As of December 9th, 2014, the New York Knicks were 4-19, amid a nine-game losing streak in a season that would include five losing streaks of seven games or more, on the way to a 17-65 record—good for dead last in the Eastern Conference and the second-worst record in the NBA.
However, the 2015-16 New York Knicks—as of December 8th, 2015—are 10-12, six wins ahead of where they were at this point last year and four games out of first place. The team has undergone a serious makeover: Carmelo Anthony, Cleanthony Early, Jose Calderon, Langston Galloway, Lou Amundson, and Lance Thomas are the only Knicks left on the roster from last year. Kristaps Porzingis—despite early overhype courtesy of the mainstream sports media—has been deathly efficient in his first twenty-plus NBA games, averaging 14.6 points, 8.9 rebounds, and 1.9 blocks per game, while his shooting percentage line reads .460/.361/.845, staggering for a 7’3 twenty-year-old. Arron Affalo (13.0 PPG, .472/.333/.750) has proved a solid offensive contributor while Derrick Williams (7.2 PPG, .410/.265/.742) and Robin Lopez (7.1 PPG, 5.7 RPG, 1.2 BPG on 24.1 MPG, .452/N/A/.862) have been welcomed additions to the interior after the 2014-15 Knicks had little-to-no presence in the paint.
By all means, this Knicks team is closer to what fans had in mind when Phil Jackson signed his five-year, $12 million per-year contract in March of 2014. But despite only being a quarter of the way into the season, with all-time coaching great Jackson as president, is 10-12 good enough? At their current rate, the Knicks are projected to win just over 37 games. Last season, the Brooklyn Nets squeaked into the Eastern Conference playoffs as an eight seed with a 38-44 record and were squashed by Atlanta in the first round.
For the Knicks, the eighth-richest sports franchise on the planet, valued at $2.5 billion—behind only the Los Angeles Lakers in the NBA—and generating $300 million a year in revenue, squeaking by is simply not good enough.
The last time the Knicks were in an NBA Finals was the lockout-shortened 1998-99 season and their last NBA title came in the 1972-73 season with a roster that included Phil Jackson. Bill Bradley, Walt Frazier, Willis Reed and Earl Monroe led the way as the Knicks won 4-1 over a Jerry West and Wilt Chamberlain-led Lakers team. In what would be Chamberlain’s last NBA game, on May 10th, 1973, the Knicks clinched with a Game 5 victory…456 days before Knicks head coach Derek Fisher was born.
In short, the Knicks have come a long way, but there’s one glaring spot on the floor that has long held them back and will continue to: Carmelo Anthony.
As of December 8th, Anthony wields the fourth-highest salary in the NBA this season ($22.9 million), and will command the highest salary in each of the next three seasons ($24.6, $26.2, and $27.9 million, respectively). Even with Anthony finagling his deal to free up future cap space, his numbers don’t justify that kind of price tag and it will ruin the Knicks’ ability to sign players and make playoff runs in the years to come.
(The heaviest anchor weighing down an NBA franchise isn’t ‘Melo, but Kobe Bryant. We won’t go too deep into Bryant’s last three, highest-salary-in-the-league seasons; he’s currently on pace for the worst shooting season in the NBA in the last fifty-five years, yet he’s collecting $25 million this year…and he collected roughly $53.95 million in salary the last two years combined, wherein he played a total of forty-one games, shot .399% from the field, averaged 6.6 turnovers per game while averaging 21.1 PPG on 19.2 shots per game. No one can hold a franchise back in his “golden” years like Kobe has, but I digress.)
Thus far this year, in terms of forwards who average at least 25.0 minutes per game, Anthony is eighth in points-per-game with 21.5, wedged between Kawhi Leonard at seventh (21.6) and Andrew Wiggins at ninth (21.1)—Leonard has the twentieth-highest NBA salary at $16.5 million this year, while Wiggins is all the way down at 129th, making just above $5.7 million this season. The problem is that, among the same sample set, Anthony is fifty-sixth in field goal percentage at .406% while shooting the sixth-most shots per game (18.3). Among those forwards, he’s fifty-ninth in EFG% at .453%, fiftieth in TS% at .517% while being eighth in usage (29.4%) and sixteenth in PIE at 14.1. What if those parameters are extrapolated to include all players who play at least 25.0 minutes a game and not just forwards? Anthony barely cracks the top thirty in PIE, is just inside the top hundred in true shooting, and he’s 118th in effective field goal percentage while clocking in at twelfth in usage.
In layman’s terms: Carmelo shoots a lot and right now the shots just aren’t falling—he’s already missed more than 200 shots this season. On Monday night, Anthony’s struggles hampered the Knicks in their 104-97 loss to the Mavericks: Porzingis scored 28 points on 13-18 shooting and, despite a technical foul from ‘Melo with 2:22 remaining in the fourth, helped cut the Mavs’ twenty-three point lead to four with less than a minute to play. Anthony capped off a five-turnover, 6-18 shooting night—including 1-6 from three-point land—by going 0-3 in the fourth and committing an offensive foul with 19.5 seconds remaining, thus sealing the game for the Mavericks and delivering the Knicks their sixth loss in eight games.
Of all players that average 15.0 or more field goal attempts per game this season, only three NBA players are shooting at a worse percentage: the aforementioned Kobe Bryant with 17.8 FGA per game at .306%, Derrick Rose with 15.7 FGA per game at .355%, and James Harden with 20.7 FGA per game at .401%. Rose’s Bulls are the only team with a winning record currently—largely due to the terrific all-around seasons Jimmy Butler and Pau Gasol are having. According to the 2015-16 Hollinger Statistics, Anthony is forty-sixth in the NBA in PER at 19.8, between Dwight Powell and DeAndre Jordan, respectively, and he’s tied for twenty-fourth in EWA (estimated wins added) at 3.3 with Jimmy Butler and Brandon Knight.
“But wait, ‘Melo won the 2012-13 NBA Scoring Title and led us to the Eastern Conference Finals that year!” Yes, Anthony won the 2012-13 scoring title while playing 67 games and scoring the fifth-most points in the league—Kevin Durant, Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, and James Harden all played at least nine more games than Anthony, but Anthony won the title because his PPG average was higher. Anthony led the league in usage, but wasn’t in the top twenty in total shooting or effective field goal percentage—whereas James and Durant were top-ten in usage, total shooting, and effective field goal percentage. Anthony took 22.2 shots per game, 1.8 shots more than second-place Kobe and a staggering 3.5 more than third-place Russell Westbrook. Anthony’s putrid assists-to-turnover ratio of 0.98 per game (175 turnovers to 171 assists) put him at sixty-fifth in terms of small forwards. The 2012-13 Eastern Conference Finals appearance? Carmelo averaged 25.8 shots per game in the playoffs, 3.4 more than the next closest player (Kevin Durant), and only made .406% of his shots, .298% from three-point range. Of the twelve playoff games those season, Carmelo had three or more turnovers in seven of them, finishing with 19 assists and 31 turnovers. After starting that postseason 8-16 from three-point range, he went 9-41.
If you love volume shooters, running up scoring totals in lieu of team efficiency, Carmelo is your guy. But in a sports era dominated by analytics, with individual and team success hinging on efficiency, Carmelo is an overpaid, perennial underperformer, clocking in at 25th on Forbes’ 2015 Highest-Paid Athletes list, despite being the 16th-best player in the NBA according to the International Business Times and CBS Sports. Carmelo might one day be in the Hall of Fame, but it won’t be because he won championships.