Carmelo Anthony is changing his number and being fake deep about it

Carmelo Anthony tried to explain why he is wearing No. 00 with the Blazers and sounded like a bad graphic designer.

Carmelo Anthony has announced he is going to abandon the No. 7 that he’s worn for most of his career for No. 00 as he begins his tenure with the Portland Trail Blazers. He uploaded a graphic to explain his decision, one that’s so fake deep that Kyrie Irving might have to invest in Goop in order to retain his position as king of that arena:

This is almost worse than when Melo posted a picture of himself staring through binoculars with the caption of “REAL EYES; REALIZE ‘Wisdom Lies In Not Seeing Things, But Seeing Through Things’”.

We can’t make too much fun of Anthony in particular, because athletes are weird about their numbers in general. They range from Anthony Davis wearing No. 23 in homage to LeBron James, to Dwyane Wade saying that the No. 3 represents the year he was drafted (2003), the number of kids that he has, and the number of championships he’s won.

The religiosity Anthony has imparted on his number isn’t unusual, either. Wade claims his number also represents the Holy Trinity, and Jeremy Lin says his No. 17 is symbolic of him (the No. 1) and God (since the No. 7 appears prominently throughout the Bible).

Athletes have always taken the human drive to force meaning onto small things to an extreme level. I once paid a teammate $200 to get the No. 7 from him because it was the only number I could wear when playing on a soccer team. Athletes are bizarre creatures, and we should laugh at them as a whole.

With that said, Anthony’s Instagram post makes him sound like a pretentious graphic designer speaking about the creation of a new logo. If you’ve never experienced the often over-intellectual and pompous language used by creatives, take for example the objectives laid out by the designers of the new CareerBuilder logo:

1. The matching of the right talent with the right opportunity
2. Actionable intelligence and customized insights
3. The smooth flow of data between systems and platforms
4. Boldness
5. Motivating
6. Dependable
7. Trustworthy
8. Professional
9. ”The mark is intended to flip to emphasize the ‘T’ when referring to CareerBuilder’s pre-hire platform components, Talentstream Technologies.”

Anthony is getting one last chance to play out his NBA career on his terms, and the hope is that his time with the Blazers will go much better than it did with the Rockets and Thunder. But if he’s already looking for something to try after he leaves basketball, he already has the personality and instinct for excessive explanations to start his own creative agency.