NEW YORK _ A day earlier, Carmelo Anthony had practiced one last time and the word was that it was the end for him. But in the final game of another lost season and perhaps the final game of his time in New York, Anthony changed the plan.
Tuesday night he texted with Knicks coach Jeff Hornacek, indicating that his knee felt good enough after two games on the sidelines, to give it a go. So with the Knicks finishing out the season with a fitting farewell, playing the Sixers, a team that has made tanking an art, Anthony decided to suit up one more time.
With nothing to play for, Anthony played one last show. It might be the conclusion to this season or it might be the last time playing for the team he swore allegiance to.
"I don't know if he's thinking that," Hornacek said. "He feels healthy and wants to play. It's a sport he loves to play. Who knows what the future is going to hold, if he's here? I think that's what everybody's mentality is right now until something changes. He gets along with all our players. I think he wants to go out there and end the season the right way and play. It's hard to keep guys out if they're feeling good. It's the game of basketball they love to play. I'm glad he's going to play."
He was the last one standing. Derrick Rose already underwent surgery to repair a torn meniscus and has been gone from the team for weeks. Joakim Noah, serving a suspension for a performance-enhancing drug, was revealed to have a torn right rotator cuff, likely needing surgery and a four-to-six month rehab. Kristaps Porzingis was sitting out with a back injury.
So Anthony, who was brought here a little more than six years ago in a franchise-shaking trade, was the one who started the optimism and now the one who was the last link to it. The three straight playoff appearances he made are a distant memory with this now the fourth straight season out of the postseason.
Anthony has absorbed a large share of the blame, first from the fans or media, and this season from Knicks' president Phil Jackson, whose critiques of Anthony could drive a wedge that finally gets the 32-year-old forward to waive his no-trade clause for the right deal. To move him still won't be easy, needing to find a locale he approves of, a willing trading partner and a way to even out the $26 million that Anthony is due next season. And maybe even Jackson finding a way to get back a return that doesn't seem like he's being fleeced for his leading scorer.
"I don't think you ever look at one guy or one thing," Hornacek said. "When you don't make the playoffs it's a variety of things. You can go into a lot of ifs and buts. But guys, I think tried their hardest. Sometimes it doesn't work out.
"We all can do things that are a little bit better, things that we need to accomplish to get to the playoffs. And so we were working on it all year. We just weren't able to bring it together. I don't think there's anything Carmelo did or didn't do that had any effect. He played what we expected. Just we weren't able to get it together."
Hornacek has defended Anthony throughout the season and Anthony has responded for him, averaging a team-best 22.5 points per game while playing more minutes than anyone on the team. But Hornacek praised him not just for his effort, but for what he brought to the locker room.
"I think just his knowledge of the game," Hornacek said. "We all know he's a great player. But sometimes you don't know how they are, do they see certain things happen. He definitely sees things happen. We go over scouting reports, he lends his voice, what if we guard it this way, because he sees something happen. I figure the great players _ you don't get to be a great player without having a great knowledge of the game. But we saw it day in and day out, his anticipation of things that are going to happen."
The Knicks entered the final game with a 30-51 record, a particularly galling season in the tenure of Jackson and Anthony since Jackson abandoned the patient building process and brought in a quartet of veterans last summer to try to make a quick push into the playoff picture. With the trade for Rose and the signings of Noah, Courtney Lee and Brandon Jennings the Knicks believed they had the pieces around Anthony and Porzingis to compete _ or in the words of Rose, to be a super team.
"There's a lot of things that came up that disrupted us," Hornacek said. "We got off to a good start early. And then we had a stretch of games where, you always want to say you want to make your own breaks, but we got some bad breaks and bad bounces. Then we had guys hurt for a little bit. It wasn't a major injury, but we had guys out for four games.
"We're losing close games that we look back and say, man, if those guys were playing those games and you pull those games out you're looking at a whole different record and the confidence of the guys. So I think there was that stretch, the 30 to 40 game mark, where some things didn't bounce our way.
"So you can always look back and see certain things like that that could be different," he added. "I could remember days when I was playing where all of the sudden you win a couple games that you weren't expected and that catapults you the rest of the season. We had that happen to us the other way. When you look at it a lot of things have to go right to be in the playoffs."
