Carmelo Anthony will sell tickets, titillate Celebrity Row, make the Garden a warm attraction in the dead of winter, hopefully for many more winters.
But this is supposed to be about bringing a championship to New York, and he is doomed, he will never win that elusive championship if he has to do it alone. Because no one can, not even LeBron. You think Bill Russell would have won even once with Melo’s supporting cast?
The Knicks need to get him help, better help than this, while he is still in his prime, because otherwise they are fooling themselves and fooling their fans.
In J.R. Smith they cannot trust.
It doesn’t excuse Melo’s fourth quarter. In retrospect, “choke” may have been too harsh a word, so let’s agree his fourth-quarter swoons in Games 3, 4 and especially 6 shined a blinding light on a franchise player left stranded inside the same, dark, black hole inhabited all those years by Patrick Ewing, held hostage by what looms as little more than a pipe dream and probably always was.
On this Knicks team that talked the championship talk but couldn’t even walk to the Eastern Conference finals, Melo is a ballhog if for no other reason than there isn’t anyone else you want with the ball in his hands most of the time.
VOTE: WHO SHOULD THE KNICKS KEEP FOR NEXT SEASON?
But there is a great difference between being recognized as a great scorer, or even a great player, and a great winner, and Melo still has yet to navigate that gap. His 23-43 playoff record will serve as damning commentary on his legacy until the franchise finds him his Pippen or his Wade, and good luck with that. And also until Melo is willing to share the spotlight and the ball the way Amar’e Stoudemire did here.
Because when he is asked to carry the Knicks for 48 minutes each and every night, he will inevitably be reduced to a mere mortal in those Winning Time playoff moments when it is mandated that he be Superman, and he discovers Kryptonite in his headband.
And you sure would have liked to have seen some anger from Melo after the season ended as a failure, something like, “This is unacceptable.” You got nothing of the sort. What happened to the guy who was “starving” — his word — to win a championship?
You would think after a decade trying to get one, he wouldn’t give you the impression he is OK with a step forward from a single playoff win to a single playoff series win.
Because Knicks fans who now have gone 40 years without a championship sure aren’t.
Outside the Garden yesterday, a homeless man sat on a crate in a light rain, a taxi line formed, a Henrik Lundqvist video played on the marquee during Rangers-Bruins Game 2. Nothing about any Game 7 tonight against the Pacers for the right to play LeBron and the Heat.
“Just allow them another season,” Poochie Gaither of Brooklyn said from beneath an umbrella. “I think we’ll bring the trophy right here to the Garden.”
Why do you say that? “This is just from like past experience — it’s not easy bringing in new players and them catching in to a guy like Melo’s ways and what he does and how he performs,” Gaither said. “He’s the star of the show. He just needs a supporting cast. And I believe that the team that they have, next season, will take us to paradise.”
Gaither was asked what disappointed him most about the ending.
“It’s kinda hard playing a team and the officials at the same time,” he began. “But I really wish we had a big man. Tyson Chandler, I’m losing a lot of … what I felt about him as a starting center. We really need a starting center. It’s really too bad we didn’t have Patrick Ewing with these guys here.”
A young man, Sid Doshi from Rego Park, expected more from the Knicks.
“I expected Knicks versus Heat in this next round,” he said. “J.R. Smith didn’t show up again, and Carmelo Anthony can’t carry the team by himself. I think they’re just getting old, man. They’re just getting old. They need to regroup.”
Another young man named Jason Schron from Manhattan also expected the Knicks to beat the Pacers.
“I think Carmelo and J.R. do too much on [isolation], and to be honest, Indy has a bunch of true point guards and we don’t, so that’s something that they really need to focus on,” he said. “In order to win, you need a true point guard, especially when you have that many pure shooters and iso guys. … You need an identity to start with, and they don’t have that.”
Inside Clyde Frazier’s elegant Wine And Dine on 10th Avenue, Rangers-Bruins and Grizzlies-Spurs occupied several of the 48 televisions that dot the spacious place.
“I feel that they don’t have anybody down low who could score any points whatsoever or get any rebounds,” customer Glenn Olson said. “[Roy] Hibbert destroyed them. They need somebody down low.”
Get Melo help.
“I think in order for the Knicks to go to the next level, win a championship, they’re gonna need a greater balance,” bartender Chris Walklet said. “You can’t get there with one guy alone, and when one guy’s creating, it leaves another guy open for an easy shot, that guy’s gotta make the shot. I think Jason Kidd didn’t have a basket in a month, so …”
So Wait Til Next Year. Again.