“Would’ve Been Out the League”: Carmelo Anthony Tells Son Kiyan About Limitations NBA Players Faced During His Early Years

Carmelo Anthony is undoubtedly one of the best iso scorers to ever play the sport of basketball. His combination of jab steps and counters meant his face-up game was elite. But, he did something even more shocking when he embraced the city of New York, when they had been awful for nearly 10 years at the time, and stuck with them until the very end.

Melo now lives in Brooklyn with his son Kiyan. Kiyan is now a top prospect in his own right and is the number one player in the tri-state area. He will be attending Syracuse in the fall.

When it comes to Syracuse, few names carry as much weight as Anthony. As a true freshman, Melo led the Orange to a National Title, signifying the start to a new era, where freshman talents could and would lead teams to titles, instead of coaches depending on multi-year commitments.

On his father’s podcast 7PM in Brooklyn, Kiyan asked whether he would be able to post the kind of stuff his generation does on their social media. His dad, ever trying to teach his son a lesson, may have exaggerated just a little bit.

“It’s some things where I’m like ‘d***, they posting that?'” started Anthony the older, “They just posted that? There’s certain things like that. But, it’s just some things that couldn’t have been posted at that point in time, because as a basketball player specifically, it was no way. It was problems with how we dressed. It was problems with how we talked.”

David Stern’s fight against self-expression through clothing in the early 2000s is well documented. While everyone knows the vitriol Stern had towards Allen Iverson for his excessive accessories, leading to a totalitarian banning of all chains and necklaces on the bench, we often don’t see how vindictive the former commissioner was to anyone who didn’t follow his draconian rules.

As Melo put it, “it was an issue with every single thing, so if you posted a video of doing something that y’all allowed to post today, you would’ve been out the league in that point in time.”

It does truly sound insane, but the conduct laws that Stern added were truly that extreme. Things have changed pretty heavily, though, as we can see in the tunnel fit pics of fashion icons like Russell Westbrook and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander today. It was current commissioner Adam Silver who changed the restrictions, hoping to make past practices obsolete.

It seems absurd that players used to get fined for having an exposed piece of jewelry or a shirt that was too large, but that was in fact a real time in the NBA. The Instagram posts of today would never have been allowed, but the extreme pruning and preparing would’ve been laughed at. Just as the internet has changed the world, it has managed to normalize NBA players sharing their day-to-day lives.