Let me preface my take here by saying that Carmelo Anthony is one of the most talented players in the NBA. We've known that since the March nine years ago when he put the Syracuse Orange on his shoulders and took them to their first and only national championship.
I enjoyed watching the precocious Anthony lead that team.
Then he went to the NBA, became a ball-stopper, one-on-one player, and hasn't been fun to watch for the past decade.
And he has ruined what, for a couple weeks, was the most fun regular-season NBA team to watch since, well, ever.
When Anthony was injured and Jeremy Lin took center stage for New York, I watched every minute of Knicks basketball I could. They were so damn fun to watch. And it wasn't completely because of Lin.
They shared the ball. They ran in Mike D'Antoni's seven-seconds-or-less system. They played team defense (yes, D'Antoni's team played defense). And they won seven consecutive games.
Then Anthony came back, and the Knicks have gone 2-6, including four consecutive losses. Lin has lost much of the aggressiveness and freedom that made him so effective during his immediate rise to fame.
And the Knicks have become, unfortunately, painful to watch again (never mind the fact that they have stopped playing defense, giving up 119 points to Milwaukee Friday).
This probably isn't fair, but I'm dumping all the blame on Anthony.
Consider this statistic — Of the NBA's top 40 scorers, only one player, Danny Granger, has a worse shooting percentage than Anthony's 40.1 percent. And yet Anthony continues to hoist 18.4 shots per game on a team that features much more efficient offensive players like Amare Stoudemire (remember that guy?, Lin and even Landry Fields.
So this is what we've come to in New York — a Knicks team on which Anthony gets his points, shoots a horrible percentage, and the team loses.
What happened to all the fun?
Carmelo, why don't you just disappear?
Or go play for the Raptors.
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