And so it continues: would the mid-2000's Pistons have been a better team had they drafted Carmelo Anthony second overall in 2003?
Melo has said they would have won multiple rings. Rip Hamilton has said they would have been a dynasty. Ben Wallace has said otherwise; Anthony would have disrupted the team's chemistry. Darko Milicic, the infamous bust who went one pick before Melo, just wishes the whole story would go away.
But this is a story without an end. And here's the latest twist: Anthony says the Pistons -- and future head coach Larry Brown -- promised to draft him second overall until the moment they didn't.
"To this day I still think about that, because I’m like, they promised me: 'Yo, we taking you, we taking you.' I’m talking about all the way up to draft day: 'We taking you,'" Anthony said on the latest episode of the ALL THE SMOKE podcast with Matt Barnes and Stephen Jackson. "So in my mind I’m like, 'I’m going to Detroit. Chauncey there, Tayshuan, Rip, all these guys is there.'"
Anthony, fresh off carrying Syracuse to the 2003 national championship, said he drove with a friend from Baltimore to Philadelphia to watch the Pistons play the 76ers in that year's playoffs, a series Detroit would win in six games. While he was there, Anthony said Brown, then-head coach of the 76ers with an unspoken agreement to take the Pistons job at the end of the season, met with Melo "in the back and he's like, 'Yo, we taking you, we taking you.'"
"So I’m driving back home, down I-95, like, 'Yo, we going to Detroit. The whole hood, we Detroit.' So that sh*t still sits with me to this day."
According to Anthony, the Pistons told him he would share playing time his rookie season with fellow forward Tayshaun Prince -- a key cog in Detroit's 2004 championship -- who had been drafted in the first round the year prior. That was "cool" with Anthony, who added with a laugh, "But I don't know how long I'm gonna share time with him, you know what I'm saying?"
"I’m just gonna come in and do my thing," he said. "And then they won it. And I’m like, my luck. Honestly if I’m there I think they win another one. I wouldn’t jump out there and say we’d three-peat, but I think we’d go back to back if I’m there. Because I would have learned from those guys, they were all vets. I would have learned from those guys in a way that my second year coming back, I would have been a totally different player."
Anthony shook his head and added, "But everything happens for a reason."
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