MIAMI — Carmelo Anthony is hurting. Dwyane Wade no longer is. Anthony sat out the New York Knicks’ 99-89 loss to the Miami Heat on Friday night, when Wade returned to the starting lineup and scored 28 points after a six-game absence to recover from a sprained right ankle.
Anthony is dealing with an array of thumb, wrist and ankle issues.
“I’ve just got to be smart,” Anthony said Friday. “I think I was trying to be a superhero and trying to prove to my teammates that I can play hurt, trying to hide it. But at the end of the day, me doing that, it wasn’t really doing nothing but hurting the team. … Me being limited out there on the court, it wasn’t doing anything for me, for my psyche, for my body. It was just making it worse.”
In other words, perhaps Anthony is taking his cue from how Wade dealt with his most recent injury.
Wade was injured in Denver two weeks ago and was listed day to day throughout his absence. He returned to on-court conditioning several days ago, went through a hard pregame workout in Detroit on Wednesday night, then did more work in Miami on Thursday and participated in the team’s shootaround practice Friday morning.
Anthony missed New York’s game Jan. 14 against the Oklahoma City Thunder because of a sprained right ankle and sprained left wrist, and neither problem has gotten much — if any — better.
“He can’t make a shot and he’s playing through a lot of pain, and it’s not going away and it just kept getting worse,” Knicks coach Mike D’Antoni said. “We’ve got to have him 100 percent or we don’t have a chance. If not, it’s crazy to keep going.”
The Associated Press
