Hall of Fame former NBA combo forward Carmelo Anthony achieved a lot during a storied 19-season pro career.
The 6-foot-7 Syracuse product was named to 10 All-Star teams and six All-NBA squads during his prime years with the Denver Nuggets and New York Knicks. His career-best 28.7 points (on .449/.379/.830 shooting splits) led the league in scoring during New York’s 54-win run during the 2012-13 season, finishing third in MVP voting that year. Anthony was also named to the NBA 75th Anniversary Team in 2022.
Anthony was one of the great scorers of his era, able to light it up both from beyond the arc (he was a career 35.5 percent 3-point shooter) and elsewhere with ease. His 28,289 career regular season points rank 13th in combined NBA and ABA history. All told, Anthony finished with career regular season averages of 22.5 points on .447/.355/.814 shooting splits, 6.2 boards, 2.7 dishes, 1.0 swipes and 0.5 blocks per bout.
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As his Denver and New York clubs’ best player, Anthony led those teams to 10 straight playoff appearances to kick off his career. After eventually embracing a new gig as a key role player, he appeared in three additional postseasons.
But Anthony’s CV is frustratingly finite when it comes to deep playoff runs. He never won a title, only advanced out of the first round twice, and only made it to a Conference Finals once (in 2009 with Denver).
To hear Anthony tell it on his must-listen podcast “7PM in Brooklyn with Carmelo Anthony,” there was one move that the Knicks could have made that would have guaranteed the club a championship during his tenure with the franchise: drafting Stephen Curry out of Davison in 2009.
“In ’09, if he’s drafted by the Knicks, then they have their centerpiece, they have their corner piece of the organization,” Anthony opined. “But mind you, nobody knew Steph was going to be this Steph. Everybody was counting him out. Ankle, he was injury-prone, he couldn’t play. Everybody was counting him out those first couple years.”
Anthony’s former Knicks colleague JR Smith, who was also present for the pod, interjected.
“You’re missing something: who was running the show?” Smith asked.
“Donnie Walsh,” Anthony said. We’re winning the championship with Donnie Walsh. Donnie probably wanted Steph in ’09.”
Curry was selected with the seventh pick by the Warriors, one spot before New York’s selection. The Knicks drafted Arizona power forward Jordan Hill, ahead of future All-Stars DeMar DeRozan (the No. 9 pick out of USC), Jrue Holiday (No. 17 out of UCLA), and Jeff Teague (No. 19 out of Wake Forest).
Anthony forced a trade from Denver to the Knicks midway through the next season.
By 2012-13 - Anthony’s best season for New York - a 24-year-old Curry was finally looking like an All-Star. Although he wouldn’t make his first of 11 All-Star teams (and counting) until the year, Curry did finish a deserving 11th in MVP voting that season. Golden State had already started winning in a big way, going 47-35 under then-head coach Mark Jackson and advancing to the second round of the playoffs.
During that turning point regular season with the Warriors, the 6-foot-2 point guard averaged 22.9 points on a .451/.453/.900 slash line, 6.9 assists, 4.0 rebounds, and 1.6 steals, while playing 78 healthy games. By 2014-15, Curry was winning his first of MVP awards and his first of four championships.
Anthony and the Knicks fell off in a big way starting in 2013-14. But had Anthony and Smith in their primes, plus a fitfully-still-effective Ama’re Stoudemire, been paired with a rising Curry circa 2012-13, could that club have competing with a title-bound Miami Heat squad boasting Hall of Famers LeBron James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh all still playing at an All-NBA level? And would Walsh have constructed a good-enough team around Curry and Anthony the next season to continue to compete? We’ll never know for sure.
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