By Jimmy Sullivan

It is becoming increasingly clear that the game of basketball is passing Carmelo Anthony by.

At age 34, the former Denver Nugget and New York Knick signed a one-year deal with the Houston Rockets before this season. Houston wanted some more firepower after a playoff run that left them one win shy of knocking off the defending-champion Golden State Warriors in the Western Conference Finals in 2018. They were hoping Carmelo could give them the offensive spark they needed to send them over the edge in the Western Conference.

Narrator voice: he didn’t.

Anthony has been a total flop in 10 games with the Rockets, posting the lowest Player Efficiency Rating (PER, for short), minutes per game and points per game figures of his 16-year career. These career-lows surpass last season, where he set his previous career-low in all of those categories with the Oklahoma City Thunder. Last year was also a spectacular failure for Anthony and his team; the former had his worst career season, and the latter lost in the first round to the upstart Jazz. Anthony was terrible in the playoffs, scoring just 71 points in the six-game series and shooting 6-for-28 from behind the arc. This year, the Rockets are clearly better without him and would be well-served to cut him loose, which is what they are reportedly planning to do in the not-too-distant future. Anthony is coming into the last stage of his career, and it is fair to wonder whether or not he has anything left in the tank.

But I will not tolerate the slander of Anthony’s accomplishments and time in basketball. Here’s why.

The small forward who won a national title in his only season at Syracuse was pegged with wild expectations since the age of 17. In high school, Anthony’s Oak Hill team faced off against St. Vincent-St. Mary in February of 2002. You might have heard of the star of that St. Vincent-St. Mary team: LeBron James. Anthony’s squad won 72-66 in a game that was nationally-televised on ESPN. The next year, Carmelo attended Syracuse and carried the Orange to a national championship in his only collegiate season. The whole world knew of his talent, and as it turns out, he was just getting started.

He went into the draft that summer as one of the top players in arguably the most stacked draft class of all-time. Anthony was taken third that year by the Denver Nuggets, sandwiched between James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh. Melo was asked to carry a straggling Nuggets franchise into the future, and he did just that; Denver made the playoffs each of the first five years of his career, but each season was marked by a first-round exit that didn’t take more than five games. The 2008-09 season, though, would be Denver’s breakthrough, as the team reached the conference finals before ultimately losing to Kobe Bryant and Pau Gasol’s Lakers. Two years later, he was traded to the Knicks and, well, there have been many words written about that, but it’s still worth mentioning here.

His time in New York was much-maligned, and many criticized him for not being able to get the Knicks further in the playoffs in his seven years with the organization. The fact is, however, that the Knicks never surrounded their superstar player with enough talent for the team to be successful. The Knicks won 54 games in 2012-13 and finished with the second-best record in the Eastern Conference in one of the most bizarre one-off campaigns in recent memory. Anthony finished third in the MVP voting and led the team to the second round of the playoffs before being bounced by the Indiana Pacers. The rest is history: the Knicks hire Phil Jackson in 2014, he immediately gets in a power struggle with Anthony and others while trying to build the Knicks in an image that would never be successful all while publicly feuding with his star player. Anthony outlasted Jackson, as the latter resigned in 2017, and Anthony was traded to the Thunder last Sept., which is where we are now.

He was part of the best draft class in the history of the league and somehow still stood out. He sometimes gets lost in this era of NBA superstars like LeBron, Kevin Durant, Wade, Tim Duncan, Bryant and others, but his achievements should never be glossed over in the annals of NBA history.
I don’t say that lightly, either. Until last year, Carmelo averaged 20 points per game in each of his first 14 NBA seasons. The full list of players to do that over the course of an entire career? Michael Jordan, James and Durant. Durant was drafted in 2007 and Jordan played 15 seasons. You can pick on Anthony’s efficiency, which indeed is what has doomed him in the last act of his career. But he is one of the best pure scorers in the history of the league, and his impending downfall shouldn’t prevent us from recognizing that.

Carmelo Anthony is my generation’s Bernard King—always putting up great numbers and almost always doing so on subpar teams. I’m not accepting the unrelenting criticism of Carmelo, and you shouldn’t, either.