There WAS something different about him from the start. The early 2000s, after Kobe Bryant and Kevin Garnett made the jump straight from high school to the NBA, it was hard for any player with a rep to even ponder spending time in college, since there were no rules on the books keeping them from declaring. 

Carmelo Anthony went another way. As so many of his contemporaries — a lot of those names lost to the vapors of history — declared for the draft, Anthony declared something else after his junior year at Towson Catholic High: he would be going to Syracuse. Anthony was 6-foot-6 and 180 pounds, and self-aware enough that he believed NBA scouts who thought him too skinny for the league at that point. 

So he went to Oak Hill Academy for a year, beefed up his grades and his body. Jim Boeheim kept tabs from a distance on his prized prospect that whole winter of 2001-02. He’d been to the Final Four twice already, 1987 and 1996, and thought he might be building toward another one eventually. Carmelo’s mother, Mary, had insisted her son would play at Syracuse for at least two years. 

Boeheim figured that was the window.