Carmelo Anthony Says The Referee Who Booted Him Has A Grudge

If you’re feeling a sense of cosmic upheaval, that everything around you is shifting, rest assured that the Knicks are still 3-6 on the season and that Carmelo Anthony is still marinating in quiet resentment.

Struck with a mystifying second-quarter ejection in Friday’s game against the Celtics, Melo pinned the call on referee Tony Brothers’s long-standing grudge against him. “I always feel it’s something. Every time we ... I don’t want to say it’s personal, but I always feel like it’s something,” he told reporters on Saturday. “I have nothing to say to him. It ain’t personal with me, on my end.”

In this case, Anthony’s frustration looks to be justified. Look at the incident: Melo gets hit with a loose-ball foul, then another T for your usual post-call jawing, then a second T as he trails the official by a few feet, doing a little more of the same, but nothing beyond the pale.

“The second one, I didn’t think it was coming at all. And I didn’t think he deserved it. Like, he was still talking in a low voice. Like, I ain’t get it. But I guess they have a history or something, and he was tired of it,” said Derrick Rose in a postgame interview. Anthony’s wife La La tweeted out awareness of Brothers’s beef before the game was even over.

Melo had cooked up 12 points in 12 minutes on 5-8 shooting, but his ejection rattled the Knicks out of a reasonably competitive matchup, which they went on to lose 115-87. With 3:20 left in the fourth, backup point guard Brandon Jennings was also ejected for good measure. It’s a strange time in America, but the Knicks are still very much the Knicks.