Billups: Knicks must add vocal leaders, because ‘Melo is ‘not that guy’
After a disappointing campaign that saw them post the worst record in their 69-year history, the New York Knicks face a summer likely to be chock full of change, as Phil Jackson begins rebuilding the roster he spent most of this misbegotten season tearing down. He’ll look to land a cornerstone with a top-five pick in June’s 2015 NBA draft, hoping to find a future franchise-leading talent to pair with current foundational piece Carmelo Anthony.
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Jackson will also look to start spending the team’s estimated $30 million in salary cap space on what he’s called “total basketball players” to slot in alongside Anthony in hopes of changing the Knicks’ fortunes (although perhaps not quite as drastically as Derek Fisher might expect). As Jackson compiles his shopping list, retired point guard Chauncey Billups — an NBA champion and Finals MVP with the Detroit Pistons, who spent parts of three seasons with Anthony in New York and Denver — thinks The Zen Master ought to prioritize vocal veterans, because as he sees it, while ‘Melo is clearly a man comfortable wearing many different hats, “loud and outspoken leader” isn’t one of them.
From Ian Begley of ESPN New York:
“He’s not that guy,” Billups said on “The Knicks Blog with Anthony Donahue” radio show. “Melo’s a good friend of mine, one of the best players I ever played with, but he’s not the guy who’s going to stand up in the locker room and give this rah-rah speech and get the team to rally. That’s not who he is.
“One thing he is, he’s going to come to play every single night, he’s going to practice every single day. He is who he is, He’s not that guy [who leads vocally]. But for who he is, he’s great. You’ve got to find another guy to make speeches, and another guy to do most of the leading. [Carmelo’s] going to most of the time lead by example. He’s not going to be vocal, he’s not going to rock the boat.” […]
“That’s tough to ask for,” Billups said of asking a player to develop into a leader. “I’ll just say this, you’ve got all that cap room, you better go find someone [to be a vocal leader]. Melo, that’s not who he is and we are who we are. That’s like asking me to be this guy with a 40-inch vertical and go in there and be dunking on everybody like I’m Russell Westbrook. You can’t ask an apple to be an orange, that’s just not fair.
“[Carmelo] will lead by example,” Billups said. “He’s going to come to work and he’s playing for the win every night. There’s no question about that, that’s who he is. He’s a great player, he wants to win. He’s going to come to work. He’s going to lead by example, he’s not going to be vocal.”
This isn’t the first time Billups has leveled this particular criticism at Anthony. During 2015 All-Star Weekend in New York back in February, Billups emphasized the importance of surrounding Anthony with strong-willed veterans not only during their time together in Denver, when ‘Melo was in his mid-20s, but also later in his career, as an established All-Star whose credentials as a leader had come into question.
“That’s kind of how I perceive him,” Billups said during a February ESPN Radio interview. “He is a great player and one thing I love about Melo is he practiced hard every day. He didn’t sit out games. He was a good soldier, pretty sure he still is. But I think he needs other strong leadership in that locker room with him.”
It’s important to note that not being loud does not necessarily constitute passivity or a tendency to fade. The hard work, good practice habits and commitment to suiting up that Billups referenced also seem like pretty valuable and instructive leadership traits. Still, Billups’ point seems fair, considering the composition of the two most successful NBA teams on which Anthony has played.
The 2008-09 Nuggets that pushed the eventual champion Los Angeles Lakers to six games in the Western Conference finals surrounded the instant-offense scoring of Anthony and J.R. Smith with the been-there-before likes of Billups, Kenyon Martin and Anthony Carter, as well as steadying influences like Nene and Dahntay Jones. The 2012-13 Knicks that won New York’s first division title in 19 years surrounded the instant-offense scoring Anthony and Smith with the been-there-before likes of Jason Kidd, Kurt Thomas, Rasheed Wallace, Marcus Camby and Tyson Chandler, as well as steadying influences like Pablo Prigioni and Steve Novak.
The lesson from those campaigns, Billups suggests, is that with other experienced players helping guide younger players and keeping the locker-room chemistry strong, Anthony was both more willing to buy into a team-first culture and better able to focus on developing his own game. How much that contributed to both his most productive individual season (the league-best 27.8 points per game and career-high 24.8 Player Efficiency Rating he put up for New York in 2012-13) and his best postseason performance (27.2 points, 5.8 rebounds, 4.1 assists, a playoff-career-high 24.3 PER for Denver in the ’08-’09 conference finals run) is unclear, but it’s probably worth considering.
So, too, is the way the Knicks’ fortunes faltered after Kidd retired to become the head coach of the Brooklyn Nets, Camby and Novak were shipped to the Toronto Raptors in exchange for Andrea Bargnani, and late-season foot injuries marked the end of the line for Thomas and Wallace. The Knicks didn’t plummet to a playoff-missing 37-45 mark in 2013-14 solely because of that veteran exodus, but some of the specific fires — the J.R. shoelaces-and-benchings saga, the weird back-and-forth with Anthony and Iman Shumpert becoming public, etc. — might not have spread had some of those tenured vets remained to keep a lid on the locker room.
“It shows how important it is to have professional players on a team to get through moments when you’re having a funk, to stay collectively as a team,” Thomas said in a radio interview last September. “[…] When you have a bunch of young guys, you don’t see that much looking out for one another. It’s important to have veteran guys with a great amount of experience and willing to share it.”
The mere fact of having been around a while doesn’t make you valuable in and of itself, though. Most of those vets the Knicks had in 2012-13 and lost thereafter made, at one point or another, tangible on-court contributions.
Most notably, a lot of them came on the defensive end — Kidd with his active hands and talent for plugging up passing lanes, Thomas with the generation’s worth of experience in calling out pick-and-roll coverages and commanding a back line that led his former Chicago Bulls head coach Tom Thibodeau to try to lure him out of retirement last season, Wallace by bodying up opposing bigs and contesting shots on the interior, etc. None of those vets were the Knicks’ best defensive player, but they all individually helped while also aiding their younger teammates’ efforts to learn how to do the same.
“Veteran teams are better defensively because they know where they’re supposed to be and they know what to expect,” Minnesota Timberwolves coach and president Flip Saunders told The Cauldron’s Jared Dubin for a great piece about defensive communication. If Jackson’s going to take Billups’ comments about Anthony’s shortcomings under advisement, that seems like the sort of vocalization to prioritize.
Coming off a season in which the Knicks, after sending Chandler back to the Dallas Mavericks, rarely fielded lineups featuring even one above-league-average defender, targeting vets who can defend could represent the Knicks’ best chance at quickly returning to respectability. That’s especially true if Jackson can land contributors who could credibly handle scoring wings and protect the rim, allowing Anthony to slide back to the power forward position where he’s been most effective offensively over the past few years.
If such a defensive improvement dovetailed with a post-knee-surgery Anthony returning to the scoring prowess he showed during Mike Woodson’s final two seasons on the bench and combined to produce a major improvement in the win column, I suspect we’d hear less about Anthony’s lack of vocal leadership and more about his quiet, calm confidence. If it doesn’t, though, there’ll surely be plenty more loud conversation about ‘Melo’s shortcomings in all of our futures.
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Dan Devine is an editor for Ball Don’t Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter!
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