Anthony, Carmelo

Carmelo Anthony, byname Melo, (born May 29, 1984, Brooklyn, New York, U.S.), American professional basketball player who was one of the most prolific scorers in National Basketball Association (NBA) history.

Anthony, who grew up in a high-crime neighbourhood in Baltimore, Maryland, was sent by his mother to school in western Virginia for a better learning environment. In 2002–03 Anthony attended Syracuse University and led the basketball team to its first National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) championship during his freshman season. Anthony received the NCAA Final Four Most Outstanding Player award, partly because of the 33 points he scored in the semifinal game. He was also named Big East Conference Freshman of the Year. After playing just one year of college basketball, Anthony left Syracuse to play professionally.

Anthony, a forward, was selected with the third overall pick of the 2003 NBA draft by the Denver Nuggets. In his rookie year he started in all 82 regular-season games, posting an average of 36.5 minutes playing time per game. He averaged 21 points, 6.1 rebounds, 2.8 assists, and 1.2 steals per game that season. He helped lead the Nuggets to 43 wins, more than doubling their win record from the previous season and earning the team a spot in the playoffs. Anthony’s rookie season was considered to be second only to that of Cleveland Cavaliers’ forward LeBron James.

After his first season Anthony improved his game performance, averaging 28.9 points per game in the 2006–07 season and becoming the second youngest player in NBA history to score 5,000 points. He helped the Nuggets reach the 2008–09 Western Conference finals, where the team lost to the eventual champion Los Angeles Lakers. Anthony’s tenure in Denver, however, was marked by the club’s playoff disappointments, as the Nuggets lost in the first round of six of the seven postseasons into which he led them. Amid much speculation as to how the small-market Nuggets could pay Anthony, a free agent at the season’s end, he was traded to the Knicks in February 2011.

Anthony’s personal trend of first-round playoff exits continued during his first two postseasons in New York, but in the 2012–13 season he guided the Knicks to the second best record in the Eastern Conference, and his 28.7 points per game led the NBA. That Knicks season ended with a loss in the second round of the playoffs, but the following campaign proved disastrous as the team finished with a 37–45 record and missed the playoffs despite Anthony’s continued offensive brilliance (27.4 points per game). The Knicks were even worse during the 2014–15 season, as the team had a league-worst 10–43 record when Anthony was sidelined for the remainder of the year with a knee injury in February 2015. He returned to play 72 games during the 2015–16 season with a new emphasis on being a ball distributor (he averaged a career-high 4.2 assists per game that season), but the Knicks struggled to a 32–50 record, again missing the playoffs. In 2016–17 Anthony continued to pour in points (averaging 22.4 points per game), but the Knicks still floundered and failed to qualify for the postseason for the fourth straight season.

In the following off-season Anthony was traded to the Oklahoma City Thunder. With the Thunder, he was not his team’s primary scorer for the first time in his career, and he averaged a career-low 16.2 points per game during the 2017–18 season. He was traded to, and released by, the Atlanta Hawks in the following off-season and signed with the Houston Rockets. However, the ball dominance and volume scoring that had made Anthony a star a decade earlier was by 2018–19 largely out of favour in the NBA, and he appeared in just 10 games with Houston before being removed from the team’s rotation. He was traded to the Chicago Bulls but was released in February 2019. Anthony failed to sign with another team for the remainder of the season. In November he joined the Portland Trail Blazers, and he played two seasons there before signing with the Los Angeles Lakers in 2021.

In addition to his professional achievements, Anthony was a member of the 2004 bronze-medal-winning U.S. men’s Olympic basketball team and the Olympic gold-medal-winning teams in 2008, 2012, and 2016, thus becoming the most-decorated American men’s Olympic basketball player of all time. In 2021 he published Where Tomorrows Aren’t Promised: A Memoir of Survival and Hope (written with D. Watkins).