Carmelo Anthony and Nikola Jokic, Team USA, and patriotism at the Olympics.

Team USA goes for the gold medal this afternoon.

What is Carmelo Anthony’s legacy with the Denver Nuggets now that Nikola Jokic has won a championship? Melo, the six-foot-seven offensive wizard, brought the Nuggets from dormant to appointment television in his seven years in the powder blue. While he has plenty of gushy memories in New York — when he was Knick fans’s greatest hope — and might be more well-known for that tenure,  the accomplishments from the West Baltimore-raised hooper in Denver are dazzling: he was four-time all-star; he lead the Nuggets to the Western Conference Finals in 2009. Despite his frosty relationship with George Karl — on his podcast with The Kid Mero, Melo said that Karl told him that he was overrated in their first interaction — it’s undeniable that Melo had good times there. His game was more athletic and robust, than the precision he would perfect in his first few seasons with the Knicks. Nobody thought he was good like Melo thought he was good. At every turn, he grunted and yelled expletives on rebounds, and took on challenges head on. When he played against a peer, he would fry them. When an out-of-his-element player switched onto him, he explored to the rim with his underrated first step. But, there were always little intangibles missing with Melo: he didn’t quite have Kobe Bryant or LeBron James’s deranged relationship with physical fitness. He wasn’t the athlete and junk-yard-dog that Dwyane Wade was. He couldn’t lead a team like Chris Paul could. He isn’t as much of a freak as Kevin Durant is. It’s true. Still, if that feels rude, then consider the rise of the Denver Nuggets in that time. The Nuggets weren’t widely thought of before Melo got drafted there. (The biggest accomplishment they had was beating the 1994 Seattle Supersonics in the first round). During the Melo era, they became a team consistently on national television. Such games were memorable, and were showcases for Melo’s intrepid style. They were matchups against his close friend LeBron, the Trail Blazers, the Jazz, and the Spurs. The Nuggets were a part of the osme of the best NBA basketball of one of the best eras of the NBA. The NBA is quite like being black in America — it has to be twice as exciting and fun to get any traction with white America, because the majority of the players are overwhelmingly Black. And Melo, who never failed to acknoledge hip-hop culture, was one of the players that helped propel the NBA to heights not seen since Michael Jordan’s era. On top of that, The 2008-2009 Nuggets were one of the league’s great outcast teams: they led the league in tattoos, with Kenyon Martin, Melo, JR Smith, and Chris “Birdman” Andersen. The trade for Chauncey Billups was a calm jolt, a move that required that Melo show discipline within the offense, giving him a big-time assassin, and a buffer for his narcissistic skillset. 

However, partly what made Melo beloved was his time playing for Team USA in the Olympics. In the 2016 games in Rio, he was a captain on the team after already winning two gold medals in Beijing and London. Athletes were told to stay in the cushy village and not to go out in Rio, a place considered “dangerous.” Melo chose to go to the slums and took a famous photo. Where NBA Melo was a ball stopper, Olympic Melo launched threes. When he retired in 2022 at age 37, he had an illustrious career, finishing with over 28,000 points, but he also wasn’t an elite level player. A fun one, a famous one, but not quite a champion; not a master of the basketball universe — perhaps a guy who has a few IPO offerings but never becomes an American institution. 

Melo’s era with the Nuggets is noteworthy because of how Nikola Jokic’s current era rendered Melo’s as irrelevant. Jokic is the best offensive player in a league full of great ones. A large brute who sees the game two passes ahead, Jokic will whistle passes behind his back, use his long arms to shoot over defenders as if he is throwing a volleyball in the air, and often use his body control to deceptively spin off players. He’s now a NBA champion, a six time all star, and a three time MVP. At age 29, getting into the hall of fame is a given; he’d make it even if he retired to his horse barn tomorrow afternoon. Above all, Jokic’s game is rooted in teamwork, making the people around you better in the way LeBron James or Larry Bird perfected. He’s almost never happy to discuss the game, or doesn’t have other NBA athletes as friends. It is a fraternity that he does not belong to. He likes his horses in his barn in Serbia. Jacobin writer Alex Press sometimes wonders if Jokic would fit in a communist compound and she is not wrong. He’s antithetical to what we understand about the modern NBA athlete — their relationship with fame, their brash work ethic, and marketability. 

