Carmelo Anthony Was Putrid In His Return To Oklahoma City

Carmelo Anthony made his return to Oklahoma City tonight as a member of the Rockets, surely bringing back fond memories in Thunder fans’ minds of the time he ... well, he didn’t really do anything on the floor in his year with the franchise besides miss a bunch of shots, but, uh, he shouted some curse words on live TV once! That was fun.

Anyway, Melo is haunting Houston right now, contributing to a downfall of a team that barely missed the NBA Finals and then made some truly inexplicable moves this summer to become much worse. You may have heard this already, but Carmelo *dramatic pause* is bad. The suck continued tonight, as the Rockets scored a season-low and fell 98-80 to a Thunder team that didn’t even have Westbrook. It’s probably best to just forget about a night that was just one team that wanted to play basketball against one team that clearly had no desire to be within two miles of a court, but here’s the coolest play of the game—a Dennis Schroder to Jerami Grant oop in which Grant nearly touches the ceiling.

The Thunder fans cheered when Carmelo Anthony first entered the game, but they definitely would have booed him tonight if he was still wearing an OKC uniform. Here is Melo’s statline: 20 minutes played at -22, two points on 1-for-11 shooting (including six misses from three), five boards, zero assists, zero steals or blocks, and a turnover. Sure, Chris Paul had an ugly night too, but Melo specifically was mind-numbingly wretched.

By the way, Schroder—the new guy on this Thunder team—got into double figures along with all the other OKC starters, and dished out five assists to boot, which are as many as Melo has on the year. The home fans may not all take pleasure in seeing a former player eat shit upon his return, but damn, it must be at least a bit comforting knowing that they found the antidote to the poison just in time.