This Report features Carmelo Anthony's six year career so far.
COMING LATER THIS WEEK
Quest for the Ring started out as a Nuggets only site. Later this week, look for the definitive Denver Nuggets Real Player Ratings for 2007-08 and 2008-09. This will be the straight up comparison of the two teams using state of the art RPR. We can use this to cut into the ignorance and mythology that always hangs around sports team fandom, but especially in the case of the recent versions of the Nuggets.
CARMELO ANTHONY CAREER REAL PLAYER RATINGS
Note: Due to data unavailable, the 2003-04 and the 2004-05 numbers use the average hidden defending adjustment (HDA) for the latter four years. Those four years, however, include the annual HDAs needed to properly calculate state of the art RPR.
2003-04 .747
2004-05 .730
2005-06 .959
2006-07 .921
2007-08 .944
2008-09 .901
EVALUATION SCALE FOR SEASONS
Perfect for all Practical Purposes / Major Historic Super Star 1.100 and more
Historic Super Star 1.000 1.099
Super Star 0.900 0.999
A Star Player / A Well Above Normal Starter 0.800 0.899
Outstanding Player: A Solid Starter 0.750 0.799
Major Role Player / Good Enough to Start 0.700 0.749
Good Role Player / Often a Good 6th Man 0.640 0.699
Satisfactory Role Player 0.580 0.639
Marginal Role Player 0.520 0.579
Poor Player 0.460 0.519
Very Poor Player 0.400 0.459
Extremely Poor Player and less 0.399
EVALUATION FOR CAREER AS A WHOLE
Carmelo Anthony has an average RPR of .867 for his career, which makes him a superstar by a small amount. The superstar range for a career is .860 to .939.
GEORGE KARL HAS BOTH SUCCEEDED AND FAILED WITH RESPECT TO CARMELO ANTHONY
Carmelo Anthony's total potential was high end superstar or low end historical superstar. See this Report for evidence. (Note: don't email me, I realize that college information alone is not enough to prove beyond all doubt that he could have been an historical superstar; even I do some things on faith every once in a great while.)
George Karl started coaching the Nuggets in January 2005, whereupon the Nuggets went on an improbable 32-8 tear. But Carmelo Anthony that year, which was the second year of his career, was not a great player. He was, to put it as nicely as possible, still learning the ropes. Karl did almost nothing in his first few months to bring Anthony up to speed. In fact, Anthony was downplayed as an option, which allowed veterans such as Andre Miller, Kenyon Martin, and Marcus Camby to take charge during that 32-8 streak.
But in the ensuing season, 2005-06, Carmelo Anthony exploded and played what to this day is his best season yet, a .959 RPR. People started to sit up and take notice, even though most of them were always deeply skeptical that he could or would ever win a Ring.
Quest was not even thought of during 2005-06, so we don’t know the details of exactly how Carmelo Anthony jumped up to became a superstar after being merely “good enough to start” in his first two years. But George Karl, at the very least, did nothing to harm Anthony that year, and he did nothing to stand in the way of Anthony taking command of the Nuggets offensive productivity.
It was in later years that Karl became a negative influence on Anthony, and we know the specifics of it, if only because Karl repeatedly made his false beliefs about Anthony known in the media. As has been extensively reported and proved here at Quest, Karl became more and more obsessed during 2006 and 2007 that Carmelo Anthony would never win a Championship because his offensive game was too imbalanced in favor of scoring, and because he doesn’t work hard enough on defense.
The basic problem, put as simplistically as possible, is that Karl does not understand that basketball is not like football and some other sports. Basketball is not biased in favor of defense over offense. In basketball, a very well coached offense can trump a well coached and motivated defense. So Carmelo Anthony’s bias in favor of scoring over assisting and offensive rebounding and so forth was never a serious or major problem.
But Karl did and still does disagree, so he has been hounding Anthony to get more rebounds, more assists, and more amorphous offensive hustle plays. Carmelo Anthony has responded to Karl’s complaints to some extent, so that as you can see, his RPR went down to the very low superstar range in 2006-07 and then again in 2008-09. When you do what Karl says on offense, your RPR goes down, not up as Karl would believe.
Defensively, Carmelo Anthony was kind of lazy in his first few NBA years, so Quest agrees with that part of the Karl assessment. And we give Karl credit he is due for getting Anthony (and other Nuggets) to work harder on defense. In fact, we are willing to historically declare that Karl was and is a good and sometimes a very good defensive coach. But offensively, to say that Karl leaves something to be desired would be an understatement.
Then most recently, during the Nuggets ten playoff games wins in 2009, Carmelo Anthony linked up with his inner soul and his past. He went back to aggressive shooting and scoring, thus leaving Karl’s offensive preaching in the dust. Anthony has clearly concluded that although Karl may know what he is talking about on defense, the Coach is out to lunch when it comes to offense.
