Always, there were more games for Carmelo Anthony. True, only twice in the first 10 seasons of his career did those extra games, playoff games, extend beyond the first round.
But Anthony never has experienced what he will feel Wednesday when the Knicks conclude a brutal regular season at the Garden against Toronto: the empty feeling of “that’s all there is.” A losing regular season will weigh on him all offseason like an emotional toothache. And there are no playoffs to bring relief.
“It’s not even real for me right now,” Anthony said. “We still have two games left, but that hasn’t set in yet. … It’s hard now. It’s hard for me to accept that. It’s hard to kind of be happy in these times. It’s just a hard situation for me right now.”
There remains one other game — Tuesday at Brooklyn against the Nets, whose fans rank seeing the Knicks outside the playoffs on a level with their own team in the Finals or the Dodgers returning from California.
The plan is to re-sign Anthony, who could miss the last two games with a sore shoulder, then get through next season and possibly cash in on the free-agent windfall when Knicks cap flexibility exists. There’s no first-round draft pick this June and Anthony admitted looking through to the 2015 free agent class hardly seems satisfying.
“It’s hard for me to even think about that,” he said. “It’s hard for me to even think past [the current game] at this point. Everything for me is just cloudy. I’ve never been in this situation before.
“I don’t know what to say about this situation. The only thing for me is to stay positive. … There’s going to be a lot of questions that I have, that I’m going to be asking myself: ‘Why this? Why that?’ I’m pretty sure I won’t find no answers anytime soon.”
For 10 seasons, Anthony has been in the playoffs. Always. Last season with the Knicks, he advanced to the second round, something he managed only one other time. In 2009, Anthony and the Denver Nuggets went as far as the Western Conference Finals before a 4-2 elimination by the eventual champion Lakers and a coach named Phil Jackson, who now wants only to see Anthony as a champ.
In all, Anthony played in 13 playoff series with a 3-10 record, 23-43 in games. Four times his teams were knocked out by the eventual champ and one other time, his team lost to the Finals runner-up.
Anthony is expected to opt out of his contract in July, when the real sweat begins for the Knicks. Anthony admits the presence of Jackson puts a positive tint on the Knicks’ future but as far as what he’ll do, you might as well ask what the weather will be like March 25, 2178.
“That was definitely a big play for our organization, for the Knicks, for me,” Anthony said about hiring Jackson as team president. “When that time comes, I’m pretty sure everything will be laid out, we would talk about it. Until then, I’m going to feel this way.”
And that way is pretty lousy, in case you have not figured that out.
The reasons for the lousy feelings are justified. The Knicks were coming off a 54-victory season, the 13th season of 50 or more wins in franchise history, the first since 1999-2000. Andrea Bargnani was added as the supplemental scorer to Anthony in a move that proved as successful as New Coke. There were injuries which every team suffers but which the Knicks used as a crutch too many times. And there was defense that too often seemed designed in a mad scientist’s lab.
“It all started early,” Anthony said of the season that saw the Knicks stumble to a 3-13 start, later 9-21. “It’s games that we lost that you can always say came back to bite us.”