Basketball is a team sport. When you play pickup basketball with your friends, the best team doesn’t always win. It’s probably the team that passes more. Basketball isn’t like the other sports. Someone who is uber talented can play in the NFL and never have a negative impact on a teammate. In fact, it’s really never a bad thing to have too much talent in any sport… except for the NBA.
There are certain players in the NBA that I categorize as “Cancers”. Those players can range from superstars to role players. However, in no circumstance do you ever want to acquire one. Regardless of the talent level, you are just better off without them. Some of the players in the NBA that qualify as cancers include – Isaiah Thomas, Dwight Howard, Russell Westbrook, and Blake Griffin. The guy who is the king of the cancers just might be Carmelo Anthony and his brief tenure with the Rockets is proving that Cancers in basketball absolutely exist.
I could care less about the NBA regular season. It’s an 82 games snoozefest. The games are totally unwatchable until February. But that doesn’t change the fact that players have their games and they stick to them. Carmelo Anthony is an iso mid-range shooter that takes contested shots and is a total liability on the defensive end of the floor. Carmelo is everything that the Rockets are not. Houston is known for 3-point shooting, defensive versatility, and an up and down style that likes to get shots up early in the shot clock. This was never going to work. I guess the only surprising part of this process was the fact that Rockets general manager, Daryl Morey, outed himself as a fool for signing him.
Things have gotten so bad that it appears that Carmelo is going to get released. Again, I don’t care about the regular season but the Rockets struggles go beyond the record (5-7). Carmelo has destroyed the team chemistry and there really is no chance that is going to change because he is cancerous. The Rockets are -6.3 points per 100 possessions every time Carmelo steps on the court. Those sort of stats aren’t really reliable for the sole fact that it’s probably closer to 15 or 20. Teams have attacked him on every possession on the defensive end of the floor and it’s been the Rocket Achilles heel thus far this season.
I don’t want to go into great detail here. It’s just more of a cautionary tale. The NBA media will lie to you that Russell Westbrook is some sort of MVP when it couldn’t be further from the truth. Carmelo Anthony is and has always been a Cancer. His team has never won anything whether it be in Denver, New York, OKC, or Houston. Cancers in basketball exist. You just have to have a brain to find them.
