent.
Still, it’s hard to blame him for his defensiveness. His game has been picked apart for years. As a casualty of the great metrics wars of the late Aughts and early teens, Anthony has faced his share of scorn and ridicule. Sentiment began to shift his way during the 2012-13 season when he became the centerpiece of a rather shocking 54-win season. With that came a gradual acceptance that Carmelo Anthony is a really freaking good basketball player, just not at that exalted LeBron/KD level.
It's a battle Melo can't win unless he somehow leads these ragtag Knicks back to Eden or drastically overhauls his game. Neither seem likely, unless the Triangle unlocks some hidden strengths and allows not only him, but also his teammates to play above their expectations. It's also possible that he'll fight the new system on the empirical grounds that the Knicks are better served when he creates opportunities for himself, which might be accurate but would also challenge the entire premise of Phil Jackson's mission.
There was a trump card at his disposal last summer. Free agency was a chance to start fresh and free himself from the burden of carrying a team that was not built to his specific needs. He could have chosen to go somewhere like Chicago that would have given him a better chance in the standings, but perversely would have diminished his standing among his peers.
In Chicago, Melo would have been part of an ensemble with the Bulls, a cog in a larger machine and a means to an end. In New York, he remains the undisputed leading man and it's hard to argue with his decision both in personal, and especially, financial terms. Rarely have the smart play and the right play been so at odds.
Melo made his choice and the analysts have made theirs. Both can live in harmony if they accept the others’ rationale, but neither is likely to find satisfaction.
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