For an NBA superstar in love with playing Hero Ball, Carmelo Anthony has a funny acquaintance with blame. Doesn't want it. Doesn't like it. He couldn't play nice with the Denver Nuggets and coach George Karl, and in New York his pattern's been the same with Mike D'Antoni, Amare Stoudemire and now with Jeremy Lin and that "ridiculous contract" -- Melo's words -- that the Houston Rockets used to lure Lin away from New York.

Throw in the raft of players the Knicks traded away to get Anthony, and how shooting guard Landry Fields melted in his presence before drifting off to Toronto, and that's a lot of tombstones for Anthony to have on his resume. So far that resume includes a whole lotta points and a whole lotta noise but just one advance past the first round of the playoffs in nine seasons, a sub.-.500 record most of his time with the Knicks, and a 1-8 postseason record in New York.

The Knicks have never looked more like Anthony's team than they do right now. And now he better damn well make them winners.

Will the real Melo please stand up? AP Photo/Frank Franklin II

Otherwise all the Knicks have done is say goodbye to Linsanity and hello to -- what? -- more Melo-ocrity?

Anthony better damn well win, all right.

He now has his coach of choice, Mike Woodson. And he now has an offense built entirely around him. He's capable of playing a more devastating and consistent all-around game. And that will always make the charge that he still doesn't get what it takes to be a winner fair until he proves otherwise.

So somebody should tell Anthony to spare us the revisionist talk about how much he wanted Lin back, or his depiction of how lovely it was to be reunited a couple weeks ago with D'Antoni, now an assistant for the U.S. Olympic team. Anthony's description of that reunion sounded like a cheesy chick-movie trailer: "We talked. We laughed. We joked ... "

Okeydoke.

There were reasonable arguments on both sides for why the Knicks should or shouldn't have kept Lin. The most curious, yet believeable one? Numerous news outlets reported that Knicks owner Jim Dolan drew the line at throwing more money into the furnace now -- now? -- in large part because Dolan's hair-trigger temper was tripped when Lin went back to the Rockets and squeezed more money and a restructured contract out of them, making it harder for the Knicks to match.

Lin quit the Knicks as much as the Knicks quit him.

But make no mistake, Anthony showed Lin the door, too, in much the same way he shoved D'Antoni out by blatantly quitting on him on a mid-March Sunday against Philadelphia; D'Antoni resigned two days later. Since when does a team's superstar -- knowing management and his head coach are on record as saying they planned to match their starting point guard's contract offer -- go public and call it "ridiculous," as Anthony did when everything was still in play?