The game marches on. It is merciless that way. The game is happy enough to have you along for the ride, but it is the game’s ride, the NBA’s ride. It was here long before you were born, and it will be here long after you die.Carmelo Anthony isn’t the only one who learns that difficult lesson these days. The NBA playoffs will begin this weekend, and they will go on as scheduled without Dwyane Wade and Kobe Bryant, without Russell Westbrook and Kevin Durant, without Paul George and Boogie Cousins.
Without Carmelo Anthony. Again.
“I never thought,” Anthony said, “that I’d have this much clarity.”
Since February, he has had plenty of time for plenty of things. He has had knee surgery. He has watched more basketball games — the Knicks, the rest of the league, the NCAA Tournament — than he’d ever believed he’d ever watched.
“My wife had to finally say: ‘Shut the TV off,’ ” he said.
He has transformed his office into a junior NBA executive suite — “Looks like a GM board right now, with names and scenarios” — and he has thought about a couple of different realities his career now embodies:
One as a pro athlete coming off a major knee injury, always attached to an enormous question mark. One as a player who always has been the featured weapon on every team he has played on going back to junior high, understanding that if and when the Knicks become competitive again, he will have to be willing to assume a secondary role — maybe even a tertiary role — in order for that to really happen.
“If I had that option,” he said, “I would. It would take a load off of me.”
He has had a surplus of time the last two months, and that is a luxury he no longer will have once he begins his basketball comeback, lightly as early as next month, in earnest sometime this summer. On May 29 he will turn 31, a 31 with a lot of tread worn off his tires. It is an age when you do a lot of thinking anyway.
Without basketball to occupy his thoughts since the All-Star Game, it has been time spent mulling the future (he loves the crop of players about to enter the league, one of whom the Knicks will select to establish a new foundation) and pondering a past that, a year ago, could have led him to Chicago or Houston, could have led him away from the Knicks’ septic-tank season.
Who knows: Maybe the knee betrays him anyway.
Or maybe it doesn’t. He wonders about that, because of course he wonders about that. Because for all the assorted basketball misdemeanors you can accuse him of during his time in New York, Anthony has proven himself profoundly incapable of straying from the truth.“I tried to keep myself away from thinking about that,” he said. “As a human being, those thoughts definitely come into play. You sit down at night and think: ‘Did I really make the right decision?’ ”
There was more.
“Not often. There was one point in the season I was like, it was just cloudy. I didn’t have any clarity, and I was second-guessing what I did and the decision I made …
“But after that it was smooth sailing.”
Well, as still as the waters can be for a man whose employer won 10 of the 40 games in which he played and seven of the 42 in which he didn’t. That isn’t exactly the kind of slogan a franchise player wants as his epitaph (“Hey! We were .250 team when I played and a .167 team when I didn’t! Renew your season tickets now!”).
The overwhelming truth is this: Melo says he has faith in what Phil Jackson is doing here, but he has little choice but to believe that way. We already know that Melo, when healthy, is a cornerstone talent; nobody knows for certain if Jackson is a worthy executive. And what little we do know doesn’t exactly lend a favorable opinion.
“This next season,” Anthony said, “for me and for the organization and for Phil, this is where we earn our money.”
He still is worth rooting for, because we have seen too few athletes pass through our city for whom winning for the city matters so much. It is easy to forget now just how much he enjoyed the 54-win ride two years ago, less difficult to remember all the pained expressions of 2014 and 2015.
That shouldn’t be the face of Melo we remember in 2035, when we look back on his time as the face of the franchise. He hasn’t been a perfect star. But he cares. This matters to him. The game marches away from you so quickly. He knows that now.
We always want to believe the players we watch bleed for the city, for the uniform, as much as we do.
There ought to be a payoff for that. Eventually.
