Maybe Carmelo Anthony is worse than Josh Smith

Come on, Knicks fans. Face it. You fell in love with a big name because you're too stupid to know any better. Everyone knew that Raymond Felton and Danilo Galinari were good pieces, Mozgov had upside, and Landry Fields (who wasn't traded, but who's production diminished considerably) was playing well. Not to mention that Amar'e was tearing it up. Now, here's a little lesson in basketball IQ. Knicks hired Mike D'Antoni. A coach who, never ever EVER has taught defense (typically when asked why his team was struggling in Phoenix, his go-to answer was "Our shots weren't falling.") They then brought in Amar'e Stoudemire, a big man who's been NOTORIOUSLY high offense/no defense (his rebounding, for his size, is abominable. He's 20 lbs lighter than Dwight Howard). He starts putting up 30 PPG and is having a good year with good supporting crew (Felton, etc)... Then, the Knicks decide to trade for A GUY WHO WAS LEAVING IN FREE AGENCY ANYWAY IN 3 MONTHS! :DDDDDDDDD A guy who specializes in isolation scoring and demands the rock be in his hands 75% of the time, while D'Antoni's system is all about ball movement. A guy who can score from anywhere but likes to go inside, who with the ball in his hands that much makes Amar'e a big sack of poop (because Amar'e doesn't cut well without the basketball unless it's off pick & roll, and doesn't have a great isolation/post game) "Huh, we traded our bishops, rooks, and knights for another queen. Somehow, we seem to be losing. How did that happen?" Then, in the off-season, what do the Knicks do? Pick up Tyson Chandler--another big body to clog the paint and make Amar'e even less useful) and amnesty Mr. Big Shot (who, by the way, has championship rings). Can you say pinnacle of incompetence? The Knicks decided to be all about scoring and flash, and when it became clear that wouldn't work, couldn't come up with a good counter plan. LeBron probably realized that while they were pitching for him. The amazing thing is, before this debacle of a trade the Knicks were in playoff position. What they clearly needed was a slight offensive improvement to get over the Celtics/Magic hump and compete with Miami. Steve Nash, ringmaster of the D'Antoni offense who lives in NYC in the off-season, was on a temperate Phoenix Suns team who was fielding offers _for everybody_. Owned by Robert Sarver, a man who's so notoriously cheap that he traded Joe Johnson, Shawn Marion, the aforementioned Amar'e and even Jason Richardson for guys like Boris Diaw, 1 year contract Shaq, Ben Wallace, and Vince Carter. The Knicks had a giant Eddy Curry max contract just sitting there. They could've traded Eddy Curry and a ham sandwich and reunited the old Suns in a conference that didn't have an all-time great like Popovich to stop them. But then some people that clearly don't understand that team basketball (triangle offense, Mavericks) clearly beats individual basketbal (repeated isolations, Heat) clamored for 'Melo, and the rest is history. Think about it. With Nash, Knicks are #1 or #2 in the conference. Guaranteed. Instead, the Knicks deserve the mediocrity they've gone out of their way to earn. Have fun watching 'Melo jack up more bricks.

Names are seductive, I had doubts about the Melo trade from the day it happened. It's amazing how much lee-way one dimensional scorers are given. Sure, he can get really hot from the floor, but does he ever make his teammates in more than the most oblique ways, does he understand what "defense is? Considering that Amare has many of the same limitations, it's fair to say they may have one too many divas on that team.

@Andy Appreciate the courtesy. Re: On/Off T-Wolves. There's some need to clarify here. 1st, obviously I like +/- stats, but they are very susceptible to noise when sample size is small. I'd take any such numbers from this season with a big grain of salt. 2nd, right now Love & Rubio both have strong unadjusted & adjusted +/- numbers. Perhaps you were looking at earlier data when Love looked worse? Re: Melo rookie. I'll say one more thing at leave at that for people to consider: Is there any doubt that Melo is a much better player as a veteran than he was when he was a rookie? Would anyone be willing to say otherwise? If so, I'd love to see that argument. Otherwise though, if one assumes correlation means causation when it comes to lil' rookie Melo being the primary reason for his team improving by 25 wins, how does one reconcile with the Nuggets now doing better without grown up Melo? How can one possible rationalize away Melo not having a direct causal impact now and yet proclaim that there is no possible explanation other than Melo-causal-impact when he was a rookie? To me the only coherent answer is that there's simply too much noise in general to assume the causality.

Melo is the anti-James Brown of team defense.

@MJ Nice counterpoints. I agree with some of ESS's post (mostly that defense is underrated in these discussions) but think his questions are going a bit out of bounds regarding Melo and whether he's actually a star. Most of what I'm trying to show is that the flipside of this Nuggets/Knicks story is the pre-Melo/post-Melo Nuggets. On/Off numbers are sometimes telling (see Ricky Rubio on this year's Wolves) and sometimes not (see Kevin Love on this year's Wolves). Melo's high minutes (team-leading) and overall production on a team that went from worst-to-competitive is telling to me. The other guys who became noteworthy later on were doing some pretty unimpressive things in the year prior in the NBA. Anyway, there are some gaping holes in my methodology there, I mostly just wanted to stick up for Melo.

