The Angels.– Carmelo Anthony, the ninth leading scorer in NBA history and a ten-time All-Star, announced his retirement from basketball on Monday.
“The time has come for me to say goodbye to the track on which I made my name and to the sport that gave me purpose in life and pride,” he said in a farewell video posted on his social media.
Chosen in 2021 on the list of the 75 greatest NBA players of all time, Anthony, who will turn 39 next week, was an extraordinary offensive talent on the courts but leaves professional competition with the thorn in his side for not having achieved an NBA ring or having played in the Finals.
However, Anthony did succeed in a big way and was an unforgettable emblem in the US team, with which he was triple Olympic champion in Beijing 2008, London 2012 and Rio 2016.
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Anthony played 19 seasons in the NBA, but he had been off the courts for a year since he could not find a team for this 2022-2023 season.
Before coming to the NBA in the famous promotion of 2003 led by LeBron James, Anthony was proclaimed champion of the NCAA with the University of Syracuse.
The Denver Nuggets chose him at number three in the ‘draft’, behind LeBron (Cleveland Cavaliers) and Darko Milicic (Detroit Pistons), and he spent seven and a half seasons in the Colorado franchise.
The Nuggets, currently only one win away from the first Finals in their history, had the best result with Anthony in the Western final in 2009 in which they lost against the Los Angeles Lakers of Kobe Bryant and Pau Gasol, who that year would win the first of his two rings together.
In February 2011, the forward packed his bags and landed in his native New York to play for the Knicks who rolled out the red carpet for him as the star they sorely needed to turn the franchise around.
As in Denver, Anthony continued to be one of the best scorers in the league, but that did not reflect on his team’s performance and the Knicks lost twice in the first round of the playoffs and once in the Eastern semifinals.
Starting in 2017, he began his journey through different teams- the Oklahoma City Thunder (2017-2018), the Houston Rockets (2018-2019), the Portland Trail Blazers (2019-2021) and the Los Angeles Lakers (2021-2022).
He came to the purple and gold franchise with the sole objective of getting a ring before retiring, but that very veteran team full of names in capital letters from the league (LeBron James, Russell Westbrook, Anthony Davis, Dwight Howard, Rajon Rondo… ) completely failed and did not even enter the ‘playoff’.
With 28,289 total points in the regular season, Anthony is the ninth highest annotator in NBA history behind only LeBron James, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Karl Malone, Kobe Bryant, Michael Jordan, Dirk Nowitzki, Wilt Chamberlain and Shaquille O’Neal. He was also chosen six times for the best quintets in the league (All-NBA Team).
After almost two decades in the league, his averages were 22.5 points, 6.2 rebounds and 2.7 assists per game.
2023-05-22 19:25:21
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