Carmelo from being option 1 to being the reserve

From his rookie days with the Denver Nuggets, to becoming a star in New York, to acquiring nicknames based on his attire, to his preeminence in international competition, Carmelo Anthony’s basketball reputation has been steadily evolving in his 19 years in the NBA.

Yet as Anthony begins to carve out a role with his sixth franchise, the Los Angeles Lakers, some things remain the same.

“He’s been a headache for every one of those teams,” said San Antonio Spurs coach Gregg Popovich, who has devised defensive schemes to try to frustrate the No. 9 scorer in league history for nearly two decades.

Throughout Anthony’s career, as ubiquitous as his megawatt smile has been his mark as a certified scorer.

“A menace,” is how LeBron James described him. “He’s a sniper. As we call it in our league: guys who don’t need a lot of airspace to shoot because of his quick trigger.”

Anthony averaged more than 20 points in each of his first 14 seasons with the Nuggets and New York Knicks, winning the scoring title in 2012-13 with 28.7 points per game for New York.

He has scored 50 points four times and topped 40 points 40 times.

“I’m still out here doing it,” the 37-year-old Anthony said. “I think that’s what honestly excites me. I’m here in my 19th year and I’m still doing what I can do. I’m still passionate about the game. I’m still passionate about coming to work every day and getting better.”

While Anthony was the undisputed No. 1 option on those Nuggets and Knicks teams, his role took different forms in recent stops, refining his game to fit rosters where he found himself as a complementary player, rather than the leader of the pack.

That’s how he went from a supernova with the Nuggets to a high-level role player in Los Angeles.

The Olympic Melo

As the most decorated Olympic athlete (three gold medals, one bronze) in U.S. men’s basketball history, Anthony’s time on that team will likely go down as the best basketball of his career.

He started on the ‘Redeem Team’ in Beijing 2008, but was at his best during the 2012 London Games as the second-leading scorer behind Kevin Durant, averaging 16.3 points on 53.5% from the field and 50% from the three-point arc coming off the bench. While Durant averaged 19.5 points during the U.S.’s 8-0 run to gold, he did so in 26.1 minutes per game, with Anthony playing just 17.9 minutes per game as a reserve.

Anthony averaged more points than James, the third-best scorer in league history, and Kobe Bryant, No. 4.

During that stretch, he had one of the most mind-blowing performances in international basketball history, scoring 37 points in just 14 minutes of playing time against Nigeria. Anthony hit 10 of 12 three-point attempts in that game, and Team USA won by 83 points.

“When he started coming off the bench, it was perfect,” Jim Boeheim, Anthony’s college coach at Syracuse and a Team USA assistant, told ESPN. “He had the game against Nigeria, he made like 100 three-pointers…. It was crazy.”

Anthony is the all-time leading scorer (336 points) and rebounder (125 rebounds) in U.S. men’s national basketball team history.

For Boeheim, who coached Anthony as a teenager and led the Orange to the NCAA title in 2003, and again years later as part of several Olympic teams, it was obvious that Anthony could fit his game for any team he played for.

“What’s interesting is that when nobody wanted to sign him three years ago or whatever it was, I told some people, ‘Well, he came off the bench in the Olympics and played well. It’s not like he’s not available to come off the bench and make shots because that’s what he does,'” Boeheim recalled. “So that’s what surprised me a little bit about the whole thing.”

Thunder/Rockets/Trail Blazers’ Melo

The past half-decade has seen Anthony jump to a handful of teams, including a nearly year-long hiatus in which he was out of the league.

The period of turmoil began with a trade to the Oklahoma City Thunder just before the start of the 2017-18 season.

“I loved Carmelo,” said Chicago Bulls coach Billy Donovan, who coached Anthony in OKC. “He was great to work with. I think it was a very, very difficult situation for all of us because the change for him happened the day before training camp opened.”

