Carmelo Anthony’s Fit with the Houston Rockets is Underrated—and His NBA Legacy Might Be, Too

by Dan Favale in Player Breakdowns

Carmelo Anthony’s stay with the Oklahoma City Thunder is officially over. As first reported by ESPN.com’s Adrian Wojnarowski, he has been sent to the Atlanta Hawks, who will waive him and pave the way for his long-awaited marriage to the Houston Rockets.

The end to Anthony’s layover in Oklahoma City befits his career. He leaves the Thunder under circumstances not dissimilar to his breakups with the Denver Nuggets and New York Knicks: in a nebulous batter of self-government, potential unfulfilled, recycled criticism and relative division, his previous team not so much wrecked as rescued by his departure.

People care about Anthony, even if they don’t support him. Intrigue will at times be disguised by indifference, generally from his detractors, as a means of concurrently affirming his imperfect, if inflated, resume and his terminated stardom. But every attempt at camouflage is unsuccessful. The next phase of his career invites emotion, both for and against him.

He’s 34 years old, no doubt past his prime, but the plight of Carmelo Anthony, timeworn as it is, persists to near-universal curiosity: Can he help his team win meaningful basketball games?

It would be fair to refocus this issue to the past tense. (Was the best version of Melo ever good enough to aid, let alone carry, legitimate title contention?) The numbers now, on the heels of the failed experiment in Oklahoma City, paint him in inconsequential-to-detrimental terms.

Consider this:

Or this:

Expecting Anthony to entirely or significantly flip facts entering Year 16 is a fool’s conviction. He can latch onto a title favorite, but the consensus opinion tilts heavily toward him having squandered his best shot(s) at positively impacting a championship pursuit.

Anthony’s NBA career has largely been an exercise in dissenting self-empowerment. He enforces leverage and indulges prerogative in a player-friendly era that welcomes both, but his application of that free will has not been celebrated the way it was and still is for LeBron James and Chris Paul. And why? Because his priorities have never clearly aligned with winning.

Whether Anthony ever viewed his career trajectory as a matter of money versus basketball is irrelevant. It has always come off that way irrespective of his motives. Whereas LeBron and CP3 have managed to juggle both, in no small part because they’re better players, Anthony consistently fostered either-or ultimatums in which he seemingly, without fail, prioritized his bank account and off-court comfort over proximity to the Larry O’Brien Trophy:

In 2006, when James, Chris Bosh and Dwyane Wade all signed four-year extensions with opt-outs before the final season, Anthony inked a five-year pact. Who knows what the LeBron-era Miami Heat would’ve looked like had Melo followed in the footsteps of his fellow 2003 draftees.

When he did orchestrate his exit from Denver in 2011, it came at the vast expense of his new team. He forced a trade to the Knicks when he could have signed with them in free agency and, by extension, left them with the assets to trade for soon-to-be teammate Chris Paul.

Look at this, assuming you can bear it:

  •  What the Knicks Traded for Anthony: Wilson Chandler, Raymond Felton, Danilo Gallinari, Timofey Mozgov, a 2014 unprotected first-round pick (Dario Saric), two second-round picks (Quincy Miller and Romero Osby), the right to swap 2016 first-round picks (Jamal Murray) and cash to Denver; Eddy Curry’s expiring deal, Anthony Randolph and cash to the Timberwovles.
  • What the Clippers Traded for Paul: Al-Farouq Aminu, Eric Gordon, Chris Kaman and a 2012 first-round pick (No. 10, Austin Rivers).

James Dolan remains an uncontrollable variable when dispersing blame for everything the Knicks gave up. His meddling and their subsequent overbidding is not on Anthony. And yet, he copped to his midseason urgency being motivated by money (i.e. his pre-lockout extension).

Then, in 2014, with the Knicks gearing up for a rebuilding effort under Phil Jackson, Anthony had the opportunity to join situations considered objectively better at the time. He could’ve signed with the Rockets, Chicago Bulls or Los Angeles Lakers. He instead chose the Knicks and their fifth-year carrot, accepting a slight discount.

“He did exactly what we asked him to,” Jackson said.

Waiving his no-trade clause to join the Thunder is the closest Anthony has come to making a purely basketball-driven decision. Playing in Oklahoma City instead of Los Angeles, Boston or another glitzier market was a concession. Spending what amounted to 83 percent of his minutes at power forward, per Cleaning The Glass, represented a sacrifice. Lowering his pull-up frequency (from 49.1 percent of his total shots to 39.1 percent) and increasing his spot-up volume (29.5 percent to 42.4 percent) constituted compromise.

Even as things went awry beside Paul George and Russell Westbrook, Anthony said and, for the most part, did all the right things. The problem? He let everyone know it immediately after the Utah Jazz bounced Oklahoma City from the playoffs:

To top it all off, because Melo is Melo, his mutual divorce from the Thunder technically won’t cost him a cent. He will get his entire $27.9 million salary from the Hawks, per Woj.

