ESPN list hoses Syracuse basketball legend Carmelo Anthony

ESPN recently unveiled its top-74 NBA players of all-time, and to not include former Syracuse basketball star Carmelo Anthony is ridiculous.

Over the past week or so, ESPN has published on its Web site a ranking of the best 74 guys in NBA history, to coincide with the league’s length of existence, but Syracuse basketball icon Carmelo Anthony unfortunately didn’t make the cut.

Sure, I’ll profess to having some Orange bias, since SU is my alma mater, and I adore the ‘Cuse hoops program. But in putting that to the side for a second, it’s utter non-sense that Anthony, a future pro Hall of Famer, isn’t among the premier 74 NBA players.

These sorts of exercises are always subjective, and the debates that stem from them are tons of fun. In case you’re wondering, the top 10 on ESPN’s list is, in order, Michael Jordan, LeBron James, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Bill Russell, Magic Johnson, Wilt Chamberlain, Larry Bird, Tim Duncan, Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal.

Hard to adamantly argue against anyone in that top 10, although I’d probably move Bryant up a little bit. As it pertains to Anthony, well, I imagine that he got left off for a couple of reasons, one of which is that he’s never captured a NBA championship, and by extension his bigger-picture success in the playoffs is miniscule.

To that end, though, there are multiple players on this list who, like Anthony, never proved able to cut down the nets in the league. Just saying.

Another possible knock against Anthony is that he’s a stud in terms of scoring, but his defense is poor, and his overall game pales in comparison to many guys who are featured in the top 74.

Those are legitimate points, however, Anthony still belongs. First and foremost, he currently resides at No. 17 on the NBA’s all-time scoring list, and Anthony could absolutely move up even higher.

In fact, if he manages to accumulate an additional 1,000 points, he’s got a terrific shot to culminate his pro career in the top 10 all-time in scoring. Let that sink in for a second.

Carmelo Anthony is likely to finish as a top-10 points producer in the history of the entire league. But yet he’s not, according to ESPN, one of the NBA’s premier 74 players? This makes no sense to me.

It may not have made a difference in the voting for this list, but Anthony also won a NCAA title on the Hill, and he has three Olympic gold medals.

ESPN’s Tim MacMahon, who knows a lot more about the NBA than I do, seems to agree. He wrote in part, “Dwight Howard and Carmelo Anthony both clearly belong thanks to their overall bodies of work, but their reputations have been tarnished by their decline and difficulty adapting to the NBA’s changes in recent years.”

I’ll have to “agree to disagree” with ESPN about Anthony. It is what it is. But my hope is that many Syracuse fanatics out there would back me up here.