Anthony went from averaging 18.8 shots per game with the Knicks to 15 per game for the Thunder. He started all 78 games he played in the regular season and the six he appeared in during Oklahoma City’s first-round loss to the Utah Jazz. He struggled in the postseason, averaging 11.8 points on 21.4% three-point shooting. This, of course, after setting the tone for his time in Oklahoma City with a response at a press conference during training camp that some around the league deemed him unwilling to make a trade.

“Who, me?” joked Anthony to a reporter when it was suggested he might come off the bench for the Thunder. “I don’t know where that started, where that came from. Hey, P (Paul George), they said he had to come off the bench.”

Looking back, Donovan said Anthony’s reputation suffered an unfair blow.

“All this stuff about being a starter, coming off the bench, I’ve always found Carmelo to be a really, really good team guy,” Donovan said. “Really good in the locker room. I think guys really enjoy being around him. I think he’s a real, genuine, genuine, sincere, real guy. And everything we asked him to do, he tried to do the best he could.”

OKC’s experiment lasted only one season. After a trade to the Atlanta Hawks, who let him go after the contract was terminated, Anthony formed a new ‘Big Three’ in Houston with James Harden and Chris Paul.

And that experiment lasted only 10 games, two of them in which Anthony appeared as a bench player for the first time in his NBA career, before the Rockets essentially told him to go home. He was eventually traded to the Chicago Bulls, who let him go without playing a game.

Then came the year-plus period in which Anthony was without a team before the Portland Trail Blazers, struggling at the start of the 2019-20 season, signed him, and their stars, point guards Damian Lillard and CJ McCollum, backed the move.

“It was close to almost nobody taking a chance,” Boeheim said. “Just think if Portland hadn’t done that, I don’t think he’d play. And then everybody has a completely different perspective on him.”

Anthony started 58 games in his first season with the Blazers and proved he could still perform in the ‘clutch,’ scoring key jump shots late in the game in the seeding round on the bubble in Orlando, Fla.

“He was great,” Boeheim continued. “I mean, he’d go eight minutes without a shot and on that team, you might not get a shot off. And then he’d take two. And to his credit, they’d go to him down the stretch, he’d end up making a three-pointer at the end to win the game. It was crazy, really.”

Anthony played one more season in Portland and came off the bench in 66 of 69 games. In the playoffs, despite Portland losing to the Denver Nuggets in the first round in six games, Anthony fared better as a reserve than as a postseason starter with OKC, averaging 12.3 points in 23.9 minutes and shooting 37.8% on three-pointers.

Lakers’ Melo

Anthony is a bright spot in an up-and-down season for the Lakers.

Through his first 18 games, all but three coming off the bench, Anthony is shooting 46.1% from 3-point range, a personal best. Anthony has even been playing better at home, where Los Angeles fans quickly fell in love with him, shooting 53.2% on 3-pointers, the best percentage in the NBA for any player playing in home games with a minimum of 30 3-point attempts.

“He knows who he is as a player and finds places where he can be useful, and this is a great example of that,” Popovich said of Anthony’s success in Los Angeles. “He’s done it again. He takes care of himself. He’s a professional. And he makes every team better. So I’m happy for him.”

Anthony averages 15.2 points on just 11.2 shots per game and is often asked to fill the wings and open up the perimeter. He has hit 47 catch-and-shoot three-pointers this season, the best total in the league heading into Monday’s games, surpassing Milwaukee’s Grayson Allen (46), according to Second Spectrum tracking.

“He’s in a great rhythm,” James said. “He’s just taking his shots and making them.”

While Anthony hasn’t gone so far as to bad-mouth the Rockets for alienating him and the 28 teams outside the Blazers for not signing him, his time with the Lakers has been enjoyed.

“As far as what I can do on the court, I don’t think that’s going to change,” Anthony said. “I don’t need a lot. I pick my spots, I get to open spots, I shoot when I’m open, my teammates look for me. Now, I’m not the type of possession player that comes on the court with the offense playing through me, so I can look at the game differently, from a different perspective.”