On Pro Basketball
By HARVEY ARATON
Inside the Javits Center complex on the windy, frigid West Side of Manhattan on Sunday morning, there was genuine warmth for the N.B.A. legends most identified as belonging to New York. None of them were named Carmelo Anthony.
The 16th annual brunch organized by the league’s retired players — an All-Star weekend event informally hosted by Anthony, the Knicks’ reigning star — was turned over to the franchise icons Willis Reed, Walt Frazier, Bill Bradley and Earl Monroe, along with the homegrown greats Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Tiny Archibald and Julius Erving, among others.
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“It was his basketball,” Reed said of the cool man nicknamed Clyde after receiving an award Sunday. “When he let us play with it, we became a great team.”
Twenty years from now, at another legends brunch, Anthony may be remembered fondly as a prodigious-scoring New Yorker. But he has work to do, because he doesn’t have the city pedigree of King, who carried his Knicks in a seven-game war against Larry Bird and the Boston Celtics, the eventual champions, in 1984. Though Anthony won an N.C.C.A. title upstate at Syracuse, he never electrified the Garden the way Mullin did as the hometown kid at St. John’s.
Anthony has plenty of time left but a long way to go before a unified New York warms up to him as a true local legend.
A version of this article appears in print on February 16, 2015, on page D1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Lineup of New York Icons, With Anthony on the Bench. Order Reprints| Today’s Paper|Subscribe
