Carmelo Anthony may have played his last game for the New York Knicks

The greatest New York Knick since Patrick Ewing left town walked uneasily around the court at Madison Square Garden Wednesday night during warmups, his hands in his pockets. He limped around his teammates, offering them words of encouragement, suffering from knee soreness that he had determined wouldn’t keep him out of the final game of his team’s season.

Dressed in a gray warmup shirt with cutoff sleeves, his signature headband white, it was as if the iconic Knick — Carmelo Anthony, winner of NCAA championships and Olympic gold medals, scorer of more points than Charles Barkley, Elgin Baylor and Clyde Drexler, wanted to go incognito at the world’s most famous arena.

On this, what many expect was his final game as a Knick, Anthony’s emergence from the tunnel merited barely more than a passing bit of extra cheers from a crowd, mostly notable for its absence. The PA announcer really put his back into it during introductions when Anthony’s turn came up, but the cheers from the sparse crowd was a faint echo of the way The Garden boomed when Anthony jumped off the bench and ran through his gauntlet of teammates back in 2011, beginning a New York career with such promise.

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“I’ve had a pretty keen sense of an idea of what New York is about,” Anthony would tell media assembled at his locker following the game, a 114-113 win in which Anthony scored 17 points, but sat for the fourth quarter while his younger teammates pulled out a win (that did more harm than good to the team’s lottery prospects). “I had an opportunity to spend six years here—“Anthony heard his past tense and adjusted it, as someone not yet ready to publicly declare his exit—“so far, seeing a little bit of the best and seeing it at it’s all-time worst. It puts things in perspective. It can make you a little stronger, and in some cases it can break you. In my case, it made me stronger.”

What Anthony battled here extended far beyond the typical New York struggles — extra media attention, carrying a team in front of sold-out fans who have been waiting since Nixon was president for another championship.

What brought Anthony to New York was owner James Dolan bigfooting his competent executive, Donnie Walsh, to make an unnecessarily one-sided trade, robbing the team of both Walsh’s expertise (he quickly exited) and assets vital to maximizing Anthony’s prime.

Then came a teardown and rebuild under Phil Jackson, whose inability to maximize the roster around Anthony morphed into an attempt to make Anthony the scapegoat for it. And Anthony, rather than accept this judgement, stuck with the Knicks, re-signed in 2014, and lest the skeptics believe that happened for money (the Knicks could offer more at the time), he’s remained a Knick even as the team attempted to trade him this year. Any deal required Anthony’s signoff and as reward, a 15 percent trade kicker. Still, Anthony stayed. ‘Once a Knick, Always a Knick’ as a mantra through hard times, rather than a Charles Oakley-disproven team marketing phrase.

Through it all, Anthony remained Anthony. Critics would never stop blaming him for what he isn’t — the price every elite superstar who isn’t given enough talent around him pays — like Ewing in New York before him. Somehow, many Knicks fans, supposed to be the most sophisticated in the world, buy into this narrative, even now, when we all recognize the role team-building plays in championships. In New York, the credit or blame is frozen in amber from the early 1970s. Willis Reed, you see, delivered a championship to New York by limping onto the court, or it was Walt Frazier putting up 36 and 19 in that same game, or it was Red Holtzman urging his team to share the ball.

Who was the general manager for that team? That’s right, it was Eddie Donovan, trading for Dave DeBuschere and drafting Willis Reed. Not a name many Knicks fans know, and it’s skewed their thinking about how championships are won for nearly half a century now — not that they’d know from first-hand experience.

The current architect, Jackson, decided instead to attack Anthony repeatedly through the media. All Anthony has wanted is clarity about the direction of the team. He’d even decided that perhaps it was enough around the trade deadline. But then the stubbornness that has served him so well on the court kicked in, and he remained a Knick, a constant reminder to Jackson that he’d inherited a Hall of Famer and six years later, deployed him in a game that purely mattered for lottery standings alongside a starting lineup of Maurice Ndour, Willy Hernangomez, Courtney Lee and Ron Baker. Who failed whom exactly?

