A veteran player who may be a bit past his prime, yet still has the ability to have a big impact both on the field and in the locker room. Someone who had a great career early on yet has bounced around the league for the past few years looking for a team that will hold onto him. A future Hall-of-Famer that has been cast aside and still believes that he has a lot to give to the game.
Is it Adrian Peterson or Carmelo Anthony?
It’s not often that you can draw such accurate comparisons between stars of two different sports, but these two seem to line up quite well, as was pointed out by ESPN’s Field Yates on the show Get Up! on Friday morning. Here is his full explanation:
To me, Adrian Peterson is akin to the Carmelo Anthony of the NFL. Anthony is a player that maybe some of the analytics minds of basketball would tell you is basically replacement level; he was so for Portland this year. But we all saw how reverentially players treat and react to having Carmelo Anthony. Damian Lillard, CJ McCollum, Blazers teammates were all holding Melo to the highest standards, and he made some big buckets for them, that much is clear. Adrian Peterson is a guy that, any locker room he walks into, you’re going to have dozens of players who are looking up to him as literally their football idol, because they watched Adrian Peterson and molded their game after him growing up. That being said, he is purely a first- and second-down runner, and we just saw this a few years ago — he couldn’t find a job until late April, when he eventually signed a contract with the Saints. You know what happened from there? He got traded because he couldn’t play for New Orleans at all. He ends up in Arizona, he has to wait for a while to get a job in Washington as well. The league does not hold that specific role in the same regards as they do a player who can play on all three downs and impact the passing game. He’s a great leader, there are going to be players who clamor for Adrian Peterson on their team, but I think he’s going to have to be patient right now because I don’t have an obvious suitor that makes sense in my immediate thoughts for Adrian Peterson’s next step.
While Peterson may struggle to stay on the field during all three downs and have an impact in the passing game, Anthony at times struggled to adapt to the three-point heavy NBA style of play, sticking to his patented mid-range jumper game.
Before Friday’s news of AP’s release, it appeared that both players had found their homes; Melo with Portland, and Peterson with Washington. That, of course, is no longer the case, with the latter once again looking for work. Hopefully, he finds it soon, and he can keep driving his feet more before riding off into that sunset.
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