The NBA season has begun this week and Carmelo Anthony has not signed with a team.
The third overall pick in the 2003 NBA Draft, Melo hasn’t played NBA basketball since November 8, 2018 in a game against his former team, the Oklahoma City Thunder.
A 10-time NBA All-Star, Anthony signed with the Houston Rockets last summer after clearing waivers in a trade that shipped him from the Thunder to the Atlanta Hawks. After signing with the Rockets he was later dealt to the Chicago Bulls before the NBA trade deadline.
He’s averaged 24 points, 6.5 rebounds and 3 assists in his career with the Oklahoma City Thunder, New York Knicks, Denver Nuggets and Houston Rockets.
Long-time NBA journalist,Sean Deveney checked in with me on the Scoop B Radio Podcast and discussed the latest on Anthony.
Check out a snippet from our discussion via the Podcast below:
Brandon ‘Scoop B’ Robinson: So I want to first and foremost. I’ve been on this Carmelo Anthony wave. I think he deserves to be on a team. He’s had a lot of circumstances that have been his felt and some that just have been circumstantial. Over at Heavy you’ve spoken to meritve different people in articles that you’ve penned. What sense do you give to the NBA where Carmelo is and why he isn’t on a team?
Sean Deveney: Yeah. There’s what 420-430 guys in the NBA right now you can’t tell me that Carmelo is 431. You can’t tell me he’s not on the list of the top 400 players in the league right now. I think that he’s gotten the scapegoat in the last couple of places where he’s been. Certainly Oklahoma City [Thunder] and definitely in Houston [Rockets]. Even to an extinct with the [New York] Knicks at the end because of that he has this sort of toxicity about him. There’s that it’s a risk to bring him in and we’ll end up paying that price if you’re the GM then you’re going to take a hit for it. When in reality while in Oklahoma City [Thunder] the 2 years they had him compared to last year. Were they even better last year? No they were pretty much the same team and the results were the same. So, you can say that he didn’t make them better but he definitely didn’t make them worse though. So, when you look at that and in Houston [Rockets]. You know he played 10 games there and then he gets waived. Eventually they figured things out but the 10 games they played after he was gone they weren’t any better either. So he took a hit for these teams when he really didn’t deserve it and now he sort of has that cloud over him and teams are just staying away it’s unfortunate because I do think the guy still has something to give and it’s worth a shot. Look has he ever got in trouble with the law those kinds of things. He’s never really been a locker room problem things like that a lot of this reputation stuff to me is unfounded.