“When you talk about people, speaking indirectly, it’s kind of hard to trust them,” Anthony said of his upcoming meetings with Jackson, GM Steve Mills and head coach Jeff Hornacek, meetings where he plans to hear the team out and make a decision on whether to approve a trade this summer. “If someone were talking badly about you at your job, what would you do? You’d feel a certain way. You’d want that person to be straightforward with you. I’m the same way. I’m a very honest person. And I know the business, I know the game, I know how it works. So if there’s a message you want to get across, I’m always open.”

Instead, Anthony has dangled for months — “I’ve made my peace with it”, he said Wednesday night, but still sounded hurt by it.

Asked if he thought it was fair that Anthony is getting blamed for the Knicks finishing 31-51, instead of pointing out that the prototype Anthony season was the least of this team’s problems, Hornacek said this Wednesday night, agnostic about the contributions of his superstar: “I don’t think you ever look at one guy or one thing when you don’t make the playoffs. It’s a variety of things. You can go into a lot of ifs and buts, but I think guys tried their hardest… So I don’t think there’s anything Carmelo did or didn’t do that had any effect. He played what we expected.”

And so it is left to visitors to see who the Knicks have employed for six years and wonder about the gap between perception and reality, to see one of the elite scorers of our age — one who managed to lift a team with J.R. Smith as second option, Raymond Felton and an injury-compromised Tyson Chandler as his point guard and big to 54 wins and within a Roy Hibbert block of reaching the Eastern Conference finals — and approach Anthony with the proper reverence.

“This is my sixteenth year in the NBA,” Sixers coach Brett Brown said of Anthony Wednesday night, prior to the game. “And part of my game plan with [Gregg Popovich] was to gameplan against the Denver Nuggets, and so you lived that world. And then you inherited the New York world before I had the Philadelphia job. So I feel like, in my timeframe, whether it’s as an assistant or a head coach, his teams were always my responsibility. And therefore you paid heavy attention to him.”
Brown also coached Anthony for USA Basketball.

“There’s another layer of respect that I have for him in the way he loved playing for the United States,” Brown continued. “He committed to the United States. He brought a new mindset and gold medals back to the United States. And then you just see his body of work in the NBA. You see the points that he’s scores, with people just draped on him, hanging on him, especially in that iso spot, where he’s just going to lull you to sleep, and you know it’s coming, it’s just a matter of when. And I just feel like you weigh up that body of work, how can we all not just step back and have a respect for him, what he’s done for the league and what he’s done for the country. I’m one of his fans. I have respect for what he’s done.”

It’s what Anthony did Wednesday night. The crowd, divided between tourists cheering the Knicks for winning and the hardest of hardcores fretting over what the win would do to their lottery position, created a strange alchemy in The Garden. Defended by Justin Anderson, Anthony used his old-man game on him all night, backing him down, down, down and then whirling and putting the ball in the basket — on turnarounds, on step backs. Impossible to stop.

Anderson swooped through the lane at the other end and threw down a monster dunk, a reminder of how airborne Anthony once had been. No matter: his turn came, and still Anthony methodically worked the younger Anderson, dribble, dribble, turn and shoot.

Anthony said after the game that he hadn’t decided whether to grant the Knicks the right to trade him, he wanted to sit down with “my team, and my family” and figure out what was a priority for him. New York is home, but he is clearly unwanted, and Anthony hungers for a championship, for the validation that should be his already, rings or not. He sees enough to understand that it’s not likely to be in New York, not with his odometer above 35,000 minutes and a roster with Kristaps Porzingis, Joakim Noah’s anchor of a contract and some promising players whose primes will come after Anthony’s contract expires.

So the likeliest option is that Anthony will go elsewhere. Patrick Ewing, the greatest player in the history of the franchise, left town under a cloud, with tabloid headlines heralding his departure, only appreciated once he was gone.

Anthony, at least, got to hear a few fans call for him in the closing minutes, a towel on his head, his night and Knicks career likely over. If ticket holders showed up for the mid-April game against the Sixers, chances were pretty good they’d seen Anthony constantly for six years, and understood that whatever has befallen this franchise since that night in 2011 when he arrived, it wasn’t his fault.

“It felt good. It’s been a while,” Anthony said with a smile. “It’s been a while.”