In case you were wondering what Carmelo Anthony is up to these days, he’s officially retired — and shockingly in the content business. I know. My guess would’ve been timepieces and Bordeaux, but Melo is an entrepreneur now, so he has various pens in various inks, and hopefully, he’s diversified enough to continue being whatever it is he wants to be. And that is . . . in the news.
The eventual Hall of Famer went on his new podcast, 7 PM in Brooklyn, with the Kid Mero, to issue a non-complaint complaint about the Denver Nuggets giving his number to Nikola Jokić.
“It was a petty maneuver. It wasn’t like, ‘Oh, we’ve got numbers to choose from.’ It was like, ‘here, take this one, you got 15,’” Anthony said. “And y’all put Jokić in the middle of that. He don’t know what the f*ck going on.”
To be fair, Mero instigated the conversation — something he’s going to find himself doing a lot on that program — and Anthony asserted that “I don’t think about this sh*t no more, though.”
However, this was mere seconds after Melo said:
“What I believe is that [the Nuggets] gave [Jokić] No. 15 to try to erase what I did.”
If this is not the height of inane internet content, I’m clearly not on TikTok. So, for the sake of the pod, Anthony shared an opinion that he’s been sitting on for, what, a decade? Regardless of if he’s right — which he is because Stan Kroenke and the Nuggets let Anthony Randolf wear 15 in between Melo’s departure and Joker’s arrival — who’s actually being petty?
Anthony, an NBA legend, an unofficial member of the banana boat crew, an official member of the 75th-anniversary team, multi-time gold medal winner for Team USA, and current co-host of a podcast with a beloved comedian/personality, is nowhere near the point of being forgotten. And even if he was disintegrating like Tom Holland at the end of Infinity War, he’d use one of his 17 platforms to remind folks of his standing in the game.
The reality is Anthony stepped on his own HOF plaque when he opted to put up gaudy numbers for crap Knicks teams instead of shrewdly planning for titles like the rest of his peers. He’s also overlooking the fact that his overt and off-putting thirst for New York forced the franchise to trade all of its assets for a star who was about to hit free agency.
Yes, the ins and connections Melo made in New York will sustain his post-playing career, but if he didn’t want people to “erase what he did,” he should’ve tried to put his name on a Larry O’Brien. Of course, Denver — which has retired a total of five numbers in its history — tried to spin the narrative; Nuggets fans didn’t move to Manhattan, and Kroenke is objectively evil. What’re they gonna do? Retire the number of an active player who forced a trade?
Look, I get it. Professional athletes’ career and lifetime legacies are mostly set in stone before age 40, and that would absolutely spark an existential crisis in anyone. Just don’t try to tell us something doesn’t bother you, or call someone else petty when you’re on camera airing decade-old grievances.
