He represents the Manhattan team espousing an old Brooklyn philosophy. Last spring, in the aftermath of a quick exit from the NBA playoffs, Carmelo Anthony, Red Hook native, channeled the old boys of Flatbush in pledging that better days lay ahead.
“Next year,” Anthony said, “we’ll be better.”
Next year. Next year. Once, it provided annual nourishment to the borough of Anthony’s birth, provided a beacon of baseball optimism. Wait till next year, went the annual prayer of October. Next year will be Our Year. Just wait. Next year. Next year. Next year.
“We’ll learn from this,” Anthony had said. “We’ll come back next year and be ready. In the future, I feel confident about competing with the top teams in the Eastern Conference. We’ve just got to get better and go from there.”
Are the Knicks better? Tonight, we’ll get a chance to see for sure where they measure up against the best basketball team on the planet right now. The Heat plowed over the Thunder in five games last summer, and didn’t seem to miss a beat in picking apart the Celtics in Miami on opening night. It certainly seems as if the Heat have gotten better, and deeper, and more confident.
The Knicks? Well, the version we will see on the Garden floor tonight is certainly a hampered version, without Amar’e Stoudemire, with Tyson Chandler still nursing a balky knee, with Marcus Camby still getting his sea legs under him with a lot of other guys still very … well, old. They are the product of a New Time around the Knicks, one that has rediscovered defense (at least in theory), one that seems (again, in theory) light years removed from the pinball-machine offense favored by Mike D’Antoni for four years.
“There’s a certain way I believe in playing basketball,” Mike Woodson said a few days ago. “There’s a certain way I think you have to play to be successful in this league. And I think this is a group of players that has bought into that way of thinking. Play hard. Play defense. Play for each other.”
It sounds very nice. It also seems quite a bit closer to the kind of blueprints used by NBA teams that actually do succeed. Can that happen here? Can that be the case with these Knicks, who in May will celebrate the 40th anniversary of their most recent championship and the 13th anniversary of their most recent playoff victory?
It will certainly look the part of a team familiar with high-end pedigree. Kurt Thomas and Camby were on the roster the last time the Knicks played in the Finals. Jason Kidd and Rasheed Wallace have played on championship teams. There is a lot of victorious muscle memory in the locker room, more than there ever has been before.
Can that yield something tangible?
Don’t expect to receive any long-term answers tonight, and not only because Stoudemire is in the early stages of nursing his knee back to health. The Heat arrive a finished product, the most important elements of their team now in Year Three as a unit. The Knicks might not be who they’re going to be until January at the earliest.
Still, it is Next Year.
And Anthony, after a summer of triumph with the U.S. Olympic team, after an offseason in which he has certainly looked committed to fitness and surviving the long season, returns as the wing man for everything the Knicks hope to accomplish. All the hand-wringing that accompanied Jeremy Lin’s departure filled the city’s basketball summer with noise, but the truth is this: The Knicks will rise as far as Anthony can lift them.
And will fall as far as Anthony permits them.
That golden Olympic experience sparked an epiphany of sorts for Anthony, intoxicated by the moment and declaring himself a changed man, that winning, and not scoring was his new holy grail.
In some ways, the first few weeks of the season will be a gift for Melo, a chance to permanently stamp the team in his image without having to worry about wounding Stoudemire’s pride or his feelings. He finally has a full training camp behind him. He finally has a full season ahead of him. At age 28, he has what he always has craved.
And he has Next Year, and all the promise that brings.
All the burden, too.
michael.vaccaro@nypost.com