I have been an avid NBA fan for many years and remember when Carmelo Anthony was drafted by the Denver Nuggets as the 3rd overall pick. He was hyped as one of the best players of that generation and let’s not forget that we’re talking about the generation of LeBron James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh, just being put in the same sentence as these guys means a lot, let alone that he was touted as a franchise player that could carry the team on his back and maybe even win a couple of titles along the way.
And for a long time, he was a franchise player, ever since he stepped foot in Denver he was the main go-to-guy for their offense and he transformed the team from a lottery pick team to a playoff contender. The Nuggets went from a 17-65 season to a 43 – 39 season, and in the process they were placed 8th on the Western Conference. They were eliminated in the first round by the Minnesota Timberwolves, but Denver didn’t care, because after a long time now they had someone that could possibly win them a championship.
Unfortunately for him and the Denver Nuggets it seemed that they were cursed, since they were getting eliminated every season on the first round. But in the 2008-09 season things changed for the Nuggets. After another great regular season, it was time for the playoffs, and this time they were ready. Carmelo Anthony helped his team reach the Western Conference Finals, this was all new for him because prior to this season he wasn’t able to win any playoff series. While he was playing like a true all-star, there was one big problem standing on his way to the NBA Finals, Kobe Bryant and the Los Angeles Lakers. Carmelo gave his all and managed to get 2 wins out of Lakers but still fell short and lost the series 4 – 2.
He decided to stay with the Nuggets for another season, yet again they fell short on the first round, and it seemed that was enough for Anthony and Denver Nuggets. He was traded to the New York Knicks. He was paired with Amar’e Stoudamire, a player who functioned wonderfully with Steve Nash in Phoenix, and was expected to perform at the same level in New York. The curse of the first-round exit would follow him even in the Big Apple. He stayed in New York until the 2017 offseason, and for the 7 seasons that he spent there, Knicks managed to qualify for the playoffs 3 times, and only one time reach the 2nd round of the playoffs.
During the 2017 offseason he had many conflicts with Phil Jackson, who was the team-president at that time for the New York Knicks, so he demanded a trade. He was traded to Oklahoma City Thunder for Doug McDermott, Enes Kanter and the second-round pick of 2018. OKC was planning an experiment, grouping Russell Westbrook, Carmelo Anthony and Paul George. Let’s just say that it was a failed experiment in the complete sense of the word. Anthony had the worst season of his career, scoring only 16.2 points per game, the lowest scoring season of his career, even lower than his rookie season. Oklahoma City Thunder lost in the first round of the playoffs from Utah Jazz, 2 – 4 in games.
OKC gave up on the Anthony experiment since it saw that adding 3 players that demand the ball all the time would never work, so they decided to trade him in a 3-team deal, where OKC would acquire Dennis Schroder from Atlanta Hawks and Cabarrot from 76ers. Anthony immediately accepted a buyout from Atlanta Hawks and thus he was a free agent.
Houston Rockets came in play and thought that Carmelo Anthony was the right piece needed to defeat the Golden State Warriors, as they had been embarrassed in game 7 of the Western Conference Finals last year, where they went 0/27 from three-point-line, so they thought adding a bone fide scorer like Carmelo Anthony would help them beat the Warriors at their own game, scoring. Anthony was desperate for a title shot and even accepted a veteran’s minimum contract worth $2.4 million. Boy oh boy were they wrong, Anthony was disastrous in the short tenure that he had with the Rockets. He played only 10 games and after that, the Rockets GM Daryl Morey said that they were “parting ways” with Carmelo Anthony, that was a diplomatic way of saying that we totally blew it and we shouldn’t have signed him. While it may have not been Anthony’s fault completely due to the fact that he is a player that plays a lot of ISO basketball, while the Rockets play basically run and gun, but his arrogance and laziness cost him his position on the team. At the beginning of the season he stated multiple times that he would not come off the bench and that he is definitely a starter. His laziness on defense, which is nothing new, opened a lot more cracks in the armor of the Rockets, imagine the result of having James Harden (one of the worst defenders in the league) and Carmelo Anthony (almost always lazy in defense) in the same squad.
At the moment Anthony has not said whether he will continue or retire from professional basketball, but many voices have come out saying that the best thing for him to do is to retire and not embarrass himself further.
