When he joined the NBA on NBC studio team this spring, Carmelo Anthony instantly became one of the most famous former athletes to enter the media ranks ahead of the league’s new rights package.
Anthony laid low after officially retiring in 2023, then resurfaced with his 7PM in Brooklyn podcast. When the hiring spree for NBA broadcasters began this year for new league partners NBC and Amazon, Anthony’s name surfaced. Before long, he was NBC’s first hire for its Sunday Night Basketball studio show.
This week, Anthony appeared on Paul George’s Podcast P, and revealed what really convinced him to get into the game. It wasn’t the money or the platform. The Hall of Famer and Olympic legend doesn’t need all that. Anthony joined the media in hopes that he could be an antidote to the self-centered analysis he hears from too many former athletes covering the NBA these days.
“I never wanted to do it, I never wanted to do podcasts, I barely wanted to do media. So I felt like just to jump into the media space, just talk about the game, nah I don’t want to do that. Like, hell nah,” Anthony said.
“You know how much work I put into this game? I don’t want to sit and talk to just everybody about this sh*t. I need to keep a lot of this to myself. I can’t share all of this yet. I’m still in it. I’m still decompressing from 32 years of basketball. I was like, ‘I don’t want to touch that.’ I also wasn’t feeling the way that the game was being talked about, the game was being criticized, in a wrongfully way. I just got tired of that. I was like, ‘Man, I don’t want to hear that.’ I don’t want to hear this and that, and you’re talking about people’s character. I want to talk about the game, I want to talk about the why.”
[embedded content]
Just this postseason, we have seen ESPN’s Kendrick Perkins have to backtrack for commenting on Anthony Edwards’ romantic life, FS1’s Paul Pierce turn a take into a publicity stunt, and TNT’s Charles Barkley chiming in constantly on Stephen A. Smith and ESPN’s coverage.
Anthony certainly has a point that while networks constantly bid up for retired stars, the athletes in NBA media these days don’t always have their eye on the ball.
“There’s so many former players who don’t talk about that type of s*it,” Anthony said.
“It becomes about what they have done, and because of what you have done, you start to degrade or you start to talk s*it about somebody else or what they’re doing, and you take the focus off the actual essence of basketball, what we’re here talking about. And I’m not mad. You can talk s*it, that’s part of the game. But when it’s character-hunting, that’s a little different. Speak the game. If I have a terrible night, you can say whatever the f*ck you want about me. Critique the game, critique me. If you want to say it’s about my movement, critique it. But also tell why I’m moving this way, so people get a full perspective. Not just, ‘Oh, he’s moving like this because he lost a step.’ Like, no. I didn’t lose a step. He can’t go left, he can’t push off on that, his body ain’t working the way that it was working two months ago.”
After building out his podcast and engaging with his audience online, Anthony believes he has a strong sense of what basketball fans want. Moving to TV will be a different animal, but the longtime Denver and New York star is coming to NBC with the express purpose of shaking up the game.
Anthony wants to speak directly to fans at home who are curious about the game and the lifestyle around it.
“I mastered my craft, so I should be able to articulate that in a way that makes everybody out there understand and comprehend,” he added. “Whether you’re older, whether you’re younger, whether you’re male, female, whatever it is. SO for me, it’s about the why. Why we go through what we go through as athletes, and the live, in-game experience.”