"An in-depth look into the pre-Melo Nuggets and his rookie team shows what an immediate and significant impact he made on that team....Melo led the Nuggs in scoring and minutes, and was third in rebounds and assists in a fairly-incredible turnaround season, winning 43 games, more than 250 percent of the previous season’s total." This is the opposite of an in depth look. To be fair I cut out you going into some more depth, but the fact that you've essentially credited Melo with a 250% team improvement is so problematic it doesn't really matter. Look, what you're doing when you do that is using an extremely imprecise form of +/- stats. People recognized that there was some potential with that, and so began refining it. Things like "Well, when we're praising the guy for making the team better, it doesn't make sense to credit him for the good things that happen when he's on the bench, right?" Fact of the matter is that lots of noise go into team records from year to year, and when tanking is such an obvious issue as it was in '02-03 with multiple teams, you really can't take it that seriously. What we know is that both Melo & LeBron's teams actually did better with them on the bench than they did with them on the court in '03-04. That might sound hard to believe, but it's actually par for the course with rookies. We typically don't see star rookies show detailed evidence of lifting their team up. That's something comes more in the 2nd or 3rd years. And of course, in LeBron's case, that's exactly what we saw. By his second year, the +/- stats liked him a good deal, and it got better from there until LeBron pretty consistently had the best numbers in the league. Kevin Durant showed something similar with his team starting to live & die with him in his 3rd year. Melo on the other hand is the only player I know who is typically called a superstar without debate, but whose team's never showed evidence of getting much worse when he left the court. It was for this reason (among others) that there was a contingent of us saying that Denver wouldn't fall off nearly as much as people think, and that New York was not going to see a massive improvement when the trade happened. Of course, I don't know anyone who thought Denver would be better and New York would be worse. That's quite remarkable, and more so because I don't actually think it's because people underestimated the talented being sent to Denver. Rather it's just that what we're seeing with Karl, along with other coaches in the league right now (Thibs in Chicaog, Collins in Philly, etc), is that if you give a great coach a bunch of decent players that work hard and have a balanced combined skill set, they can do great things with it. I'll leave what that says about the kind of star whose presence gums up the works of such a coach to the readers.

The Nuggets didn't just add Melo in his rookie season, though. In 2003 Nuggets were horrible overall. They gave major minutes to the likes of Vincent Yarbrough, Junior Harrington, Ryan Bowen, Nikoloz Tskitishvili and Donnell Harvey. Their starting five is hard to pin down because a lot of mediocre players got time for them but it seems like it was typically Harrington, White, Yarbrough, Juwan Howard and Nene. Compare that to Melo's rookie year, when the starting five was Andre Miller, Voshon Lenard, Melo, Nene, Camby. Even if you replace Melo with an average small forward, that team was going to see a lot of improvement based on the upgrades everywhere else.

Fantastic post Ethan, and this is the key thing right here for me: "Now, the narrative is about how the Knicks only need a point guard, an animating force that would finally allow Carmelo’s obvious star to rise. Well, stars who shoot efficiently, play defense, and pass the rock can manage just fine without such help." Basketball stardom, as opposed to popular stardom, is the ability to make it easy to build a successful team around you. Nothing more. Every excuse of "he just needs X" really needs to be translated into "he's not good enough to win without X", and the fact that the list of X keeps growing with Melo says everything.

"Were we wrong to ascribe the success of those teams to Melo? (Denver has trafficked in underrated players like Andre Miller, Marcus Camby, Nene Hilario)" An in-depth look into the pre-Melo Nuggets and his rookie team shows what an immediate and significant impact he made on that team. They already had Nene and Camby when he got there. The year before Melo's arrival the Nuggs won all of 17 games. Camby was hurt for much of the year, but the Nuggs were 6-23 with him in the lineup, so it didn't really matter. Nene played 80 games that year. Melo arrived with Andre Miller in '03-04. Miller was coming off a 15 PER season with the Clips where being surrounded by prime Lamar Odom and Elton Brand was enough to win 27 games. Melo led the Nuggs in scoring and minutes, and was third in rebounds and assists in a fairly-incredible turnaround season, winning 43 games, more than 250 percent of the previous season's total. Over the years, they'd go through the Iverson and Billups eras, eventually leading to the forced-out trade to New York. Denver did a nice job of getting good and underrated value for him to pair with Ty Lawson; a steal of a draft pick in 2009.

Mike Bibby started 12 games with Miami...

one of the worst storys i've ever read. melo has not played like an all star this year but is still better than A.I. and SMITH on a bad day,lil hater in you?

"We know it worked out in the exact opposite manner." Do we really know that? Less than 50 games into Carmelo's Knicks career? What have the "Talent Haul" Nuggets accomplished? You conflate team efficiency with individual value, so if Andre Iguodala is so great, why haven't the 76ers had a 50-win season in the past decade? Look, the current evidence supports your point about Anthony being overrated, and I agree that he hasn't played like an All-Star starter this year. But it seems disingenuous for you to criticize "pundits" for their initially praising the trade, then turn around and accept the new narrative as absolute truth.

Watching Melo play "defense" makes it clear why the dude supposedly rebounds well - it's nothing to do with hustle. He's very hesitant to close out on the perimeter or do anything that takes him away from the paint, where it's easy to collect in-area rebounds. Zach Randolph plays poor help defense as a big man because he's fighting for position down low. Melo plays poor perimeter defense because, from my seat, he's found a revolutionary way to be a selfish rebounder. This is a man with a max contract.