SUMMARY CONCLUSION ABOUT KARL'S IMPACT ON ANTHONY
Karl, at the least, did not stand in the way when Carmelo Anthony surged to become a superstar in 2005-06. But Karl has failed to offensively coach Anthony correctly and, as a result, not only has Carmelo Anthony not become a historical superstar (as he could be) but Anthony actually declined in 2006-07 and especially in 2008-09. Anthony’s offensive backsliding has been a bigger negative than his defensive improvement has been a positive.
COULD CARMELO ANTHONY POSSIBLY WIN THE QUEST?
Most likely not. At a minimum, Anthony needs a coach who truly appreciates and understands offensive basketball at the NBA level. Tunnel vision defensive minded coaches will mess with his game to no end. And he needs a new team, because the Nuggets owner has become too financially conservative in the wake of the economic emergency to be able to properly finance the Quest for the Ring.
Whether Anthony has been permanently scarred due to drinking the Karl kool-aid offensively is still up in the air, although those who think he has not been permanently scarred were given a big boost from Melo's spring 2009 playoff season, when we were briefly treated to the classic Carmelo Anthony, the one that won the National College Championship, come back to life again.
HOW CARMELO ANTHONY’S BREAKOUT YEAR 2005-06 LED DIRECTLY TO THE BIRTH OF THIS SITE
Quest for the Ring was originally "Nuggets 1". The site was born in late 2006, in the first part of the season that followed Carmelo's breakout year. However, at that time, RPR was not even a figment of the imagination, so we did not have the hard data that you just saw, with which to base becoming a Nuggets fanatic on. Nor did we know about just how big the Nuggets payroll was, and was about to become.
So objectively, there was little, in late 2006, to base any prediction that the Nuggets could be a major contender on. But intuitively we knew that Carmelo Anthony was now for real, and could theoretically win a Ring. And so we got swept up in Nuggets fandom.
And since we were not on the Net yet, and didn’t want to be bored and/or enraged all the time by doing economics and politics, we decided to do basketball. The combination of wanting to write about something that is not often depressing and Nuggets fandom produced the legacy site “Nuggets 1,” which transformed over time into The Quest for the Ring. More detailed history can be found in several different User Guide Reports, including this one.
And so it was just an educated guess that told us that the Nuggets could possibly win a "miracle ring" in either 2007, 2008, 0r 2009. When the Nuggets obtained Allen Iverson in December 2006, right when this new site was still in the incubator as an infant, Quest very naively believed that the Nuggets were truly serious about being a major contender, and that now they actually were a major contender. (Oh to be young and stupid again, it seems looking back that youthful ignorance was a lot of fun.)
But the Denver Nuggets of recent years were never a true major contender if everything now known is factored in. It has been proven beyond any shadow of a doubt that the Allen Iverson Nuggets thing was about marketing and money making, not about becoming a major contender to win the Quest. And you really have to make a leap of faith as wide as the Grand Canyon to actually with a straight face believe that George Karl could ever or will ever win the Quest.
For these and other lesser reasons that have been exhaustively reported and proved, it was never realistic that the Nuggets were a major contender during any of the springs of 2007, 2008, and 2009.
NUGGETS COVERAGE TO BE COMPLETED SOON
But in 2009, like a monster that comes back for more in a horror movie, the Nuggets became one of the luckiest franchises/teams of all time, whereupon they fooled hordes of people into thinking they were a major contender. Grown men, none of whom predicted early in the season that the Nuggets were going to win much of anything in the playoffs, were claiming by the time the Nuggets met the Lakers in the 2009 West Finals that they "might actually be better" than the Los Angeles Lakers! Not that it is ever fully rational, but some of the basketball world was going stark raving mad from Nuggets mania, and Quest was compelled to report that the alternate universe had kicked in.
But then reality made a big comeback and the normal Universe came back. The Nuggets lost to the Lakers four games to two, and they were eliminated at home by 27 points as the Lakers synchronized offense made mince meat of the suddenly scared witless Denver rough, tough, and nimble defense.
We intend to do another, final, big Report on this subject before we put “the Nuggets thing" to rest for who knows how many years. One thing we absolutely have to do is to complete the explanation of why we were wrong when we in January 2009 predicted that the Nuggets would not win more than a couple of playoff games in 2009. (They ended up winning ten of them.) Ironically, getting time resources approved to do this is tricky, precisely because, despite those ten wins, the Nuggets were in 2009 much more the luckiest franchise than they were an actual major contender. But do it we must, and we will, by mid October at the very latest.
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