Carmelo and the Man in the Mirror

Imagine a sumptuous penthouse apartment in South Brooklyn, not that far in terms of walking distance from the owner's notably more humble childhood home. Inside, a well-dressed man is staring intently into a full-length mirror, wearing an impeccably designed, hand-crafted bespoke suit.

But something's wrong. It's not a horrible, disfiguring flaw, but rather a detail that's slightly out of place and tantalizingly, horribly just beyond his reach. He twists and turns, adjusts the collar and the sleeves, fusses and grimaces, but the more he struggles, the further he seems to get from that elusive, perfect pose.

So he grabs a hat and checks himself out, only to quickly discard it. And then another, and yet still another, each more ridiculous than the last, still trying to rectify the original, seemingly unsolvable problem with the suit. He glowers, snapping his fingers with increasing agitation at the team of assistants and designers and assistant designers charged with keeping the bucket brigade of Seuss-ian headwear flowing. Their sweaty grins belie an all-consuming dread, born of the knowledge that the boss will never, ever be content.

That's Carmelo Anthony, shuffling through every jab step, juke, and feint in his considerable offensive arsenal, his usage rate climbing higher and higher, as the efficiency wonks regretfully shake their heads and shrug. All that effort works, to be sure, but it's only intermittently pretty and rarely ever fun, both for the performer in question and for his audience. That Carmelo plays like the best player on a bad team is mostly because he has been that since coming to New York. That he plays like a player at war with himself, shadowboxing ineffectually in a full-length mirror until the shot clock is wrung all the way out, seems to reflect something more complicated.

If Melo's game scans as labored and joyless, it's because it's impossible to shake the idea that Melo's watching himself, and aware that others are watching too. The crippling paradox here is that for all of the capital-w Work he puts in, the other adjective that's been hung on Melo since he entered the league is that he's selfish. It's an easy mistake to make, given all that fussing and rock-pounding, but it also misses the point. It's not ego at the root of Melo's decision-making tree; it's insecurity.

Look at the events of All-Star weekend, when Melo limped and groaned through 30-plus minutes of a meaningless exhibition so he could brick some lift-free threes in crunch time. Now that Anthony is out for the year, the perception is that said decision was at best a narcissist's desire for self-flattery. If you're feeling less than charitable, it was a selfish, brand-building stunt that could possibly derail the Knicks' nascent rebuilding plan, what with the injury being worse than anyone had thought, and leading to the scary-sounding and medically questionable "left knee patella tendon debridement and repair." It seems even less smart given that it has been known since the beginning of the season that Melo needed to go under the knife, and that any setbacks in the projected four-to-six month timetable for recovery could easily spill over into the 2015-16 season.

So why play? Why risk it at all? Anthony says it's partly because he felt he owed something to the fans that voted him in.

"That's important to me," Anthony said. "At the end of the day, it's a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation because if I would have said I'm not participating, I'd have gotten backlash about it. I'm saying I am participating, I get backlash."

With all due respect to Melo's sense of obligation to his fans, this is just really, really wrong. Blake Griffin, Dwyane Wade, and Anthony Davis sat out and somehow managed to avoid having their likenesses burned in effigy. It is a uniquely Melo type of wrong, though, seemingly the result of a sense that somewhere, in some grubby corner of the Internet, some subreddit or subtweet, someone might have called Anthony selfish, soft, or otherwise unworthy. That, somehow, is enough.

His decision to keep going this year, in the midst of the worst season in Knicks history—and it was very much his decision—could under different circumstances have inspired lofty Grantland Rice-esque prose about a noble, Reed/Ewing-esque warrior dying on his shield, or a hardscrabble gamer that rubbed some dirt on a debris-filled joint because didn't want to let the guys down. Either story would have been silly; most such narratives are. The problem, where Melo is concerned, is that he cares about stories like this; he cares a great deal. The harder he presses and the more he cares, the more he does and says things to his detriment.

Take this long-form ESPN The Magazine profile, in which Melo pals around with various Silicon Valley VC/tech bros, searching for the unified field theory of disruptive ideas. This is part of his campaign for a "bulletproof legacy," to become "known for being a visionary, for being truly great."

In some sense, New York would seem to be exactly the right place for someone who thinks like this, filled as it is with an equally image-obsessed slew of one percenters. In another sense, it is exactly the wrong one, as it is also home to a press that will gleefully bludgeon anyone with the temerity to say such things out loud.

Melo's hardly the only NBA star with a full-time entourage dedicated to building a global empire, or that aspires to be "a cultural icon, a taste-maker." There is even a way in which his non-basketball interests might vibe as interesting, or at least the mark of a well-rounded, intellectually curious human being. But while Carmelo Anthony does seem to be that sort of human being, he also seems exquisitely preoccupied with appearances, and so insecure that even the true things about him give the impression of false-bottomed inauthenticity.

This is Melo's narrative, or he is its captive. It becomes the narrative of every other thing he does. It was there in the stories of his (alleged) jealousy of Jeremy Lin during the heady days of Linsanity, it was the presumed motive for forcing the franchise-kneecapping trade that brought him to New York in 2011 when he could have signed there as a free agent months later. It's there in the fugazy tough guy hilarity of the Honey Nut Cheerios incident. Whether it's true or not—and we never know, not really—it sticks, and is elastic enough that everything he does fits within its confines. He panicked, or went for the money because money validated him; always grabbing and reaching, worried that the next step will open onto calamity, perpetually on defense against slurs both real and imagined.

It's a shame whether it's true or not, as it always is when a human is subsumed by this sort of storyline. There's always going to be the sense that Carmelo could have had more, been more and done more, but there's also a vexing permanence to this perception. There's enough data to suggest that Carmelo's ISO-tastic exploits do make his teammates better, and he has expanded his range and otherwise done his best to elevate an underwhelming-at-best supporting cast. But this will never be the story.

Melo knows all this. Even worse, there is the sense that he might agree with it. What's so pitiable is that the harder he tries and the more he frets and the more he seems to be watching himself struggle and worry and react, the worse it all gets. He is devoured by his narrative, and devours himself.

You don't even need to be a fan to want to tell him to pull a Bobby Rayburn and stop caring, or to shift his worldview in the direction of a healthy, Kobe Bryant-esque fuck you. He won't, but that's finally more deserving of empathy than scorn and derision. And so his season ends as it began: with him alone in front of the mirror and paralyzed by his own reflection, surrounded by a pile of rejected hats and trapped in expensive clothing that somehow feels like a straitjacket.