Carmelo Anthony successfully made his NBA return last week when he was signed to a non-guaranteed one-year deal with the Portland Trail Blazers - a team which looked a little shaky, even just 10 or so games into the regular season.
Anthony’s signing was a breakthrough for the old guard, to say the least, as the number three pick from the 2003 NBA Draft certainly looks like the last of his kind from an era where hero-ball players dominated the league.
Let's call this the Kobe Bryant era.
It’s hard not to look at Anthony being cut from the same cloth as the league’s ultimate anti-hero. Like Bryant, Anthony has made a living by putting the hoop inside the basket — all talks of efficiency be damned.
Both players will chunk an x number of shots in a game, and will certainly favor a late isolation — even if if they missed their last 10 shots entering crunch time.
The debates about them and how they’ll fare in today’s game will never end, but if there’s one thing in Carmelo’s return that cannot be disputed, it’s that people tuned in to see what he’ll be doing in a Blazer uniform.
That’s exactly the type of impact that Bryant had in the league. Just a couple of years ago, he was, in a sense, ‘Melo’, at least when we’re talking about their on-court play. (A more beloved version, of course, given the trophies that he has won for Los Angeles.)
In his final year, Kobe huffed and puffed his way to a 17.6 point average, wins be damned, as injuries and age began to take their crippling effect on the living legend.
But while he may have not been capable of lighting up his opponents on the offensive end the same way he did a decade past, he still caught your attention every time he walks the court, ball in his hands, knowing that a pass to him will be the last option.
He made you watch. He made you wait for his next move. And when he took on three defenders in a set-play and decided to take an off-balance fade away, you cringed.
Yet you sat in awe when he had the audacity to take the ball in the next possession and make the same shot against the same type of defense.
That’s the bottom line — you watched.
Far from mellow
And while there remain a lot of must-watch basketball players in the league today, no one does it like Bryant did — whose style remained unchanged, only polished, since his days as an afro-sporting rookie back in 1996.
James Harden will take on defenders one on one because he is just too crafty for his defenders. LeBron James will barrel through opponents on raw power alone.
But you watched Kobe for his sheer determination. For all the brilliance of Harden or James, neither will have the balls to pull up a 30 footer on a night where he’s missed 80 percent of the shots he threw. It was a dogged mentality — of how winning can only be achieved by him taking shots, nothing more, nothing less — that could be frustrating at times.
Still, the joy of him pulling through in the tightest of moments, and the frustration of watching Bryant go for a contested jumper (instead of putting their fate in the hands of their teammates) is something that, for better or worse, is lost in today’s beautiful game.
Lakers fans might probably be relieved nowadays, knowing the LeBron James will make the right decisions in the end — be it a strong drive to the hoop, a kickout to a wide open shooter, or a two-man game with Anthony Davis.
In Kobe’s time, the only assurance you have is that Bryant will do everything humanely possible to get that win. And that’s okay. That’s beautiful... most times.
With the game’s continuous evolution, it’s still questionable as to how effective Bryant’s style would have been to the fast-paced, more team-oriented type of basketball today.
Anthony’s above-average performances with the Blazers only proves that players with that type of mentality can always squeeze into a team and still get significant minutes. But Bryant doesn’t like squeezing in, and he’s not the above-average type either. He could be brilliant or really bad.
Good thing he retired three years ago and left the game to the kids.
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