When they were last together, Mike D’Antoni imposed ball-sharing improvisation on Carmelo Anthony’s out-of-my-way isolation. The result was an unremitting plunge toward what was believed to be permanent separation.

And yet more than five years after D’Antoni resigned from the Knicks over his differences with the team’s star player, Anthony now wants New York to figure out how to trade him to the Houston Rockets, with whom D’Antoni has resurrected his reputation as an offensive mastermind, ahead of his time.

It helps that Anthony’s pal, Chris Paul, has joined the James Harden-led Rockets, while the Knicks are attaching figurative training wheels to their foreseeable future. But there is another implied facet of Anthony’s desire to reconnect with a coach he treated with absolute disdain in New York.

In his head or heart, and quite possibly both, Anthony has to by now know that D’Antoni was right.

“In New York, Melo and other people were averse to Mike’s offense because it was not only different but it was early different,” said Dan D’Antoni, who served as an assistant coach with the Knicks when his younger brother was in charge. “It was before Golden State, before it was settled that there was a new way to play in the N.B.A. But things change. The league changes. The game changes. Melo changes. Mike changes.”