The differing instincts and approaches that Melo and Jokic have to being basketball players makes them being lumped into each other so compelling. It’s like Bird and Magic but actually much more defined and pronounced, because Jokic is much better than Melo as an all-around player. Melo made pomp happen every single game he played, even when he was trying to get traded so badly that he refused to play as hard as he could have. At times, he was attention-seeking and distressingly selfish on the court. He was also an underrated leader whose teammates have never said a bad word about. Melo never thought he owed anyone anything other than his family. But, Jokic is the opposite of that image. Oh, what an image: Yes, white people have certainly made Jokic the face of the “punch-in” athlete, the guy who doesn’t take the NBA quite as intensely seriously as the Black athletes who are usually the face of the entire league. There is something to this, though: Jokic casualness about his accomplishments — he never lets them to see to influence decisions he makes on the court or things he says to the media — is endearing to people who bemoan that players are flashy and liberal capitalists making boardroom deals for generational wealth. Melo is a scorer; Jokic looks to distribute first. Melo never cleared ten rebounds per game; Jokic lives on the glass. Melo played AAU and went to Oak Hill, a basketball institution; Jokic played in Serbia before pursuing a career in the NBA; Melo played for six NBA teams; Jokic will probably spend his entire career in Denver; Melo, who is now podcasting and was married to LaLa Vasquez-Anthony, a celebrity herself, viewed basketball as a chance to strengthen his vivid culture ties; Jokic is married to his longtime girlfriend from Serbia; Melo demanded a trade to New York as a marketing ploy, a complicated one, as he played up the fact that he was born in Red Hook even though he truly grew up in West Baltimore; Jokic in Denver is seamless — a city in the mountains for a man from Serbia, a cold weather spot for the dude who was molded by the cold; Melo liked to bet on himself; Jokic cares about being comfortable — the reason why he won’t overextend any aspect of his celebrity. 

I was reminded of Melo and Jokic in Serbia’s semi-final game against The United States of America. Team USA has another rock-solid team: LeBron James, at age 39, is the best player on the court — the floor general who knows just when to take over the game even if his athleticism isn’t quite what it used to be; Kevin Durant is a sniper in the outskirts of the nuclear winter; Stephen Curry, the greatest shooter of all-time, caught fire and helped the USA win a squeaker against Serbia. It’s not supposed to be like that, but it was. Serbia came out with an intensity like girl bosses weaponzing their identities. It genuinely looked like Serbia was going to win. Bogdan Bogdanović did Melo’s “three to the dome” celebration several times, in front of Melo’s face, who attended the match with his son, Kiyan. Right there, the old patriotism began to rumble through my body. It was frustrating. How dare these eastern european crackers come at Carmelo Anthony? Don’t they know that Uptown brothers used to imitate Melo’s moves all day and night? (A Twitter user said: “Dirty ass Serbians. Go sell some drugs.”) Jokic and his Serbians put up an excellent fight, and the USA roster has the utmost respect for his whimsical and consummate style of play, but Team USA came back furiously, showing their ever-lasting power in the face of difficulty and external strife. (Bodganović and Melo embraced after Serbia won the bronze medal this morning). Basketball blogger Matt Moore, who tweets under the account name @HPbasketball, tweeted that if Serbia won, they should get to take one of Melo’s gold medals. This rubbed me the wrong way, as Melo earned those medals representing this country with an unfiltered charisma that Black athletes are sometimes scared to possess. I made a tweet tagging @HPbasketball, while defending Melo from the nerdy white basketball fan. If you love the culture, then you love Melo; there’s no denying his flaws, but there’s no denying his influence on the great aesthetics that surround NBA basketball in the 21st century.

Nationalism is a silly concept in this country — or, any country for that matter, as Isreal and Isreali’s prove in every single clip. Like Mad Men’s Bert Cooper tells Pete Campbell, America is a country founded by men with bad stories — stories of slave ownership, structural white supremacy, war crimes, general crime, and filthy capitalism. America might have elected Barack Obama because he was a once in a generation politician, but it also elected virulent racists like Donald J. Trump, Woodrow Wilson, and Andrew Johnson. The country was based on white supremacy; the cold and calculated consideration of white men only built for power, and the systematic destruction of the man who looks different, and darker. To claim otherwise is to lie to yourself. 

But, to have hope — hope that our creativity, our prowess, our joy will one day be the most important characteristic of being an American — is to be human. The athletes in the Olympics — the incredible Sha’Carri Richardson, the resilient Simone Biles, Kevin Durant, Anthony Edwards, and even Joel Embiid — are unmovable forces that are twice as better than the competition from the opposition. Team USA goes for the gold medal today in men’s basketball. (The women go for the gold on Sunday, watch them too). It is a team full of Black athletes — ones that have constantly represented Black Americans in the most exuberant way, thus representing America, as well. Nobody has a quicker first step than Anthony Edwards. Nobody can change the course of a game quicker than Stephen Curry can. When Melo was screaming in the crowd, cheering on his friend LeBron James and his teammates, I was reminded that America isn’t only the worst of itself. “A lot of bullshit happens in our country, but a lot of great things happen, too”, Kevin Durant said, after the game, acknowledging the juxtaposition that America often puts us in.