’Melo wilting under burden of lifting Knicks

NEW YORK – Carmelo Anthony(notes) dropped to the Madison Square Garden floor, blood spilling out of the corner of his eye and the life leaking out a lost cause. Down goes ’Melo, a TKO that left him discombobulated and diminished. He had come to New York chasing glory and endorsements, the bright lights of the big city. A fast smile, a sweet stroke, the Knicks treated his arrival like some kind of second coming.

The New York Knicks oversold Anthony, and it’s little surprise that he’s underdelivered. This was the kind of night Anthony hasn’t been wired to withstand, the ferocity of the Boston Celtics trampling the Knicks with a furious fourth-quarter bludgeoning. Suddenly, the Knicks found themselves crumbling under a champion’s resolve, the Celtics responding to a word that Doc Rivers had never needed to use until his halftime diatribe: soft.

The Celtics could never live with such a label, and that’s so much of the reason they came so hard for the Knicks in the final minutes of an 96-86 victory. It was so much of the reason that Anthony would go without a basket in the fourth quarter, that his eye needed five stitches after connecting with the sharp end of a Rajon Rondo(notes) elbow.

“We got on the floor and got grimy and made it a dirty game,” Garnett marveled.

Amar’e Stoudemire(notes) dropped down with Garnett, symbolic of the way Stoudemire has grown into a $100 million man. Anthony hadn’t been here a month, and Stoudemire has had to publicly remind him that this isn’t about the Knicks adapting to Anthony but Anthony adapting to the Knicks. Stoudemire could live with ’Melo missing 10 of 12 shots in a loss to the Detroit Pistons, but hiding on the team bus and leaving Stoudemire to answer the questions in his absence?

That’s unacceptable, and spoke to a career of enabling and bad habits that come with Anthony’s prodigious talent to score. ’Melo’s no Starbury, but he had a choice to make: Come to New York, grow as a player, a leader; or be forever remembered as something of a wasted talent. When Anthony snapped on Jared Jeffries(notes) for failing to get him the ball at the end of that Pistons loss, it was a dead issue with him once they hit the locker room. He isn’t mean-spirited, isn’t a man to carry grudges.

Marbury would’ve gone three games without passing the ball to Jeffries. There’s a lot of differences between them, but the sulking, the excuses, need to stop. As Anthony started to search for an escape hatch on a wayward start in New York, he suggested that it could take a full year together to jell – never mind that the upheaval of the blockbuster trade has already regenerated the Denver franchise.

“I don’t want to hear that,” Knicks president Donnie Walsh said Monday night.

The Knicks are 7-9 with Anthony and still struggling to find success with ’Melo and Stoudemire on the court together. Anthony has never had to sacrifice in his career, but he does now. He ought to take a good, long look at Stoudemire, and see the way he’s reinvented himself with the Knicks. Stoudemire’s transformed everything because it was important to him. He hated the labels as a non-leader, an uninspired defender and rebounder.

For now, the Knicks need Anthony to accept the notion that his sloppy, scattered and selfish basketball is intolerable. As one Eastern Conference assistant coach said: “He has a career worth of bad habits. They weren’t going to change in a month.”

Sometimes the New York public demands so much more than the Knicks organization. The Knicks don’t make demands of stars within the organization but concessions to them. That’s owner Jim Dolan’s star-crossed way, and that’s a big part of the way that Isiah Thomas still plays him.

This is an enabling culture of sycophants and bootlickers within the Knicks’ infrastructure, a stable of pitiful yes men empowered under Dolan to somehow make the toxicity worse. The greatest regret of the Walsh era won’t be the players that the owner forced him to give up for Anthony. It won’t be the impatience that maybe cost the Knicks a deal for Deron Williams(notes). Just maybe, it’ll be the inability to let Walsh sweep the poisoned air out of the Garden and let this proud, old franchise breathe again.

For whom the task for overseeing Anthony’s transformation will fall is still uncertain in New York. Walsh still hasn’t had a substantive conversation about his future with Dolan, Garden sources say. Indiana Pacers owner Herb Simon won’t run president Larry Bird out of Indiana; he’ll let him make a decision on his future. Nevertheless, Simon still adores Walsh, and the prospect of Walsh returning to his wife and family in Indianapolis does carry appeal. And that’s especially true given the autonomy for the Knicks job that’s eroded over the past 18 months with the re-emergence of Thomas.

The Knicks have until April 30 to exercise the option on Walsh’s final contract year, but this has already gone a long way without resolution. Bird would probably have to exit the Pacers for Walsh to return, but in that scenario several league sources believe Walsh would enlist Chris Mullin to join him as the Pacers GM.

For now, Walsh left the Garden admiring the work of these Celtics, admiring the toughness and tenacity that could await the Knicks in a 2-vs.-7 series to open the Eastern Conference playoffs. The Celtics delivered a clinic on stars working together and buying into a program, a belief. So far, ’Melo has bought into only his own hype.

“When you want to win, everybody has to be a willing participant,” Rivers said. “Everyone has to sacrifice. You look at our guys, all their shots were cut in half from the year before. And that’s just the way it is.”

Carmelo Anthony had come to New York plastered on the side of billboards and buildings, but here were the Boston Celtics – here was a burden so far unfulfilled – leaving him hunched over and bleeding in the middle of Madison Square Garden. Carmelo Anthony will never be a savior for the Knicks, but it will be on him to become something far more admirable here: a survivor.