Some overdue credit for Carmelo Anthony's underrated season

Remember how great a season Carmelo Anthony had last year? He won the scoring title, put up some of the best shooting numbers of his career, posted a PER way above his normal efficiency, and proved you could run one of the league's most effective offenses through his scoring and passing abilities. It was a make-good season for 'Melo, and he was duly rewarded for it, starting the All-Star Game for the East, making second-team All-NBA for just the second-time, and finishing with a career-best third-place finish in the MVP rankings--even getting a single 1st-place vote from that silly dude from the Boston Globe.

Feels like a long time ago, doesn't it? This season, everything's different for Carmelo and the Knicks, who burst out of the gate as the hottest team in the NBA in 2012-'13, but this year limped around the first lap like a horse with a busted leg and a really bad hangover. Going 9-21 over their first 30 games, the Knicks were matched only by their cross-state rivals as the league's biggest disappointment, and rather than the heaps of praise he received last season for turning the team around, 'Melo received criticism--and inclusion in the inevitable round of trade rumors--for getting New York off to such a bad start. 

But you know what? (And sorry for the third straight rhetorical question to start a paragraph, promise it's the last.) Carmelo Anthony is having the same great season he had last year. Let's compare the numbers: 

2012-13: 28.7 PPG, 6.9 RPG, 2.6 APG, 45% FG, 38% 3PT, 0.8 SPG, 0.5 BPG, 2.6 TOV 
2013-14: 26.1 PPG, 8.7 RPG, 3.0 APG, 45% FG, 40% 3PT, 1.1 SPG, 0.7 BPG, 2.3 TOV

Does one of those seasons really seem appreciably better than the other? The only real advantage that 'Melo's 2012-13 has over his '13-'14 is that he scored about two and a half more points per game that season, on the way to winning his first (and likely only, as long as he plays in the same league with Pissed Off Kevin Durant) scoring title, and he got to the free throw line about once more a game (7.6 to 6.7, though he's shooting a couple percentage points better from the stripe once there this season). 

But look at all the things he's doing this season. He's averaging nearly two boards more a game, and easily leading the entire Knicks roster in total rebounds and rebounds per game. He's shooting better from three-point range, second-best on the team to Beno Udrih, who's only attempted 39 treys all season. He's assisting more and turning the ball over less--less than he has in his entire career, actually. He's even averaging a steal per game again, which is really the least he can do while playing the lazy, switch-heavy brand of defense he's been guilty of for the majority of his career. 

The advanced stats support it, too. He's staying efficient, posting a 23.6 PER--currently 8th in the league, and just about a point shy of his career-high PER last year. He's got an offensive rating of 111, just one off the career high of 112 he set last year. And he's doing all of this while playing both the most minutes of his career--39.1 per game, highest in the NBA--and a much-lower usage percentage than the league-and-career-high of 35.6% that he set last year. There's really no individual statistical measure by which Carmelo Anthony is not having an incredible season. 

The reason you're hearing so little about it this season while you couldn't stop hearing about it last season is two-fold. One is the obvious point that NBA players--especially the best ones--are always judged by their win-loss record, fair or not. As great as the numbers 'Melo put up last year were, the real number that made it a career year for him was 54, the number of wins the Knicks had last season, their best tally in over a decade and a half. In a sport where one player can have such an impact on his team's overall fortunes, that's the thing that All-Star candidacies and MVP campaigns are really built on--and that's the support that obviously disappeared for Anthony this year, when his team fell apart around him.

But as is usually the case in the NBA, 'Melo got a little too much credit for the team's success last year, and he's getting way too much blame for their failures this year. It's not his fault that Jason Kidd retired, that Raymond Felton lost a step and that Pablo Prigioni has lost time to injury. It's not his fault that the frontcourt trio of Tyson Chandler, Amar'e Stoudemire and Kenyon Martin never seem to be healthy at the same time, and don't seem to fit all that well alongside one another when they are. It's not his fault that Iman Shumpert has forgotten how to shoot for all but about two weeks total so far this season, and that J.R. Smith still can't quite seem to remember. And it's definitely not his fault that the Knicks mortgaged what little was left of their future to mortgage in a deal for Andrea Bargnani, a player who, in the immortal words of ESPN's Tom Haberstroh, "offers nothing of what the Knicks need and everything they should avoid." 

Basically, the team needed no help from Carmelo Anthony whatsoever for this season to be a disaster--not even LeBron could've redeemed this bunch this season. (Well, maybe LeBron could have, but that's why he's LeBron, and nobody except poor Gary Washburn has ever said 'Melo was on his post-championship level.) Last night's loss to the Pacers was a perfect example: Anthony was absolutely brilliant in the first quarter, scoring 16 points on 6-8 shooting, and allowing the Knicks to creep into the quarter break with a one-point lead. But eventually the game started slipping away from them in the second and third quarters, as too much Bargnani and Stoudemire on defense and too many turnovers on offense left the Knicks hugely vulnerable to a Pacers run, and before you knew it, Melo was sitting for the 4th quarter in garbage time with his 28 points and seven rebounds. Was it his fault that the Knicks lost? Maybe a tiny bit, but it probably wouldn't have made your top-ten list of reasons why.

The other reason Anthony's season is getting so little attention is that with certain NBA players, fault tends to come a little easier than credit. A lot of NBA folks made conclusions about Carmelo around the time he was demanding a trade out of Denver--the Melodrama, you might recall--that he must not be that good a guy, not that good a teammate, or just not a true winner to put his current team in such a bind to get rid of him and his future team in such a bind to acquire him. It was the same sort of hubbub that surrounded LeBron post-Decision, and as he conclusively proved, the only way to get rid of it is by winning big and winning consistently. Melo found that out himself last year, but now that the winning's stopped, he's back to being the problem child again, and many assume that if the team's not winning, his leadership must be at least partly at fault for it.

I think Carmelo deserves a lot of credit, however, for that very leadership this season. Have we once heard him sell out a teammate for a poor performance this season? Has he given coach Mike Woodson, perpetually on the hot seat, anything but unconditional support? Has he reacted badly to a trade rumor--even the utterly ridiculous one sending him to LA for Blake Griffin--or demanded a trade himself? Has he used the phrase "we" when he should have used "I" in a press conference, or "I" when he should have used "we"? Has he ever vented his frustration in a way that was really inappropriate? Hell, this is a guy with J.R. Smith and Andrea Bargnani as teammates--has he done anything really out of line this season?

The story with Melo on the Knicks has always been: OK, this is the team you wanted, this is the team that's been built around you--if you don't like it, then that's your own fault. And for his part, Melo's response to that seems to be: I can accept that. He takes responsibility like the guy who knows that the team rises or falls (in the public perception, if not in actuality) with him, and he hasn't complained or demanded out or started lusting over other player or team situations. There's no saying what Anthony will do once free agency becomes an option for him--though my money would still be on him staying in New York, even after everything--but when he does, he'll very likely be able to make his move this time around without having burned a single bridge behind him. That's impressive for any superstar in this day and age.

And while Carmelo hasn't gotten the headlines this season, I shouldn't act like his season will go completely unrecognized. He's on track to start his sixth-straight All-Star game this February, he'll probably get second or third-team All-NBA honors, and he might even get a down-ballot MVP vote from a ballot or two that doesn't believe you have to be on a winning team to be a winning player. But when the story of Carmelo Anthony's career is written, it will be with last year as one of his greatest successes and this year as one of his greatest failures--a perception created entirely by a context over which 'Melo has little to no control, and not based in the slightest in numbers or reality.