What went wrong in Carmelo Anthony’s last 2 stops?

By the numbers: Carmelo Anthony’s last two trips

There are a million things a player can say after he’s made a shot. Maybe they go the Michael Jordan route: “He (Gerald Wilkins) can’t guard me,” Jordan famously declared during a 1993 first-round series. Maybe they go Reggie Miller, trash talking fans and throw in a few theatrics to create the moment.

One thing a player shouldn’t be saying after a made shot? “My bad.”

Such was the case for Carmelo Anthony in Houston. At one point during his run with the Rockets, Anthony found net on a contested mid-range jumper, sullenly looked over to the bench and had to apologize to his coach.

Maybe Anthony is just like us in a way; maybe he simply didn’t read the terms and conditions. Houston starves itself to a healthy diet of 4.2 mid-range shot attempts per game — 4.2 too many if you ask them. Recall the shot that has made Carmelo Anthony a Hall of Famer. Does that not seem to be even slightly paradoxical?

Schematically, we should’ve seen this outcome, even prior to. Within Houston’s offensive diet, Anthony’s bread-and-butter (post-ups and mid-range shots) were completely cut.

This season, the Rockets have run 2.1 post-ups per game, which ranks second-to-last ahead of only the Brooklyn Nets.

It feels unwise to expect that they’d ever let Anthony operate to his strengths, even though he was absolutely brilliant when he forced the issue; in 2018-19, Anthony ranked in the 98th percentile on post-ups, with a blistering 1.41 points per possession and 73.7 percent success rate. 

Common sense, of course, suggests those numbers would have regressed to the mean. Even so, Anthony’s mean has been pretty darn spectacular. In the four years that the league has tracked post-up opportunities, Anthony has ranked above league average in each of them.

In seeing an all-time great, 65-win offense stumble out of the gates, the media immediately sought out Anthony as the reason why. It’s become the easy thing to do. What isn’t necessarily easy to do is remember the injuries that coincided with Houston’s 4-6 start to the season.

Of the 10 games, then-reigning MVP James Harden missed three games and Hall of Fame floor general Chris Paul sat out an two games.

All told, the trio of Paul, Harden and Anthony took the hardwood together for a grand total of 37 minutes, being outscored by 16.5 points per 100 possessions in the process.

For those keeping track at home, that 37-minute span wouldn’t even be the equivalent to a full game. If three quarters serves as enough of a sample size, then let’s go ahead and strip Dirk Nowitzki of his Finals MVP in 2011 and hand it over to LeBron James. Foolish, right?

This isn’t necessarily to say Anthony is free of faults here. He’s no longer the offensive juggernaut capable of single-handedly changing the course of games; he probably hasn’t been that man — on a night-to-night basis at least — since his days in the Big Apple. Yet, even in a limited role, here are a couple of things Anthony could have done better.