Can Cooper Flagg pull off a Carmelo? Revisiting Syracuse’s ’03 title run led by a generational freshman star

Can Cooper Flagg pull off a Carmelo? Revisiting Syracuse’s ’03 title run led by a generational freshman star

 

Even with the ball merely resting in his hands, there is immediate clarity this player is extraordinary. It’s obvious before he takes a jumpshot, bounces the basketball or tosses it to a teammate. When all of those things happen, though, the festival of talent leads to a revelation: Even at his age, his first year in NCAA Division I basketball, this is someone around whom a championship team can be built.

This is someone opponents will fear, teammates will follow and his own coaches will endeavor to deploy to maximum effect.

It could apply to him surely.

But this actually is a recollection of my first glance at Carmelo Anthony in a Syracuse uniform on a November night at Madison Square Garden in 2002.

Much has changed in the sport of basketball since Carmelo became the first freshman in college basketball’s modern era to drive his team through a college regular season to the very top of the sport.

When Anthony played for the Orange, there was no NBA Draft age limit. He chose to play in college when many of his peers were directly entering pro basketball to varying degrees of success. Freshman in general were viewed differently then by their coaches, media and fans following the sport. There was an expectation they would acknowledge the hierarchy, accept supporting roles and step forward toward heroism only when absolutely necessary.

Michael Jordan was the third-leading scorer for North Carolina’s championship team in 1982, though he was the one trusted to make the title-winning jumper. Louisville center Pervis Ellison was named Most Outstanding Player at the 1986 Final Four after scoring 25 points on Duke’s inside combo of Mark Alarie and Jay Bilas in the NCAA final. Ellison, too, was third on his team in shots and scoring along the way to that championship.

Carmelo changed everything in 35 games at Syracuse. Although we’d gradually seen fewer lottery-bound senior superstars in the years that followed Christian Laettner’s time at Duke, the implied limitations toward first-year collegians largely remained in place. Of the 56 players chosen consensus first- or second-team All-American during the 1990s, none was a freshman.

Anthony disrupted this convention by being an incredibly versatile player, confident but unselfish, an eager teammate, a willing leader. He did it by coping with challenges and recognizing how to conquer them. He did it by engaging with his teammates as if he weren’t headed to places in the game they never would know.

“I’ve played with so many players, coached so many kids. You can’t be a better teammate. To go out and have the responsibility that he had in terms of leading a young team, to being there every night, never missing a start, to being available always,” Gerry McNamara, the point guard on that Cuse team and now head coach at Siena, told Sporting News. “The unique thing about playing with him is he never once, in all the months of playing with him – I never heard the three letters: NBA. He was solely focused and bought into what we were doing. With his level of talent, I don’t know if you get that much these days.”

Anthony did those things we’ve all seen Flagg do throughout the winter, only now it’s understood: Sometimes the best player is new to a team, new to the level of competition, new to the demands of playing before thousands of people and millions of television viewers. Any team that fails to empower such a talent is likely to regret its reticence.

“Carmelo was really the first one. There was only one senior on the team, and he didn’t start,” Hall of Fame Syracuse coach Jim Boeheim, now an analyst with ESPN and the ACC Network, told SN. “Carmelo was the first freshman, really, that won the thing. But Cooper Flagg can do that. There’s a lot of similarities.”

Anthony’s stay at the July 2001 ABCD Camp for elite basketball talent was so brief it could be described as a cameo. He was there for a day, because he had to leave to begin summer school at Oak Hill Academy in Virginia. But, hey, Beatrice Straight won an Academy Award for just 5 minutes, 2 seconds of screen time in the 1976 movie “Network”. It was kind of like that.

Anthony played against highly regarded New York prospect Lenny Cooke in an afternoon matchup on the court at Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey. After Anthony made clear during the course of the next 90 minutes or so which of them was the superior prospect, I spoke with him for a dozen or so minutes and wrote for Sporting News about what his commitment to Syracuse would mean for his career and for the Orange.

That was the only time I encountered him until attending the Prime Time Shootout high school event in Trenton, N.J., the following February. My friend Dave Telep, then a recruiting analyst and now a vice president with the San Antonio Spurs, was on the court interviewing Anthony as I spoke with another player. When I was finished, I approached the two of them to reintroduce myself to Carmelo. Before I got out a word, he reached out his hand to shake and said, “Hello, Mr. DeCourcy.”

It was obvious Carmelo was exceptional at more than just basketball.

The previous winter, Syracuse assistant Mike Hopkins had been recruting a top wing prospect from Philadelphia, Matt Walsh, who became a two-time All-SEC player and scored 1,301 points at Florida. Assistant Troy Weaver, though, knew about Anthony and convinced Hopkins to attend the Slam Dunk to the Beach tournament in Delaware to scout him.

“I meet one of Troy’s buddies and say, ‘Tell me about Carmelo Anthony, because I’ve been recruiting Matty Walsh. And he puts his hand up, like on top of a mountain, and he says, ‘This is Carmelo’, and he puts his other hand all the way down and goes, ‘This is Matty Walsh.’ It was like a foot,” Hopkins, now an assistant coach with the Phoenix Suns, told TSN. “I’m like, ‘Come on, you’re so full of it. There’s no way.’

“I went to the game, and Carmelo’s got the headband around his neck, and you could just tell. It was like the time you watched Allen Iverson in a layup line, or Ken Griffey Jr. hitting a baseball with the hat on backwards. Like ‘The Natural’. He had that aura, that smile and that charisma. And then you watched the game and he had 36, dribbled through everybody. It was kind of like: OK, you’re right, there is that difference.”

When Anthony arrived at Syracuse for his freshman year, NCAA rules did not permit the opening of practice until mid-October, and coaches could not do offseason work with their teams or even observe them in pickup games. So the SU coaches had to hear second-hand stories from open-gym pickup games about what he be capable of accomplishing that winter. There were five-star reviews from the team’s veteran players.

“I remember Troy calling me – he heard from like four of the players, and a couple ex-players who were there – and saying, ‘Hop, I think we’re going to be pretty good.’ Like, ‘Oh, my God,” Hopkins told TSN. “When your veteran players get this excited – I remember that being the first time feeling the buzz within the team that we’ve got something special here.”

Anthony’s college debut came in the Coaches vs. Cancer event at Madison Square Garden in November 2002. The Tigers played against John Calipari’s third Memphis team, which would go on to win 23 games and reach the NCAAs. The Tigers built a substantial early lead, before Anthony launched a recovery that briefly put the Orange ahead. SU wound up losing by seven, but Anthony scored 27 points, the most for any freshman in his debut, and grabbed 11 rebounds.