“When you’re going against a great player like Carmelo you’re not gonna guard him individually,” Bulls coach Tom Thibodeau told reporters just a 
few weeks ago. “You have to guard him with your whole team. There are times where you guard him perfectly and he still has the ability to make. Like I said, we guarded him about as well as we could and the guy still ended up with 39. He’s been a great scorer his whole career. He knows how to read defenses. If you over-help, he’s going to make you pay. He probably doesn’t get enough credit for that. He’s a load. You try to make him play in a crowd and try to challenge his shots as best you can, but you’ve got to make him make those shots.”
Larry Drew echoed Thib’s sentiments after his team was dissected by Melo’s innate ability to put the ball in the hoop.
“We knew that we would probably have to really have to change our defense around him and give Melo some different looks,” explained Drew. “He made shots. We threw a few different lineups at him, a few different matchups. A few of our matchups we actually made a lot of mistakes as far as getting sucked in when he wasn’t really involved on the back side… He made some 3-pointers with hands in his face. They all weren’t breakdowns. He made shots tonight. Sometimes you have to pick your poison with how you’re going to defend certain things and certainly we have to take our chances defending him at the 3-point line. When he jumps up and we contest a shot, we have to settle for that.”
Unfortunately for coach Drew and the Hawks, there wasn’t anything they could do to stop Melo once he got into his zone.
Iman Shumpert made an extra pass to Anthony on the right side of the arc; easy money, in Kyle Korver’s face.
Thirty seconds later Raymond Felton felt Josh Smith cheating off of Melo as he drove to the foul line, where he unloaded a bounce pass to Melo in nearly the exact same spot; water!
After Amar’e Stoudemire corralled a loose ball on the next possession, Felton pushed the ball up-court with Melo trailing him. He dropped the pass off and Melo continued to stay warm, this one from about 30-feet away.
“Not at all,” said Melo, discussing whether he knew where he was on the court when he launched and nailed his third 3-pointer in a row. “I looked at Raymond and he was telling me to run. Once he cut his man off and dropped it back I just caught it and pulled. I had no idea where I was at at that point in time. It was one of them heat check shots at that time.”
When a scorer with the size, strength, versatility and aggressive mindset is on point the way Anthony was on point yesterday, it can render a defense obsolete.
“I mean it was like, ‘It’s falling once again,'” explained Anthony. “‘My shot is falling once again.’ When you feel like that you feel like you can’t miss. My shots tonight came within rhythm with the swing-swing passes. I found the open man tonight and we made shots and everyone played within the rhythm of the game. It was good out there. It felt good.”
There were certainly stretches last night where New York relied too heavily on one-on-one isolations, which is somewhat expected of a team that’s just getting healthy and, hopefully, back into rhythm. As the Knicks continue to put the pieces to the puzzle together and ultimately find the rhythm that they had going at the offensive end earlier in the season, Melo’s ability to score is going to help get his teammates more and more open looks, regardless of whether he notches assists or not.
But last night it was all about Anthony getting it done his way, on the big stage, when it mattered most.