Specifically they were essentially asked if Melo is a #1 option. Unsurprisingly, given much of the talk about Melo these days, the answer seemed to be no. Some tidbits:
"I love him as a player. I just don't think he's your alpha male. He can't be your No. 1 guy. He's kind of like Clyde Drexler. As the alpha male in Portland, Clyde never got over the top. But when he went to Houston and was the No. 2 guy to Hakeem Olajuwon, he won."
"And as a winner -- that's what it's all about, right? -- he's not rated highly. I mean, this is his 11th season. It's time to win something."
"So now, 10 years into the league, he's probably Robin on a championship team instead of Batman. He has Batman talent, but the intangibles are missing."While everyone had some nice things to say about Melo, the bottom line seems to be that he's either a) not a number one option on a championship team; or b) you have to find the perfect people to build around him, aka "five Tyson Chandlers" for him to win.
I don't necessarily have any qualms about this. What I have a problem with, is putting the majority of the blame on Melo and not just a product of our own expectations and the ruthlessness of winning NBA titles. Every NBA champion in recent memory has either had an all-time great playing at their peak, a slew of similarly talented Hall of Famers and in some cases they have had both. Carmelo Anthony isn't LeBron James or Kobe Bryant and he doesn't play with Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen or Tony Parker and Manu Ginobili. Why is that so bad?
Maybe I'm naive here and underrating how Melo plays ball (the bad parts) but aren't those Celtics teams pretty damn good if Melo replaced Paul Pierce? If he had Andrew Bynum, Paul Gasol and Lamar Odom, could Melo win a title against an injured Celtics team? I tend to think the answers are yes, but what do I know?
Sure, Dirk won one without some of the above, but what does that really teach us? That Carmelo Anthony is a worse player than Dirk, we knew this. And for what it's worth, Dirk had the perfect team around him, several Tyson Chandler types, Jason Kidd, Shawn Marion and a fantastic coach, and this all after years of people claiming he couldn't win a title.
I don't think it's a bad thing for Clyde Drexler to not win a title without Hakeem and I don't think it's a bad thing if Melo can't win a title without a future Hakeem (it's probably not named Kevin Love). But, it might be bad for the NBA if those are truisms in the league. By all accounts Melo is a terrific player. ESPN's #NBARANK, may not be the best judge of talent but Melo ranks as the 15th best player in the league. If that's the case, and Melo can't be the alpha dog, isn't the problem that you need one of at most 14 players to win a title and probably two? That's pretty ruthless. Daryl Morey's worked so hard to get two, #1's in James Harden and Dwight Howard, who both rank higher than Melo, and Houston still isn't even talked about as a legitimate title contender.
I could be a biased Knicks fan but all the talk about Melo just gets boring. It's not even enlightening to hear what league executives have to say about it. It's the same old stuff being repeated, whether it's about Melo or anyone else. One player in the NBA has a larger effect than any other player has on their sport but even with that, they can't do it all alone. Did LeBron win anything before he and coach were on the same exact page, putting him on the court with all great shooters?
I guess people like reading the headlines about Melo and how he is or isn't good enough to win alone but nobody is saying anything interesting about the subject. Wait, Carmelo Anthony needs another great player or a team perfectly constructed around his talents to win a title? Great, he's like every other NBA player!
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