Carmelo returns; aims to knock down shots for Blazers

 Plenty has changed since Carmelo Anthony last played an NBA game.

Zion Williamson had just made his Duke debut. Kyrie Irving had said only a month earlier he planned to re-sign in Boston.

There’s been turnover all over the league — including a blockbuster trade between Anthony’s last two teams that sent Russell Westbrook to Houston and Chris Paul to Oklahoma City.

When Anthony joins the Portland Trail Blazers on Tuesday in New Orleans, he will come to an NBA that’s much different since Nov. 8, 2018, and he will try to show he still fits in it.

“I just look at that opportunity, that team, and say, ‘Look, this is what I can bring to the team, this where I can help,’ and it will only work if all parties see it the same way,” Anthony said in a video posted Monday.

Plenty of fellow players think he can. A former coach hopes he will.

“Hopefully this is a good situation,” Houston’s Mike D’Antoni said. “You never know why this didn’t happen before. For whatever reason. Maybe he wasn’t ready. I hope it works out.”

Anthony had played 10 games for D’Antoni when his season abruptly ended. Anthony hadn’t played terribly, with three 20-point performances before the Rockets decided it wasn’t the right fit.

The three-time Olympic gold medalist has kept himself in shape by working out with NBA players, but going from pickup play to NBA action is a major step. He’ll be trying to make it at 35 and will be attacked defensively by players a decade or more younger — and he wasn’t a great defender even at their age.

But he’s a top-20 scorer in NBA history and can perhaps provide some needed punch to a Trail Blazers team that is 5-9 after losing Monday in Houston, where the last team to give Anthony a shot had no complaints about his effort.

“He’s a leader,” D’Antoni said. “There was nothing at all, not even a hint of him not doing what we asked or trying or all that. It was just for us, for whatever reason, it just wasn’t going to be a fit here.”

Maybe it will in Portland.

SLUMPING SPURS

San Antonio has games this week at Washington and New York, a pair of last-place teams.