What Carmelo (and what not) did to get to Springfield
Six teams, 19 seasons, 3 gold medals and 28,289 points: Here is why Melo’s career will be remembered for much more than a Résumé of the Hall of Fame.
Hakim Warrick still Remember the first time I saw Carmelo Anthony before an informal party in the Syracuse University More than 20 years ago.
When the team jumped to the court in the old training facilities Manley Field House Of the Orange, that summer day of 2002, Warrick was skeptical, to put it gently.
“He looked at him and thought: ‘Is this plump that excites everyone so much?'” Warrick told AM850.
The second year student soon understood why. Baltimore’s talented forward, with round features, had a very complete game and quickly consolidated 27 points in his university debut against Memphis in the Madison Square Garden.
Anthony’s solo season in Syracuse was an unprecedented success: the team began without ranking and ended with A 30-5 record. He scored more points than any first -year student in the history of the program and became the First ‘Freshman’ of the History of the NCAA to be named Most prominent player of the Final Four. He took Syracuse to his first and only male basketball title in 2003 with 33 points and 14 rebounds in the semifinals about Texas, and 20 points, 10 rebounds and 7 assists in the championship game on Kansas.
“He stands out,” said Jim Boeheim, Syracuse coach for a long time, Espn. “We have had great players.Dave) Bing, who was an incredible player, to Pearl (Washington), Sherman (Douglas), Derrick (Coleman), Rony Seikaly, Billy Owens, John Wallace. There have been many. But Carmelo won it. It is quite simple. He was a great player and won. “
However, there would be no championships to continue in the 19 seasons of Anthony in the NBA. However, with His entry to the Basketball Hall of Basketball Naismith Memorial This weekend, Anthony has managed to avoid the speech obsessed with the rings that the pattern usually marks how players are judged in this sport.
Anthony’s general achievements, and the path he forged to achieve them, makes him a safe bet in Springfield. It is number 10 in the historical list of NBA scorers with 28,289 points. It is the third in the historical list of scorers of USA Basketball, with four Olympic medals, including three gold. It has been 10 times All-Star, six times selected All-NBA and member of the 75th anniversary team of the NBA.
Instead of defining himself for what he did not win, Anthony won his reputation for what he did not try to win in the NBA.
1:01
Stephen A.: Melo would have 3 rings if I had formed team with LeBron and Wade
Stephen A. Smith believes that Carmelo Anthony would probably have won three NBA titles if LeBron James and Dwyane Wade had joined in the Heat.
Starting with the Draft night.
After LeBron James will reach first place in Cleveland, the Detroit Pistons selected the Serbian pivot Darko Milicic secondly, leaving Anthony available for Denver Nuggets In third place.
While Anthony had an impressive beginning in Denver, taking the nuggets of 17 victories to 43, classifying them to the playoffs and being second in the vote to the rookie of the year, behind James, Milicic barely left the bench for a team of the Pistons that surprised the Los Angeles Lakers And he won everything.
It was the only Detroit title during a dominant streak in which it reached six consecutive conference finals and two consecutive NBA finals in 2004 and 2005.
What would happen if Anthony had been in Detroit instead of Milicic? “Of course I have thought about it,” he told AM850 Chancey Billupsformer base of the Pistons and current coach of the Portland Trail Blazers. “I have done it for so long. So long.
“And I really think that if we had drained Melo that year, we would have won at least three championships.”
A few years later, when his average score was around 25 points and Anthony was recruited as a key piece of the renewed national program of Use basketballanother hypothetical scenario was raised. This time, he had control.
What would have happened if I had never signed an extension of five years with the Nuggets in the summer of 2006 and had prepared its free agency for 2010 with other 2003 drafts and USA Basketball phenomena as James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh?
“Bosh, Wade, Bron and I were supposed to somewhere.” “We just couldn’t find out where,” Anthony said in “Podcast P” with Paul George in July 2024.
But on a decision that now explained was based on a mixture of reluctance to risk guaranteed money and a potential role that never seemed appropriate, stayed on his own island instead of getting on the ‘banana boat’.
“Imagine me at 23 or 24 years, being the fourth option of the team when I deal my team every year,” he told George. “I am finding my way in this league. And you want me to leave that and be the fourth option? I don’t know how I was going to do it.”
“So I thought: ‘Not even talk!’ I can’t be that room. ‘”
In 2008, he joined James, Wade, Bosh and Kobe Bryant In Beijing for Olympics.
He also met with Boeheim, who was an assistant in the coach’s coaching staff Mike Krzyzewski. And so the ‘Olympic Melo’.
