Carmelo Anthony is a Trail Blazer and a Hall of Famer
Anthony was out of the NBA for over a year before the Blazers gave him a dignified finale.
Inductees into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame don’t go in as a member of one team the way they do in baseball.
If they did, Carmelo Anthony’s plaque would undoubtedly feature a Knicks jersey when he’s officially enshrined this fall. New York is where he chose to go in his prime. It’s where he’s most loved, where he had his greatest individual success and where his No. 7 jersey will one day be retired.
Anthony would be a first-ballot Hall of Famer if his career ended after he left the Knicks in 2017. He didn’t need the brief time he spent with the Trail Blazers to cement that. He was only in Portland for two seasons, one of which was cut short by the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
But I’ll bet he gives that chapter the appropriate amount of reverence in his induction speech, for what it meant for the way he ended his career.
In the beginning, it was a marriage of convenience, with Anthony and the Blazers solving each other’s problems.
