Carmelo Anthony, the No. 3 overall selectee of the 2003 NBA Draft after LeBron James and Darko Milicic (if you still remember who he is), has still not found a new club. Though he kept saying that he just wanted to play in the league, no team is willing to offer him a contract.

The last time Anthony appeared in an NBA suit was for the Houston Rockets against the Oklahoma City Thunder at the Chesapeake Energy Arena on November 8, 2018. That was the 10th game he played for the Rockets. 

On January 21, Anthony was traded to the Chicago Bulls which waived him in less than two weeks.

A good scorer, but nothing else

It is no surprise for aging scoring champions to be given up by teams. Allen Iverson finished the 2007-08 season with 26.4 points and 7.1 assists before he retired two years later. Dominique Wilkins scored 29.1 points per game in the 1993-94 season before going to Europe. George Gervin put down an average of 21.2 points in his last season with the San Antonio Spurs but after that, he only stayed in the NBA for one more season before also heading across the Atlantic. 

The reason behind their early NBA departures was simple: they could not do much more than scoring. When they are unable to trample on the opponents' defense or the team does not need them to do so, pure scorers lose their value. This also explained why players like Wilt Chamberlain and Dwyane Wade could still lead their teams even after they had lost much of their scoring ability. Chamberlain could still make great contributions to defense, just like Wade could still perform the orchestrating role.

Anthony definitely belonged to the first kind. Since establishing his reputation at Syracuse University, Anthony displayed complete offensive skills but was not unrivaled in any area. He was okay in one-on-one defense but terrible in other defensive sectors. Scoring was basically the only thing he was interested in and good at.

Attitude, also a major factor

Skill shortcomings were not the only reason that Anthony could not find a job. Unlike Iverson, Wilkins or Gervin, he has not suffered serious injury in his career. It's true that he may slow the team's offense down as a starter, but it should not be a problem for him to contribute firepower off the bench.

Nonetheless, the league's general managers were unwilling to even give him that job. The reason may lie in something he said to Stephen A. Smith on First Take of ESPN. According to Anthony, the Rockets' GM Daryl Morey told him that the team no longer needed him before the game against the Spurs. Anthony's response to that was:

"I've already started accepting the fact that I got to come off the bench, which is very hard for me. I accepted that and I moved on from that."

Anthony sounded like he had made a huge sacrifice by agreeing to be a bench player. However, he might have forgotten that he only got 16.2 points per game at a career-low field-goal rate of 40.4 percent as a member of the starting-lineup. If anything can prove that he no longer belongs to the starting squad, this is it.

Therefore, the conclusion here is that attitude is also behind Anthony's failure to secure a playing berth. He lacks clear understanding of both himself and the outside world. As a result, he was often unable or unwilling to do what the team wanted him to do. Anthony's former teammate in the Denver Nuggets, Chauncey Billups used to point out that compared with helping the team win but scoring under 30 points, Anthony preferred to drop 30+points despite the result of the game. When he could not do that, his frustration could be felt on the court.

It should be safe to say that no team will risk having a 35-year-old player like this in their team.