Time flying she the same person, never matures /
All her friends married, doing well /
She’s in the streets yakkety yakkin like she was 12 /
Selfish in her own right for life, guess she’s in her second childhood.
- Nas
No matter where they go in their careers, Carmelo Anthony and J.R. Smith can’t seem to escape one another.
The two basketball prodigies have been teammates for eight seasons, all on good teams one step below great. In five seasons with the Denver Nuggets, their teams averaged 50 wins but won only two playoff series. In their first two seasons with the New York Knicks, it has been the same story. Lots of regular season wins, not much playoff success.
Eleven seasons into a Hall of Fame career, Carmelo has been overrated for so long he’s now underrated. A 6’8, 230 pure scorer with a lightning-quick step and unlimited range on his jumper, he has been able to score at will from the moment he came into the league. He is a six-time All-Star with a career PER of 20.9, yet many would have you believe he’s a loser who can’t help a team win. If you don’t believe Carmelo is an elite player, ask his peers and see what they say.
At 6’6, 220, J.R. is a miniature version of Carmelo, smaller but more athletic. An elite athlete with elite shooting and ball-handling ability, he can create his own shot against any defender in the NBA. There’s no reason he couldn’t be one of the best SG’s in the league, but gunners who get buckets at the expense of the team concept on both sides of the ball usually wind up as 6th men. J.R. averaged 18 points per game last season, winning the 6th Man of the Year Award.
Very little has gone right for him since. A week after signing a three-year contract extension this summer, he underwent two procedures on his knee, not all that uncommon for a guard entering his 10th season in the NBA. For a player who relies on athleticism, knee surgery is never routine. Compounding the problem with a five-game marijuana suspension to start the season, J.R. looked like a shell of himself over the first three months, which the stats bear out.
For all the hysteria surrounding the Knicks, injuries have been the biggest story of their slow start. J.R., Carmelo, Tyson Chandler and Ray Felton have all missed significant amounts of time, putting too much pressure on their depth as well as Mike Woodson’s questionable grasp of the talent levels of his second and third-stringers. As a result, New York is off to a 15-24 start that has seemingly everyone in the organization’s job in jeopardy.
Since the start of the New Year, the Knicks have quietly begun to right the ship. They went 6-3 through one of the most difficult stretches of their schedule, with wins at San Antonio, at Dallas, vs. Miami and vs. Phoenix. They don’t have a bad loss in the bunch, dropping games at Houston, at Indiana and at Charlotte on the second night of a back-to-back. With the schedule easing up before the All-Star Game, the Knicks have a chance to make up ground in a hurry.
In the top-heavy Eastern Conference, there isn’t much preventing them from making a run at home-court advantage in the first round of the playoffs. The Indiana Pacers and the Miami Heat have established themselves as a cut above and the Toronto Raptors continue to impress, but everyone else has as many problems as New York. The 4th seeded Atlanta Hawks have a +0.9 point differential while the Washington Wizards check in at -0.9 in 5th.
When everyone is healthy, the Knicks have a fairly complete team. They have two point guard in Felton and Pablo Prigioni, a host of athletic 6’6+ wings in J.R., Iman Shumpert, Toure Murry and Tim Hardaway Jr., a versatile combo forward in Carmelo as well as a stretch 4 (Bargnani) and a former Defensive Player of the Year (Chandler) upfront. With an $87 million payroll, it’s hard not to have a lot of talent, no matter how poorly you are managed.
In the court of public perception, New York has been the victim of the mob mentality and groupthink that so commonly afflicts Basketball Twitter. Beyond everyone assuming they were idiots, there was no thought put into why they traded for Bargnani. If you break down their playoff loss to the Pacers, the thinking becomes clear. Bargnani was brought in to spread the floor and guard David West, as his size wrecked the Knicks small-ball line-ups last May.
While most people viewed Miami as the team to beat in the East, New York spent the summer worrying about Indiana. As it turns out, building a team with the idea of matching-up with the Pacers in a seven-game series may not have been so crazy after all. Chandler and Bargnani are one of the only frontcourt duos with the size to bang with Hibbert and West, which means a playoff series could come down to Carmelo and JR vs. Paul George and Lance Stephenson.
For most of their careers, Carmelo and J.R. would have responded to the challenge in one way, trying to go point-for-point and outscore Indiana’s dynamic wing duo. However, the problem with getting offense off 1-on-1 moves is that it prevents everyone else from getting into a rhythm and allows the defense to load up on one side of the floor. In the modern NBA, the only way to beat the best defenses is to spread the floor with shooters and swing the ball from side-to-side.
For the Knicks, it really is that simple. If Carmelo and J.R. move the ball and play defense, they have a chance against anyone. If they don’t, they could lose in the first round and they will lose in the second. When Carmelo has more than four assists, New York is 11-2. Carmelo and J.R. both average 3 assists a game, so it’s not like they are incapable of reading the floor and finding the open man. It’s just their talent has always bailed them out when they played selfishly.
However, as J.R. found out in the first three months, physical talent doesn’t last forever. More importantly, there’s no telling how long this team can stay together. Even without the staggering luxury tax bills to worry about, the specter of Chandler’s health hangs over everything. Chandler isn’t the Knicks most talented player, but he is their most valuable. If he can’t go, turn out the lights because the party is over. At the age of 31, he only gets more fragile with time.
If you ask most people around the league, New York made a foolish gamble betting on J.R. and Carmelo in the first place. However, it’s worth remembering that this season is the first time everything has been taken away from them. They have seen their basketball mortality, which has a way of concentrating the mind. J.R. Smith is 28 and Carmelo Anthony is 29. They still have time to turn the perception of their careers around, but it grows shorter by the day.
“Don’t goof around, I guess. Be serious. Be a professional. And just don’t take this opportunity here you have for granted,” Smith told reporters last week. “There’s a lot of people in this world that want our jobs. You can’t take it for granted. It can be taken away just that fast.”