For this, for all of it, Anthony’s reputation has and will continue to suffer. Hindsight will erode his legacy and abrade his Hall of Fame credentials—not in totality, because Anthony is going to the Hall, but the fallout from retrospective assessments will be noticeable enough to necessitate defenses:

Context is key when evaluating Melo‘s arc. Whatever side of the fence you land on is mostly fine. But the focus on feats undone, on recurring mistakes, speaks more to a misapplication of the third wall.

Anthony has never feigned championship obsession. Holding him to a different, perhaps higher, standard judges him against a bar he’s never conformed to meeting. That he has so obviously asserted leverage, emphasized financial excess and indelicately advertised every adjustment and concession he’s made, both minor or marginally more than minor, should be enough to squelch this illusion that he’s strived to become the company-man caricature so many fans assume professional athletes want or need to be.

This does not make Anthony a villain or less of a person. Quite the contrary. Dwight Howard’s identity crisis has become an annual rite of passage; Anthony has not sought wholesale reinvention at any turn. His is more a tale of expectation by association. He endeared himself to the circle of his era’s best players—namely James, Paul and Wade—which created this warped sense of where he himself stood within the league.

There have been, to Anthony’s credit, some adaptations over the course of his career. He became more of a playmaker during the back end of his stint with the Knicks. He warmed up to three-point volume after the 2011-12 season. He half-contorted his play style in Oklahoma City.

And to that point, there should remain hope he steers into a more complementary twilight. The Rockets may even be just the team to float that optimism. They will ask Anthony to make sacrifices similar to those he didn’t truly embrace with the Thunder, but he has never been ill-suited for the role of potent accessory.

He drilled 37.3 percent of his catch-and-shoot triples within an Oklahoma City offense light on dependable spacing. Houston paced the league in the frequency with which it manufactured uncontested threes, and only the Brooklyn Nets launched more catch-and-fire threebies. Melo should eat.

Playing off Harden and Paul will be a different experience than working in tandem with George and Westbrook. The latter two are not natural-born distributors. George is a secondary setup man at his peak, and Westbrook passes more because the collapsing chaos he creates on full-bore drives to the basket mandates that he do so.

Paul and Harden are craftier and more holistically selfless in the aggregate. Flinging threes off the catch will take on a new meaning around them, particularly when Houston boasts an inherently superior floor balance.

This union will not be seamless. It never is with Anthony. Hiding both him and Harden on defense is untenable, and he’ll want his off-the-dribble touches. Mike D’Antoni—who is cool with the Melo add, per Woj—will help here. His staff staggered court time for Paul and Harden to borderline perfection last year. Paul averaged 15.1 minutes per game without Harden, while Harden saw 21.9 minutes without Paul.

Extending those principles to include Melo is neither effortless nor implausible. Eric Gordon logged more than nine minutes of me-time and under five minutes with both Harden and Paul in the lineup. Plus, as I’ve noted previously, D’Antoni will “do some things to keep Anthony involved during full-strength minutes. The Rockets’ iso-heavy offense isn’t revered for its off-ball motion, but they know how to incorporate pick-and-roll divers. Anthony can take on more rim-running duties in super-small lineups, much like [Luc] Mbah a Moute and PJ Tucker did this past year. He shot under 38 percent in these situations with the Thunder, but they weren’t routinely trotting out five-sniper arrangements.”

Equally important: Do not discount the effect playing alongside a good friend could have on Anthony’s mindset. His bond with Paul may compel him to buy into what he once rejected.

Yes, Anthony is mistaken if he believes the Rockets or any other team needs the full Melo experience, or that the full Melo experience can even translate to more than a lost season on its own. His approach to the game, even dating back to the peak of his powers, is inarguably flawed. And no, the best version of himself was never good enough to carry a viable title contender.

But can he, at age 34, help his team win meaningful basketball games? It’s possible. To write it off implies he’ll never find a balance between the functional and sentimental, between what makes the most sense and his own terms. Maybe that’s fair. Anthony has brought that doubt upon himself. But there’s an overlooked value in his refusal to ever totally conform.

Melo’s career, however undecorated, is not an accident, even if it’s not met with the intended or desired acceptance. Nor is it a disappointment by way of opportunities ignored and inferiority unaccepted.

It is a career, a legacy, of his own design.

Unless otherwise noted, stats courtesy of NBA.com or Basketball Reference.

Dan Favale is a Deputy Editor for NBA Math and covers the NBA for Bleacher Report. Follow him on Twitter (@danfavale) and listen to his Hardwood Knocks podcast, co-hosted by B/R’s Andrew Bailey.

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