Carmelo Anthony did not take kindly to Charles Barkley calling out his perceived lack of leadership.
Barkley said on TNT Thursday night that Anthony needs to be a better leader. Anthony fired back, saying that he’d never even met Barkley and the two don’t know each other at all.
“I wouldn’t even feel right cursing my teammates out here on the bench, on the court. That’s not who I am,” Anthony told the New York Daily News’s Stefan Bondy on Saturday. “Me and my teammates we have conversations, we have players-only meetings. I speak up and I’m heard. But the problem is somebody always trying to compare you to the next person, to the next man, and that’s what kinds of irks me and gets on my nerves. How can you tell somebody that they’re not, you know. You’re not around me. I’ve never even met you before. So you know nothing about me other than what you’re seeing out there on the basketball court, the couple minutes of the games you actually watch. So for somebody to tell me I need to be a better leader, I mean it’s…
“I don’t know how to be a better leader than what I’m doing. I don’t know what that mean. A lot of people interpret that different ways. I don’t know what to say about that.”
Anthony also contended that he’s held to a different standard as the star in New York.
“I always say it’s a lose-lose situation for me,” Anthony said. “And then everybody else is in a different situation. You take the game in Utah, for example, when I was sitting on the bench thinking to myself trying to think what’s going on. If anybody else in the NBA in my situation would’ve done that they’d be like, ‘He’s pissed, he’s being a leader.’ With me, it’s bad body language.
“So it’s always going to be a tough situation and I think that’s kind of what put me at peace this offseason and made me come to peace and not have to worry about those things.”
It’s true that Anthony comes in for a lot of criticism, but that’s life in New York. Still, it probably isn’t fair to assume that Anthony is a bad leader just because he isn’t as demonstrative as certain other stars.
