Keidel: The NBA Is Here, Which Means The Carmelo Anthony Apologists Are Back
By Jason Keidel
» More Columns
As our two NFL teams tank, we are approaching the oblivion of winter. That means no baseball, some channel-skipping football and basketball.
Which brings us to the sequel to Fan Guy: the Carmelo Anthony Apologist.
Call him Fan Guy 2 or whatever adjunct works for you. The etymology is a bit different, but he has woefully similar characteristics to the Jets fan who never blames his team for their failures, but rather blames those of us who frame it for the public.
Again, these are not the characteristics of every Knicks fan. Not every Jets fan is a Fan Guy, and not every Knicks fan is a nut. But they will be very easy to spot. Just check the comments and tweets an hour after reading this. He will be the guy whose idea of diplomatic discourse is to drop every F-bomb in the book, to question my heritage, sanity and sexual orientation. He never uses his real name. And his handles predictably drip with machismo, like "MeloMan7" or "KnicksKnuckles" or "KnicksInSix." His rage is saved for anyone who doesn't drool over every move the Knicks make.
Fan Guy 2 was euphoric when the Knicks traded for Melo. He instantly morphed into a vessel for all the hyperbole that came with the deal, an echo chamber for Jim Dolan's propaganda. He cried when those first MSG "Coming Home" commercials ran prior to Melo's first game, wiping his nose with his No. 7 Snuggie.
His ethereal, dream-sequence romance with Melo is very delicate. He doesn't want to hear that Melo was born in Brooklyn but raised in Baltimore, thus trivializing that "native son" nonsense. By that logic, Michael Jordan is a New Yorker, as well. Yet we never hear that MJ is a bejeweled king of Kings County.
Fan Guy 2 (or the Anthony Apologist) doesn't care that the Nuggets had a better record than the Knicks after the trade. He doesn't miss the players or the draft picks that the Knicks lavished upon the Nuggets, despite the fact that no other team was pining for Melo. The Knicks had exponentially more leverage than they realized, and basically bid against themselves. Everyone knew Anthony wanted to play in NYC. What was the rush? Why so eager to sell the farm?
And, more than anything, what gets Fan Guy 2 in full-throated fury is the wide-screen reality that the trade is a bust. That's when otherwise reasonable men become shrieking infants, hurling all varieties of vulgarity with great abandon. That's when wives lose their husbands, kids lose fathers, talk-show hosts keep their fingers perilously close to the mute button and writers keep their fingers equally close to the "blocked" button on social-media sites.
Hell hath no fury and such. Fan, truncation of fanatic, is not a normal guy. His thinking is rarely logical and linear. But his passion is largely innocuous. He wears all kinds of costumes at a bar, drinks, eats and yells a bit too much, veins bulging from the sides of his neck. And then he staggers home.
We don't know when he became Fan Guy 2, but surely there was some axis, some symbolic intersection where the road forked and he bent the wrong way. And since he's here, calling strangers every profanity in the lexicon, he might as well go all the way.
Facts no longer matter. Their record is irrelevant. The Knicks are just as bad as when they acquired Melo, but are now about $120 million poorer. And no team will win when a ball hog, a black-hole power forward like Anthony is the best player. But that's of little consequence. What matters is your rage, your misguided agony, your vitriolic approach toward everyone except those responsible: The New York Knickerbockers.
And if the forced sentimentality weren't enough, you now have a true child of the Holzman, halcyon years; a hippie of the highest order.
You now have Phil Jackson, the baton to the glory days; the grainy tape and strained color TV and Marv Albert, a confluence of timing and talent that has eluded our beloved Big Apple for 40 years. With the Zen Master and triangle offense in town, it's time to measure the hypotenuse of a dynasty! Never mind that he's never built a team before, that this is his first trip through the turnstile of the GM's office. We're all partly blinded by the 13 rings he brings to Gotham. It's the first two he won here that has the masses mesmerized, no matter how irrelevant they are today.
Jackson won't be the first icon to catch and release the Knicks. Pat Riley, Larry Brown and Lenny Wilkens are among the vocational corpses in the graveyard of 2 Penn Plaza. And if Martians were to land on Earth sometime soon, how would we possibly explain Isiah Thomas? There are still some jaded Knicks fans who thought he did a decent job. As they say in cyberspace...smh...
We came this close in 1994. You remember the bizarre confluence of basketball, murder, mayhem and the birth of reality television, with Orenthal James Simpson in that white Bronco cruising toward the end of his life.
Maybe it's a fitting metaphor. The Knicks were 48 minutes from an NBA title and blew it. And they haven't been that close to a title since. (That includes the year they were stomped by the Spurs in the Finals.)
You know the rest. Riley faxed his resignation and the team tumbled into turmoil. Dolan was in charge. When you swap a dynasty builder like Riley for a wannabe rock-god owner, your team has issues.
For some reason no one wants to admit this, but Anthony was a consolation prize for LeBron James. When the King stiff-armed the Knicks they got the prince -- or a prince -- or some limb of the NBA's aristocracy. Or so they thought.
It's ironic to see Jackson andAnthony share a stage, a floor or a franchise. The 1970s Knicks were all about teamwork, seven or so selfless souls who always chose victory over vanity. In case you haven't seen it, there's a delightful documentary about those Knicks on ESPN, part of their "30 for 30" series. Those Knicks won with the extra pass, while Melo is fluent in the extra shot.
When my mother was pregnant with me, she and my dad went to see the first championship team in 1969. Back then you could sit six or seven rows from the court without signing over your car. With a few quid and a kind usher you could inch toward the hardwood, where it was loud, livid and the cigar smoke crowned the court.
There's something quite comforting about those teams, the idea that the Knicks once played pristine basketball, that Manhattan and MSG were once indeed the Mecca of basketball.
It's a shame they are so disquieting now.
Follow Jason on Twitter @JasonKeidel.
You May Also Be Interested In These Stories
