Carmelo Anthony is really hung-up on Jeremy Lin. The Knicks forward has been playing extremely well for Team USA at the Olympics, and that’s caused many people to reevaluate their opinion of him.
Coach K doesn’t understand why Melo gets a bad rap, but Anthony thinks he knows where it all started.
“Let’s be frank about it,” he said in an interview with USA Today. “When it comes to the Knicks, we’re talking about one particular point in time. We’re talking about the whole ‘Linsanity’ thing. That’s when it started. That’s when it started to escalate as far as people saying I was selfish.”
Although I believe Melo got an unfair share of the blame for the Knicks’ struggles upon his trade to New York, he’s flat-out wrong about his comments.
Melo has been considered somewhat of a ballhog since his first years in the NBA with the Nuggets. He’s always been an elite scorer, and he helped take Denver to the Western Conference Finals, but it’s well known that he takes a lot of shots and that ball movement often stops with him.
Things really were magnified after he was traded to the Knicks and the team began struggling. He simply was a bad fit for coach Mike D’Antoni’s offense, and that’s why the selfish accusations began. It didn’t start with Jeremy Lin, it only continued during Linsanity.
Regardless of what Melo may say about his relationship with Lin, it’s clear he has what Matt Moore at Pro Basketball Talk termed a “persecution complex” about the point guard.
H/T I am a GM
