A Lineup of New York Icons, With Carmelo Anthony on the BenchInside the Javits Center complex on the windy, frigid West Side of Manhattan on Sunday morning, there was genuine warmth for the N.B.A. legends most identified as belonging to New York. None of them were named Carmelo Anthony.
All of those former stars could flash championship rings, though for some who never were among the last men standing in June — Chris Mullin and Bernard King, to name two — it was more about the roots.
In their collective career stories is a compelling history of the city game and a fair amount of brotherly love. The talkative Kenny Smith of Queens didn’t brag about the two mid-1990s titles he won with the Houston Rockets, but he sure didn’t mind sharing that he had attended Frazier’s basketball camp as a 9-year-old, competed in a tournament run by Archibald, played against Mullin in high school and worn King’s No. 30 for much of his career.
During a panel discussion of born-and-bred New Yorkers and one (Frazier) adopted from Atlanta, Mullin, a Brooklyn native, had the crowd chuckling over recollections of having needed peer chaperones to and from the subway when he ventured uptown to the Rucker League from his home in Flatbush until he had a couple of decent games.
“When I got really good, I started hanging out in Harlem,” he said.
The pros don’t do much mingling with the schoolyard masses anymore, least of all the max money players like Anthony, who labored stiffly through a 30-minute, 14-point showing as the Western Conference defeated the East, 163-158, on Sunday night at Madison Square Garden.
Anthony spent his early years in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn before moving to Baltimore. Wanting to be a homecoming king upon his arrival in New York in early 2011, Anthony spoke of his reverence for the one-man fast break known as Bernard, even if the timeline suggested that Anthony, born in 1984, came of spectator age when King was enjoying his last scoring binges with the Washington Bullets.
In our all-or-nothing culture, people too often link career legitimacy to the claiming of at least one championship ring, although the New York fan base and news media never blamed King for the failure of his Knicks teams to advance beyond the second round of the playoffs. The city certainly celebrates — in retrospect, at least — Patrick Ewing’s titleless years with the Knicks.
So why has Anthony become such a polarizing figure in these parts? Why would many longtime season-ticket holders have enthusiastically volunteered to escort him to the city limits when he was flirting with other teams as a free agent last summer? Why is there such strong sentiment that the Knicks will never be true contenders with Anthony as their leading man?
Part of the disenchantment is no doubt related to the Knicks’ uninspiring play since Anthony arrived as a much-heralded savior. The team will conclude this season owning one series victory for the last five playoff seasons, and two straight years of finishing out of the postseason.
Unlike King, who dominated high school gymnasiums while at Fort Hamilton High in Brooklyn, Anthony has a relationship with New York that has seemed contrived, born more of self-interest — he forced the Knicks to surrender multiple assets to get him rather than wait out a season and a labor dispute — than a desire to be part of a special group.
Anthony’s most transcendent New York night — he broke King’s single-game Knicks scoring record with a 62-point explosion in January 2014 in a blowout of a defenseless Charlotte team — in some ways reflected what critics have complained about most, the sense that it’s always about him.
Some of the carping has amounted to radio static, excess noise, especially the overblown controversy of Anthony’s desire to play in Sunday night’s starfest after missing regular-season games with a barking knee that will most likely require shutting down soon for minor surgery.
Yes, money and visibility were his primary reasons for staying in New York, but this season’s collapse is more on the team’s president, Phil Jackson, than it is on Anthony. There was no harm, no foul, in his wanting to have a little fun with LeBron James and other Olympic team buddies. His knee may have hurt but right arm, aim aside, was fine. He took 20 shots, made 6.
To make the night a complete loss, the first questions directed at Anthony in the interview room were about the Knicks’ buyout of Amar’e Stoudemire.
“Not going to ask me about the weekend?” he said.
Anthony is, for the most part, an amicable fellow, often trying to please reporters by telling them what they want to hear (yes, of course, he would be recruiting prospective free agents over the weekend, as if he could have any real say in the matter).
Jackson has bet heavily on Anthony in his 30s evolving into a less-is-more performer, using experiences good and bad to make himself a player with more purpose. Paul Pierce had that epiphany in Boston, but only Jackson can provide Anthony with the necessary collaborators, his Ray Allen and Kevin Garnett.
If Jackson can, it will be Anthony’s job to prove once and for all that he is not merely a quintessential showcase player, a square peg trying to fit into a triangle. He will need to show that he can grow, that he can share, as Frazier did with the 1970s Knicks.
“It was his basketball,” Reed said of the cool man nicknamed Clyde after receiving an award Sunday. “When he let us play with it, we became a great team.”
Twenty years from now, at another legends brunch, Anthony may be remembered fondly as a prodigious-scoring New Yorker. But he has work to do, because he doesn’t have the city pedigree of King, who carried his Knicks in a seven-game war against Larry Bird and the Boston Celtics, the eventual champions, in 1984. Though Anthony won an N.C.A.A. title upstate at Syracuse, he never electrified the Garden the way Mullin did as the hometown kid at St. John’s.
Anthony has plenty of time left but a long way to go before a unified New York warms up to him as a true local legend.
7/16/2015 4:02 PM LAST EDITED: 7/16/2015 4:03 PM