“Carmelo, from day one, was going to score, and the Olympic triple line is even shorter, so it was even easier,” Boeheim said.
“I could simply enter, and I don’t even know how many times, but it seemed that every time he entered, he struck. His first shot. If he put a triple, he picked it up. Almost always. He was an Nato Olympic scorer.
Jason Kidd, headline of the American team in 2008, said that Anthony was also key to the chemistry of the team, softening the tension between Bryant and James, who did not have a previous relationship.
“He was a mature man,” Kidd told AM850. “I knew how to keep everyone at bay. … One of Melo’s most important things is that it is great on the court, but it is also out of it. He is a great teammate, and I say it because it is not just about basketball.”
In the victory for the gold medal over Pau Gasol and Spain, he scored 13 points in 17 minutes leaving the bank, helping the Redeem Team, which will also enter the Hall of Fame this weekend, to fulfill its mission.
1:37
Brian Windhorsst: Carmelo is a member of the Hall of Fame in his first vote
With Carmelo Anthony announcing his retirement, Vince Carter and Brian Windhorst reflect on his career.
Three years later, The famous Anthony stage in New York began. He played seven and a half seasons there. He lost against James, Wade, Bosh and the Heat in the first round of 2012 in five games (he scored 41 in the only victory of the Knicks). The following season, he won the scorer title, averaging 28.7 points per game, and led New York to 54 victories and second place at the east conference before losing against the Indiana Pacers In second round.
The Knicks did not break their championship drought, but the Madison Square Gardenthe stadium where its stage in Syracuse began, came to life again. New York played again on the most important dates of the NBA television calendar, such as the opening night and Christmas day, and Anthony’s patented celebration, which consisted of taking three fingers to the temples, was imitated throughout the league. It was Melo in its entirety, when his Knicks number 7 shirt was the best -selling league in 2013 and his reputation as a scorer was consolidated.
“There is something to say about: ‘Ok, I’m going to lead a group alone,” Gasol told AM850. He did it. Obviously, first in Denver, he had good teams, but at that time there were better. And the same with New York, where some ambition and confidence is needed to achieve it. ‘I will go to the Knicks and I will try to revive and put that franchise at the top after years of struggle.’
Boeheim added: “The NBA is a lot about being in the team in which you are. He raised to Denver greatly, but now they play against Kobe and then against Tim Duncan. They are not winning. They are not winning a championship. And New York is not winning a championship with whom he was there. He raised to his teams. That is what can be done in the NBA. Of three, penetrate, shot in suspension.
1:47
Retrospective: Melo establishes a record in the MSG with 62 points
On January 24, 2014, Carmelo Anthony scored 62 points to establish the points record in a single game for the Knicks and the MSG.
There is one last hypothesis that Gasol thinks.
What would have happened if he had not suffered a second fracture due to stress in the left foot in November 2019, which led the Portland Trail Blazers to say goodbye to him?
Without that injury, which ended his career in the NBA, did Anthony have had the opportunity to extend his contract?
At that time, Anthony had been out of the league for more than a year after being fired without contemplation by the Houston Rockets After just 10 games of the 2017-18 season. The Blazers occupied the gas stall in the squad with Anthony, who went from being unemployed to averaging 15.4 points with Portland that season.
“So my injury gave him the opportunity to play again, to prove his worth,” Gasol said. Anthony added 2,738 points to his total career in his last victory – two years with Portland and a last season in Los Angeles, making a partner with James after so many years – a gold brooch that allowed Anthony to sneak among the 10 top scorers of all NBA times.
He retired four years ago and still has the greatest amount of decisive field shots in the last five seconds of the last quarter or the extension (18) since the game began to be recorded per game in 1996-97.
His Olympic curriculum earned him two more gold medals in London and Rio, and still holds the United States record in a single Olympic match: 37 points in just 14 minutes and 29 seconds against Nigeria in 2012. “Of another world,” Boeheim said about Anthony’s performance, with 13 of 16 in field shots (including 10 of 12 in triples). “It was crazy. A madness.”
“I didn’t fear at the moment,” Kidd said. “I wanted the ball. I think everyone knew that when I had the ball, it was to throw, not to pass.”
His Syracuse championship still resonates, and the team celebrated its 20th anniversary in March 2023, when Boeheim led its last game at the old Carrier Dome before retiring.
And when Syracuse players evaluate the new rookies for the first races of the summer semester, the matches are no longer played at the Manley Field House.
Play in him Carmelo K. Anthony Basketball Centerthe 54,000 square feet training center opened in 2009 thanks to the “Little Dog”.
“I guess everything went as it should,” said Billups. “His career is as good as he gets.”
