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Melo admits he 'really wanted to go to Detroit' in '03 draft

REUTERS/Mike Segar

Few areas of society lend itself to "what ifs" more than sports. One of the better NBA iterations of that was the circumstances surrounding the No. 2 pick of the 2003 NBA Draft. High school phenom LeBron James went first - and always was going first - to his hometown Cleveland Cavaliers.

Yet the Detroit Pistons, coming off a 50-win season and a trip to the Eastern Conference finals - and owning the second pick by virtue of a forgotten trade with the Vancouver Grizzlies trade six years earlier - ruined many a narrative by selecting Darko Milicic. Carmelo Anthony - by far the top NCAA prospect that season - dropped to No. 3 and the Denver Nuggets.

The rest is history. Anthony, for all his perceived faults, is probably headed for the Hall of Fame. Milicic was last seen feeding his tattoos beer.

Thirteen years later, however, Anthony admits that he wanted to join the Pistons - an established, veteran team that turned out to be on the verge of a championship season.

"That's why I was a little bit disappointed," Anthony told Bleacher Report's Howard Beck in an in-depth article about the New York Knicks star's close friendship with LeBron James. "Because I really wanted to go to Detroit. You had Chauncey (Billups), you had all those guys over there. Detroit, they had something going over there."

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Billups - after manning a Pistons backcourt alongside Richard Hamilton that went to two straight NBA Finals and won one title - later played with Anthony in Denver and New York. He maintains that Melo would never have gotten away with bad habits offensively had he began his pro career in Motown.

"That ball-stopping mentality that Carmelo has? He wouldn't have had that if he was a Piston," Billups told Beck. "We wouldn't let him play like that. He would have been a much better player than he is now - and he's a great player now."

The Pistons of the early-to-mid-2000s were the epitome of team basketball, even if the era they dominated was plodding and considered the dark ages in comparison to today's open, spaced NBA. Yet Anthony's talents would have fit like a glove at small forward, even if it would have altered Tayshaun Prince's career.

The Pistons won the 2004 NBA Finals, and a title as a rookie for Melo would have been his second piece of hardware in a row - he had led Syracuse to its lone national championship in April 2003.

"Who even knows if LeBron would have ever gotten through us (in 2007)?" Billups said. "We probably would have had three championships."

Beck's piece also examines the potential dynamic on that Pistons-Cavaliers rivalry of the time, and how Anthony and James' friendship would have benefited from playing just 170 miles apart.

"It would have been at a whole other level," James said.

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