Carmelo Anthony is a legendary player in NBA history and most certainly in the history of the Denver Nuggets.
Be that as it may, it didn’t stop the Nuggets from giving Melo’s old jersey number to eventual 2x MVP, Nikola Jokic, and Anthony is far from happy about it.
“It was a petty maneuver,” Anthony recently shared on his “7 p.m. in Brooklyn“ podcast. “It wasn’t like we got numbers to choose from. It was like here, you got No. 15.”
While Anthony does leave room for the possibility that Jokic could have chosen the number to “pay homage” to him as an all-time Nuggets great, he’s still leaning toward the theory that the organization is being hostile toward him.
“But what I believe is they gave him No. 15 to try to erase what I did,” he said.
The Denver Nuggets famously selected Anthony with the third overall pick in the much revered 2003 NBA Draft on the heels of his NCAA National Championship with the then Syracuse Orangemen earlier that year. He went on to become one of the most important players in franchise history by becoming their third all-time leader scorer and leading the team to the 2009 Western Conference Finals before requesting to be traded in 2011.
While Anthony was never able to lead the Nuggets to an NBA title during his tenure with the team, Jokic, affectionately known as “The Joker,” on the other hand has been able to deliver a championship to the city.
Drafted in the second round of the 2014 NBA Draft, the skillful Serbian-born superstar has grown into one of the league’s most dominant players winning back-to-back MVP awards in 2021 and 2022 before winning the NBA Finals MVP last year while leading the franchise to its first ever NBA title.
