Keeler: Nuggets, Carmelo Anthony feud is getting old. Time for a truce. Time to retire Melo’s jersey

Can’t we all just Melo out?

The feud between Nuggets fans and Carmelo Anthony celebrates its 15th anniversary early next year. Our favorite basketball beef’s growing facial hair now. It’s old enough to enroll in driver’s ed.

Time for the Nuggets to steer this narrative back to sanity.

Time to retire Anthony’s number. To rip the Band-Aid off. To make peace. To stop pretending he didn’t happen.

Anthony is being inducted into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame this weekend. So how come he’s still notably absent from the rafters at Ball Arena?

“(It’s) well-deserved. I always thought (Melo) would be a first-ballot Hall of Famer,” Denver hoops icon Chauncey Billups told me earlier this summer. “He’s just that gifted. He’s a great teammate. He made me better.”

Anthony made Denver better, too. Any list of top-5 Nuggets that leaves off Melo is suspect. Any all-time Nuggets Mount Rushmore without him is mere graffiti.

Melo’s 13,970 points with the Nuggets still rank No. 4 on the franchise list, topped only by Alex English, Dan Issel and Nikola Jokic — icons all.

Anthony was the franchise’s best pure scorer since English, the face of this franchise from 2003-11. The 6-foot-7 forward and No. 3 overall pick notched four of his 10 All-Star berths here. He landed four of his six All-NBA selections as a Nugget.

It’s been 15 years.

It’s time to forgive a little.

No one’s asking you to forget the divorce. Melo big-timed Denver. That’s a Front Range sin on par with playing for the Raiders or letting Bill Schmidt run your front office.

Anthony told the Nuggets he had no interest in signing a contract extension after the 2010-11 season — essentially forcing the team to trade him to the New York Knicks that February.

And what a trade. The guy that might’ve become the best Nugget ever had he sucked it up and stuck around, instead turned into the greatest flip in franchise history.

On February 22, 2011, Denver shipped Melo to the Knicks. The Knicks sent back Danilo Gallinari, Wilson Chandler, Timofey Mozgov and Raymond Felton. But the sweetener was the draft picks the Knickerbockers threw in, including a 2016 pick swap that had a major impact on Denver. The No. 7 selection that summer, a gift from New York to the Nuggets, was used on a Kentucky guard named Jamal Murray.

In other words, Melo helped to build a championship team in Denver. It just took him leaving and another 12 years for that tree to finally bear fruit.

Let’s stop ignoring history. And revising it. Before he abandoned Ball Arena, Melo made it relevant. He gave it hope.

Anthony effectively ended the Nuggets’ Wilderness Years. Denver had suffered nine straight losing seasons, BM — Before Melo. The year prior to the Nuggets drafting him, Denver won 17 games. It won just 27 the season before that.

The Kroenkes and the then-new downtown arena stabilized one of the NBA’s wobbliest franchises. The on-court product, at the turn of the 21st century, still stunk to Mile High Heaven.

Anthony changed that. Instantly. The Nuggets won 43 games his rookie year. They won 49 in his second. His era ushered in 10 straight playoff berths, including two after he’d been traded to the Knicks. To date, that remains the longest consecutive postseason streak in franchise history (2003-13).

Melo didn’t just help save a franchise. He put the Nuggets back on the national basketball map. Anthony’s baby blue Denver No. 15 was among the top 15 jerseys sold by the NBA Store every season from 2003-’04 until 2009-’10. Melo was the cover athlete for Electronic Arts’ NBA Street Homecourt video game in the winter of 2007.

Was he a great defender? No. Were his postseasons forgettable? Too often. Melo’s Nuggets reached a Western Conference final in 2009, one of eight playoff berths in the Mile High City. He was eliminated in the first round the other seven times.

“That year we had it rocking here (2009) was one of my favorite years in my 17-year career,” Billups said. “And it had a lot to do with Melo, watching him just destroy people every single night.”

The 50 points versus the Rockets in February 2011. The 49 points against Washington, on 19-for-25 shooting. The six treys against Indiana while Ball Arena booed him.

Like any passionate relationship that burned hot and ended badly, things between Melo and Denver got thorny. Tangled. Complicated. Hurt fed the hate.

The Nuggets gave Anthony Rudolph Melo’s No. 15 not long after the Anthony trade. Jokic got it next, became the franchise’s GOAT, and cue the awkward.

“What I believe is that (the Nuggets) gave him 15,” Anthony told The Kid Mero in January 2024, “to erase what I did.”

Baloney.

At any rate, rules for remembrance were always made to be broken. Kobe Bryant has two numbers hanging at Crypto.com Arena. Why can’t the Nuggets have two No. 15s?

The longer this can keeps getting kicked down the road, the pettier everyone looks.

“I remember (Anthony) coming into the league,” Billups mused. “And now to see him retire and actually be inducted into the Hall of Fame. I’ll just be looking like, ‘Dang, I really am old.'”

It’s been 15 years.

As grudges go, isn’t that long enough?

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