I’m not sure which was more comical this past week, the vaunted Notre Dame defense getting shredded and smoked like beef brisket in the BCS Championship game or the reports of Carmelo Anthony trying to incite a postgame scrap with Kevin Garnett after Monday night’s Knicks-Celtics game.
Now I’ve never met Anthony but he seems about as gangster as my six-year-old nephew in Cars pajamas. Garnett, on the other hand, has the type of grit and demeanor to make you think he’d be nice with the hands, ‘bows and ‘butts to be the odds on favorite in a Vegas if the two met in an actual ring.
But bringing it back to basketball, despite the immaturity of his actions, Melo’s Monday night antics makes me believe he could give the Knicks a fighting chance at coming out of the East.
First things first. Everybody knows Miami currently sits atop the East and the league as a whole. They are the odds-on favorite, and any title aspirations will have to go through LeBron James and Co.
While the Knicks have had fielded plenty of talented teams, the recent incarnations have seemed to lack the intestinal fortitude to be taken seriously. Even I’ve been critical of them due to doubts that Anthony and Amare Stoudamire’s inner divas can co-exist peacefully with only one basketball to go around in Madison Square Garden.
Stoudamire’s lengthy injury may have been a blessing though. Now that he’s seen how effective and successful the team can be without him, Stoudamire seems content to embrace a role off the bench in a super sixth-man role a la Manu Ginobili or Jamal Crawford. If he’s truly content getting buckets off the bench, one of the Knicks’ major problems is solved.
The other issue is the lack of grittiness that we saw in NY when guys like Larry Johnson, Patrick Ewing and Charles Oakley roamed the frontcourt. The front office attempted to address the issue by bringing in Tyson Chandler last season after his supreme defensive efforts helped lead the Dallas Mavericks to a title in 2011.
Grizzled vets Rasheed Wallace and Marcus Camby were later added to toughen up the team, but it’s clear that Spike Lee’s favorite squad won’t get Mo Better until Anthony buys in and shows the toughness needed to win in the Big Apple. This season it appears that may be starting to happen.
Even though it was woefully ill-guided, Melo’s promise and fulfillment of an on-court threat to Garnett that “you’ll see me after the game” shows that Anthony is determined to fight back this season. Garnett is a savvy vet with tons of semi-dirty tricks and trash talk designed to get opponents out of the game. The Denver version of Anthony would’ve been content to drop 30-plus win, lose or draw. He would not have banged down low in the post or traded elbows with a cagey rabble rouser such as KG. The old Melo was content to get buckets and be famous. The new Melo wants to win – badly.
What we’re seeing is similar to the light bulb moment when King James finally figured out that his team was nearly unstoppable if he played aggressively in the fourth-quarter. The Knicks are a serious problem if and when Anthony channels his emotion and aggression into winning at all costs; that means scoring, rebounding and defending at an elite level. He’ll never be a shutdown defender, but he’s giving more effort. The fact that he doesn’t have to try to be a celebrity in New York means the Knicks golden goose can concentrate all his efforts on leading his team to the promised land.
Of course, regardless of his post-game antics, the Knicks fell short to the Celtics. Anthony showed that while his team lost the battle, he wasn’t willing to concede the war. That’s a good sign for Knicks fans. If he can continue to give that effort level and “never back down” attitude on the court, NYC fans will love him and opponents will hate going into The Garden.
Ever since 2003, Anthony has been fighting to get out of the James’ giant shadow. It’s going to take a championship to do so, but it looks like the boy from Brooklyn is back home getting in his sparring now in hopes of taking his best shot come playoff time.
