Carmelo Anthony has an extremely unique place in basketball history.
When he announced his retirement from the NBA in May, much was made about how the Baltimore-bred superstar finished his career as a top-10 scorer in league history, won three Olympics gold medals and an NCAA championship, but never won an NBA title. Or came particularly close.
Given that basketball is the sport in which a single player can have the greatest impact on team success, the lack of playoff success is a perplexing part of the Towson Catholic alum’s legacy. It would be unfair to say he wasn’t a “winner,” as Anthony did lots of winning at other levels. It is perhaps too dismissive to simply say he was on the wrong teams and didn’t have enough help during the bulk of his career in Denver and New York.
And yet, it’s also an amount of dumb luck. The Detroit Pistons probably spent a few years regretting having taken Darko Miličić with the No. 2 pick in the 2003 NBA Draft and allowing Anthony to fall to No. 3. Had they made the correct pick, Anthony would have had a chance to contribute to a title team in his rookie year and would have never carried such a reputation.
There is no doubting his greatness, though. Anthony carved out a unique place within basketball culture and the overall history of the game. What’s more, he did so while constantly representing his hometown and singing our city’s praises. Even after leaning into having been born in New York when he first went to the Knicks, he made sure to remind everyone that he was rooting for his beloved Orioles when they faced the Yankees in the 2012 MLB playoffs. The Orioles and Ravens are both featured among his many tattoos. Ravens first-round pick Zay Flowers said this year that a welcome message he received from Anthony was most meaningful to him.
Moreover, Anthony continued to give back to this city via the Carmelo Anthony Foundation and Carmelo Anthony Youth Center, created the Team Melo AAU program and brought contemporaries like LeBron James, Kevin Durant and Chris Paul to town for a 2011 exhibition game at Morgan State.
Anthony has long labeled Baltimore native Eric Skeeters as his godfather. Skeeters himself has an extraordinary place in basketball history as part of the coaching staff at Coppin State when the Eagles upset No. 2 seed South Carolina and later on the staff at UMBC when the Retrievers shocked No. 1 seed Virginia.
Skeeters got his start in coaching as an assistant at St. Frances in the ‘90s, meaning Anthony was around the team growing up. Asked how Baltimore impacted Anthony, Skeeters told me you need to look no further than a St. Frances basketball legend.
“It was a maturation process in Baltimore that the older guys taught the younger guys,” Skeeters said. “And so Melo learned everything about the game, patterned his game after Mark Karcher and the years he spent with us at St. Frances — all the jab steps, pivots, scoring, the body control. Now, Mark was 6-[foot]-5 and unathletic. Melo was 6-[foot]-8 and could jump to the moon. So he took that skill set and that toughness. … Melo patterned his game around [Mark].”
In that way, Baltimore was with Carmelo Anthony during every step of his legendary career.
Sadly, we haven’t had as many opportunities to publicly show our appreciation to Anthony in a large setting here. Aside from the 2011 Melo League game at Hill Field House, the only game Anthony played here after high school was a 2013 exhibition game the Knicks played against the Wizards at what was then known as the Baltimore Arena.
Anthony is almost certainly a top-five Baltimore athlete of all time, in the conversation with the likes of Babe Ruth, Michael Phelps, Al Kaline and Leon Day. (Cal Ripken Jr. if you expand “Baltimore” to include the suburbs of Harford County.) I hope we’ve fully appreciated the man’s remarkable career and loyalty to his city as a pop culture figure.
And while it’s probably impossible this late in the scheduling process, it would be really great for Nike and Under Armour to work together with the city for a Syracuse-Maryland game at the newly renovated building this fall to allow an opportunity for Anthony to be honored appropriately in his hometown.
Perhaps Anthony could be recognized in the rafters or via another permanent display of some sort within the building. He deserves to be honored in that type of fashion and it would provide Baltimore sports fans a fun chance to celebrate one of our own.
Photo Credit: Courtesy of NBA Photos
Originally published June 15, 2023