Championships or not, Carmelo Anthony is one of the best players to ever set foot on the basketball court. However, if you played in the 2000s, you got an earful from Kobe Bryant, no matter how good you were.
Advertisement
Copying Michael Jordan in every aspect he could, Bryant became him not just game-wise but also with competitiveness. In fact, he went a step further when it came to talking smack to his opponents and especially when the players were close to his caliber.
Let’s hear Melo talking about one such incident.
It was always a war between Carmelo Anthony and Kobe Bryant
In his appearance on All the Smoke with Matt Barnes and Stephen Jackson, Carmelo reminisced about the time he and The Mamba went head-to-head against each other and how even before the game used to start, Kobe would tell him that he would guard Anthony in the fourth and “referees won’t call sh*t” on him.
Both of them went at each other whenever Melo’s Denver took on Bryant’s Lakers back in the mid-2000s and by the end of that decade, it became a war. The 6ft 7′ forward shared a story with Barnes and Jackson who also had been in plenty of battles with the 6ft 6′ guard themselves.
“We hug before the game, he says, ‘It’s war.’” Melo remembered from a game in 2009 WCF. “I said it’s war. Let’s get it. Like It ain’t gonna be nothing easy. I always used to try to beat him up though, I was bigger than him, I used to beat him up, be physical with him.”
Those were the days to watch a basketball game.
How Melo’s career graph digressed with time and NBA’s treatment
From being a scoring champ, 10x All-Star, 6x All-NBA team member, 4x Olympic medalist, and top scorer in US men’s basketball team history, and establishing himself as one of NBA’s greatest 75 players of all time, Anthony is now without a team for the second time in his career for this long.
Despite compromising his ego and accepting the role of becoming a bench player, the once face of Denver and New York franchises finds himself out of the league.
But it’s just the way the teams operate these days. Franchises and their management believe in young players more than proven veterans even if they are as great as Anthony once was, and can still contribute and be more efficient and consistent than an average young guy.
