Like a person who has spent more than a decade sitting in the same spot,
never moving, staring at a computer screen, and waiting desperately for
a Web site to refresh, the New York Knicks, blurry-eyed and sore, may
have finally found themselves facing a new page. On Saturday, the
storied but not particularly successful franchise traded ten-time
All-Star and former scoring champion Carmelo Anthony to the Oklahoma
City Thunder for the center Enes Kanter, the wing Doug McDermott, and a 2018
second-round draft pick. This haul isn’t the stuff that turns franchises
around: Kanter, twenty-five, is a deft scorer around the basket and a
defensive liability of the highest order, with perhaps the slowest feet
in the league; McDermott is a six-feet-eight shooter who enjoyed a
gilded college career at Creighton but hasn’t much to show for it, as of
yet, in the N.B.A. More important than what the Knicks received in the
Anthony trade is what they did not. There is no faded superstar,
one-dimensional volume shooter, renowned malcontent, or chronically
injured should-have-been coming the Knicks’ way. Such has it been for
the Knicks that this nonexistent player may represent, in his bright and
unexpected absence, the light at the end of a long, dark tunnel. For the
first time this century, the Knicks will be a young team operating free,
in theory, from the gravitational pull of some cockamamie, overcooked
plan to sign a big-name player merely for the sake of doing so.

There has been a succession of such plans. Just before Anthony arrived
in New York, in 2011, the team signed the power forward Amar’e Stoudemire to
a hundred-million-dollar contract—even though he had an injury history
so dire that the team couldn’t get the contract insured. LeBron James had
been the franchise’s initial target. But he was never coming to New
York; he went to Miami to team up with two of his close friends, plus the
former Knicks coach Pat Riley. Still, the Knicks worked the LeBron angle
for years, making severe and costly changes to their roster. Prior to
that, the Knicks traded away their draft picks recklessly for the likes
of Eddy Curry, Stephon Marbury, and Antonio McDyess. You could rattle off a
list of crippling Knicks trades, from Patrick Ewing to the present, that
would give the genealogies in the book of Genesis a run for their money.

Anthony is part of that lineage. Before coming to New York, he played
for the Nuggets, in Denver, where, in 2010, it became a very poorly kept
secret that he was not going to sign a contract extension. He had spent
seven years with the Nuggets; the team was resolute and competitive but
a level below the real championship contenders. News began to circulate
that Anthony only had eyes for one place: New York, the city where he
was born. By refusing to sign the extension Denver offered, he would
become a free agent in the summer of 2011. But the collective-bargaining agreement between the National Basketball Players Association
and the N.B.A. owners was about to expire, and there was widespread
belief that the owners, seeking to save themselves from themselves,
would implement new restrictions to cap player earnings. And so Anthony,
it was said, preferred to be traded before the
summer, under
the existing agreement.

This meant that teams had to choose whether to gut their rosters for a
trade or risk waiting until the summer, when, if he was still available,
they could sign Anthony without giving up anything but money. For his
part, Anthony said little, publicly, about the situation. The Nuggets,
meanwhile, didn’t want to lose their best player in his prime for
nothing. They had no way to generate leverage, though, apart from
spinning the press. And so they spun. Rumors began to leak from unnamed
sources that the Brooklyn Nets, having only recently moved to New York
from New Jersey and desperate to make a splash, were offering a large
haul for Anthony. Given that Brooklyn is the part of New York where
Anthony is actually from, it seemed plausible that he would be amenable
to playing there. The song and dance of anonymous sources,
headline-seeking leaks, and thin innuendo had its apparently intended
effect: the Knicks’ owner, James Dolan, allegedly worried about losing
Anthony to the upstart franchise nearby, pushed through a
trade,
reportedly over the wishes of many in his front-office staff. To make it
happen, the Knicks sacrificed not only every young asset on the team
but also a first-round draft pick. Anthony arrived in New York to a
video montage featuring soft-piano pop music about coming home; a
three-year, more-than-sixty-four-million-dollar contract extension; and
a gutted roster.

The dearth of young talent to develop or trade left the Knicks, in the
coming years, always playing catchup, their roster decisions seemingly
improvised from one season to the next. For the first couple of seasons,
the Carmelo-led Knicks were afterthoughts, dispatched in the first round
of the playoffs. During the 2012-13 season, the team acquired a bevy
of veterans on short contracts to support Anthony; the result was a
fifty-four-win season and, finally, a glimpse of the second round. But
the success of that team was built on an unsustainable barrage of
three-point shooting that was snuffed out in the playoffs by the first
tough defense it encountered. The four seasons that followed rank amongthe worst in Knicks history, and they were bedevilled by ever-present
questions about the franchise’s direction. Was this an offensive team or
a defensive team? Were they rebuilding or looking to become short-term
contenders? No one seemed to know. All the while, Anthony scored a
gargantuan number of points, wore eye-catching headwear during his
postgame press conferences, and, for what it’s worth, embraced an
activism that went considerably further than wearing slogans on shirts or virtue
signalling on Twitter.

He is now thirty-three years old. His trades from the Nuggets and to the
Thunder bookend another transaction, one he controlled: in the summer of
2014, Anthony exercised an early-termination option in his contract and
then, after briefly exploring free agency, re-signed with the Knicks, for
five years and a hundred and twenty-four million dollars. This contract
included a rare and rather mind-boggling no-trade guarantee, which gave
Anthony the power to veto any destination not to his liking. The Knicks’
record since then is 80–166. And although Anthony grew more and more
displeased with his fate (which he had chosen), the Knicks’ hands were
essentially tied (a fate that they, too, had chosen). Like the
franchise—ranked by Forbes as the seventh most valuable in all of
professional
sports,
with an estimated worth of $3.3 billion—Anthony has warmed himself in these trying times under the
recuperative glow of money. He took the longest available contract
extension, in 2006, thus missing out on the game-changing free-agent
summer of 2010; he sought a trade under the expiring C.B.A. rather than
wait for free agency; he opted out of his contract only to sign a longer
and larger one with a rudderless team that he did not particularly seem
to fit. No one should begrudge Anthony any of these decisions. Still, in
light of his ever-increasing frustration with where he was, I’m left to
wonder how often he reminded himself that he bought his ticket on this
ship.

In Oklahoma City, Anthony’s new star teammates, Russell Westbrook and
Paul George, will make offensive opportunities come more easily to him.
He’ll find spaces on the court he hasn’t seen in his N.B.A. career, and
face defenders preoccupied with other players. We may see something
approaching the Olympic version of Carmelo Anthony, the one who has
earned three gold medals and earned plaudits from coaches and teammates.
You can count on him returning to Madison Square Garden in Thunder
colors and dropping a gaudy number of points on the Knicks sometime this
coming season, no matter how many shots it takes.

In the meantime, Anthony moving to the Thunder completes a daft slant
rhyme with Knicks history: Patrick Ewing was traded seventeen years
before, almost to the day, to the Seattle Supersonics, the much missed
franchise that would eventually move to Oklahoma City. Perhaps that
faint, ringing echo is the signal that it’s time for everyone to move
on, to change for the better.