All my friends hate Carmelo Anthony.  Hell, I’d say roughly 90% of Denver hates him.  As a man who hates lots of things for extremely trivial reasons, I get it.  But as he and the 2009 Nuggets, err Knicks, return to Denver for the first time since he left, I just can’t bring myself to stay mad at that asshole. Here’s why:

My first sports memory also happens to be the only time I’ve ever sat court-side.   Somehow my dad swung these incredible tickets, and we saw Hakeem the Dream and Ralph Sampson play the Nuggets at Big Mac, with one of the refs singling me out to, as I recall, shoot the half court shot at halftime.  As it turns out, that ‘half court shot’ was really just me holding the ball during a timeout.  Either way, game changer!  I’ve been living and dying (mostly dying) with the Nuggets ever since.

Born in 1984, I can’t really recall the fun and gun Doug Moe years, so my Nuggets fandom essentially falls into two eras: Pre Melo & Post Melo.  Zero points for creativity, but you get the idea.

Pre-Melo

1990-2003 for our purposes, which doubled as my formative years where I started playing basketball and fell in love with the game.  My beloved Nuggets averaged a blistering 27.9 wins/season, highlighted by Mutombo & friends giving a collective finger-wag to Seattle in the playoffs (Exhibit A on the George Karl post-season nightmare reel), lowlighted by seasons with 11, 14, an 17 wins respectively.  That’s total wins, for the season.  Not a single streak.  Also tucked into this era were some of the highest comedy personnel decisions in the history of the league.  Vince Carter, Paul Pierce, Dirk Nowitzki, Raef Lafrentz? Raef Lafrentz, obviously.  Or how about the immortal Nikoloz Tskitishvili?  Don’t think he ever started a game, and he might even be dead.  If it wasn’t for Robert Pack saving my childhood by tea-bagging dudes on a nightly basis, I may have done like the rest of Denver and pretended to be from LA so I could supports the Lakers.  Seriously, Pack was an animal.  In case you don’t remember:

Post Melo

Then, in 2002, when the NBA rigged the lottery for LeBron to end up in Cleveland, and Detroit lucked into the 2nd pick and the chance at a dynasty by adding the wunderkind from Syracuse, it seemed we’d again be left with the ‘lengthy’ European with loads of potential. F**k. But fate intervened.  And by that, I mean Joe Dumars showed up to the draft drunk, took Darko, and let Melo fall to us.  Just like that, a 17-win team turns into a 43-win team and makes the playoffs for the first time in nine years.  Just like that, the entire culture of our team changed.  We’ve now been to the elimination rounds going on ten years straight, including a trip to the Western Conference Finals where we came up two inbound passes short of a trip to the promised land (the Lakers really are the antichrist).

Now, many of Melo’s detractors will point out that in six of the seven years we went to the playoffs, we lost in the first round.  Fair point.  But consider the paradigm shift that took place there.  We went from a fan-base whose annual highlight was the NBA lottery to a group that consistently contends for division championships.  I’m not saying we didn’t underachieve when we got there, but at least we were there.

This brings us to the crux of the Melo hate, and that’s him forcing his way to New York.  Passionate sports fans are inherently irrational people.  We attach ourselves to our teams, either by geography, birth, or both, and expect our athletes to do the same.  Our happiness is literally affected, albeit for short periods of time, by the successes and failures of our teams (looking at you Rahim Moore.  70 yards.  30 seconds.  What. The. Hell?).  The personal lives, histories, and dreams of these athletes take an immediate backseat.  Bill Simmons talks about this often, but we desperately want them to care like we care.  I wanted Melo to want to be a Nugget for life, to love the team and the town as much as I do.  And yes, I was livid when he demanded the trade.  Never mind that he’s from the east coast, loves New York, and has a fame-whoring celebrity wife that bathes and dresses him that needed to be in a big market.  He wanted to play near his home in a place that he could triple his income (endorsements), in the basketball mecca of the world no less.  I mean, eff him for leaving and all, but I certainly get it.

The second part of the trade that pisses folks off is the new trend of players holding their teams hostage, forcing their way to wherever they please.  Let’s consider the most sterling example of this, LeBron James.  Born and raised in Ohio, he played just-the-tip with them all the way into the offseason, giving them every indication of re-signing, than went on national TV and essentially waved both middle fingers at them.  We were all witnesses.  We’re going to wager our entire future on you, trust you, turn on the TV, watch the King re-sign, take us to a championship, aaaaand….. GONE.  Once you put it in perspective, Melo’s not even half the asshole LeBron is.  He made it clear from the start that he was leaving, giving us time to swindle the Knicks out of every good player on their roster.  Our team is now 100-times more fun to watch, and debatably better off.  We’re most likely a 4/5 seed this year, where we’ll either roll Memphis or struggle with the Clippers.  After that, who knows?  Maybe we Bernie ourselves all the way to the conference finals.  Do I think we can beat OKC, or even the Spurs? Probably not, but I’ll be glad I’m watching that, and not hoping for a chance to draft Nerlens Noel.

Ben Hochman, the Nuggets beat writer for the Denver Post, has been making the case that Denver should someday retire Melo’s jersey, even getting Karl to weigh in: