Chauncey Billups urges Nuggets to retire Carmelo Anthony's jersey | Sporting News
When will the Nuggets honor one their franchise's all-time greats?
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Carmelo Anthony was among a group of five former NBA and WNBA players — one that included Dwight Howard, Maya Moore, Sue Bird and Sylvia Fowles — who were inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame on Sept. 6.
Anthony accomplished a lot over the course of his 19-year professional basketball career, most notably his 10 All-Star selections, four Olympic medals (three of them gold), two All-NBA Second Team appearances and a spot on the NBA 75th Anniversary Team. Yet no team in the league has retired his jersey; only Syracuse University, where he played in the collegiate ranks during the 2002-03 season, has done so.
Fellow Hall of Famer Chauncey Billups believes that shouldn't be the case, specifically calling upon the Denver Nuggets to take action.
Anthony's Nuggets jersey should have gone into rafters 'the year after he retired,' per Billups
Anthony will be most remembered for the years he spent in Madison Square Garden with the New York Knicks, but he reached his statistical peak while playing for the Nuggets. In his 564 regular-season contests with the franchise, he averaged 24.8 points, 6.3 rebounds and 3.1 assists per game.
He also helped turn around a team that won only 17 games the year before his arrival into one that reached the postseason each of the seven full seasons he was in Denver.
That alone, in Billups' mind, made Anthony worthy of a jersey retirement ceremony shortly after he called it a career.
"They should have retired Melo’s jersey the year after he retired," Billups told Andscape's Marc J. Spears. "Once he retired, I said, ‘All right, cool. He’s done now. He won’t play another game. It is time.’ And so, to me, it is already too late. That should have been the first order of business in terms of retiring Melo’s jersey just because I know exactly what he meant to the organization."
Billups then doubled down on his assertion of how large an impact Anthony left behind on the Nuggets.
"Melo is one of the greatest players in the history of the franchise," Billups said. "Obviously, there’s so many guys that came before us that were great players. And obviously, there was Joker [Nikola Jokić] that came after all of us. But Melo is one of the best players in the history of the franchise — probably top three, top two in the history of the franchise there. I’m still in Denver and all the fans and the people I know, they still appreciate him. They love him."
Anthony and the Nuggets have engaged in a public feud since the player's high-profile departure to New York midway through the 2010-11 season, but he made sure to include the Nuggets during his acceptance speech this past Saturday.
That could be the first step towards reconciliation, which may one day result in his No. 15 jersey hanging in the rafters at Ball Arena.
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