People who talk about Carmelo's skills in present tense have not seen him lately. According to whatever advanced stat you want to talk about, he was one of the worst players in the league last year. And this is surrounded by pretty good teammates, so it's not like this is an aging superstar/bad team scenario. And the numbers really bode poorly for his future. Remember, this is someone who now has 1000+ regular season games under his belt. That's a lot of wear and tear.
Carmelo had actually been one of the rare remaining successful mid-range players his last few years in NY. His last 5 seasons in NY, he'd been a 45% shooter from long twos. That's 16 feet and further. He was shooting them at a decent clip, too, with a quarter of his shots coming from there. Last year, he still took almost a quarter of his shots from there, but he was hitting 38%. That's already not a great shot to be taking to begin with. He did take more threes last year, but hitting 35% of them isn't all that spectacular. His TS% has never been worse and the average distance at which he took his shots has never been greater. He also took a serious nosedive after the ASG last year. He shot 38% from the field the rest of the way. His usage right went down, his ORTG went down.
The playoffs weren't an outlier, it's how his season had been going up to that point. He started okay, then it all fell apart in February. Melo actually shot 35% from the field overall in February. That's bad. Very bad. That's also a hallmark of an aging player who's breaking down. Start the season okay, get worse after 50 games when you run out of gas. Again, does not bode well for this season or any other future seasons, should there be any for Carmelo. His PER has also never been lower and perhaps the biggest drops of all was to his Assist rate. It was half of what his previous worst season had been. He's basically just taking long jumpers and threes at this point, and doing nothing else on offense. It's not like he's posting people up and looking to create space for his teammates. His season was exactly like what we saw in the playoffs.
And this is all without taking into account his defense, which has been terrible by any metric. He can't guard his man 1-on-1 anymore, and he can't switch or rotate either. His Value Over Replacement Player was -1.1. He's just not giving you anything anymore. His offense is below average, his defense is below average. Sure, he still scored 16 points a game, but at 32 minutes and 15 shots a game, and a 23% usage rate, there are a lot of people who could do that. Way more efficiently and without hurting the team in so many other ways.
