NEW YORK — A homecoming demands great food, and Cole Anthony will not settle for anything less.
“I need Carbone,” he shouts. “I need a good meal, especially in New York.”
He repeats himself. He does it loudly.
Anthony is rarely quiet. Not on the court, not afterward, not here in a SoHo sneaker store making dinner plans, not later on as he walks the Manhattan street yelling “Bing bong!” one night after vanquishing the Knicks. Tonight, on a warm November evening, he’s dressed in all black — hoodie, sweats, sneakers — the outfit of someone trying to avoid blending in but with the voice of someone who needs to stand out.
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His postgame interviews have become concertos. He is such a character it feels like he is playing a character on TV when he stands in front of a microphone, sticking his face into the camera after a Magic win, and turning a usually milquetoast moment into something fun.
“That’s just me being candid,” he told The Athletic. “I just be getting hyped, getting that adrenaline rush. That’s just Cole right there. When I’m on the court I’m super, super serious but off the court when I’m just chilling I like to joke around a little bit. Giggle, giggle, play, play, all that.”
Anthony brings his personality to his game. He plays the same way, Magic general manager John Hammond says, as he acts.
Anthony, 21, has spent half his life in the fishbowl, and has adapted to keep the line between the public and private versions of himself thin. His mother directed a documentary about his AAU team when he was 11. His father, Greg, is a former NBA player and now a broadcaster for Turner Sports. He grew up as a super-prospect at the crest of social media and its lionization of high school basketball players. The hype machine dialed it up for Anthony when he was only a teenager, and he was famous long before he was in the NBA.
Faced with a choice to recede into privacy or learn to embrace publicity, Anthony is comfortable with the attention.
“I’m real big on trying to act the same regardless of what’s going on,” Anthony said. “I don’t like to change who I am. Not really into that. Some people will get to the NBA and start acting different than how they did before they got there and vice versa. I like to be me all the time. That’s why in those postgame interviews I get to show everybody how I normally am.”
Those television spots are the endpoint of what he does with his friends, Bryce Council, a lifelong friend says. They make clear that Anthony does not lack self-assurance. It has been tested before. The Magic see it all the time, the kind of verve that helps these rebuilding years hit less painfully.
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They also stand out because the last few years have been uneven. He struggled for the first time in his career, got hurt and his stumbles sometimes left him in tears. His one year at North Carolina wrought damage to his glide path to the NBA. When he landed in Orlando with the No. 15 pick in the 2020 draft, it seemed like a deviation from his path to stardom. Instead, he says, it has put him in the right place.
This season, he is thriving. With Orlando in the middle of a rebuild and just 5-24, Anthony has emerged as a productive piece of it. He is averaging 19.9 points, 6.1 rebounds and 5.6 assists, and has taken hold of the starting point guard spot. He dropped 33 on the Jazz last month in one of Orlando’s rare wins, and nearly had a triple-double against the Knicks.
The growth has come from experience and the team being in a different situation. He has grown close to Jamahl Mosley, Orlando’s first-year coach. As a rookie, Anthony felt he forced his decisions too frequently. He was new and thrown into a difficult spot. He became the starting point two weeks into the season when Markelle Fultz tore his ACL. The Magic, caught in-between a playoff chase and a young, emerging roster, sent away their best players by the trade deadline in March, going all-in on a youth movement.
“That was a very difficult and almost unfair situation to put him in,” John Hammond, Magic general manager, told The Athletic. “You give him that season and a chance to grow from that.”
Anthony has had to adjust frequently since he left Archbishop Malloy High School, where he was the No. 3 player in his recruiting class. He went to North Carolina with a plan to stay one season and be a top-three pick. It went sideways quickly.
He tore the meniscus in his right knee in December, a little over a month into his freshman season. Anthony was told to expect the injury to be just a bone bruise. After an MRI, a team doctor walked into the training room before a subsequent practice and told him he needed surgery. Anthony was floored. He started crying.
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Anthony had never undergone surgery before. He had never had long periods of time away from basketball because of injury before. He had never struggled at the sport before.
That season, North Carolina had its worst season ever under head coach Roy Williams. Anthony’s jumper went haywire. It was his first time on a losing team. His draft stock seemingly plummeted.
“He hadn’t experienced that before,” Greg Anthony said. “And he didn’t handle it well.”
Still, Anthony sees it as a valuable time, so do those around him. It was the “hardest year I ever had playing basketball,” he says, but that “it was awesome for me.” The year helped him mature, Council said.
He struggled to trust teammates and wasn’t in the right mindset, Greg Anthony said, all of which prepared him for today and to learn from those mistakes and not repeat them. That one season at UNC was a perspective-changer, his father said, and when Cole Anthony accepted that he was part of the problem that season, he began to grow from it.
That season provided adversity for Anthony, which forced him to come up with a new plan.
Anthony returned in February to play the final 11 games of the season. It was an unexpected choice and out of step with his peers, who have shut it down when presented with an opportunity to preserve themselves for the draft. It became a key factor for the Magic as they evaluated him ahead of the draft.
Orlando saw the talent. They saw his athleticism and the notable rebounding skills for a guard. But they were impressed by his desire to play again when he could have just punted on the rest of his Tar Heel season.
“Because why come back and play?” Hammond said. “Really there was no reason for him. He knew he would probably be in a position to be drafted. He came back for his love for the game.”
The entire year proved to be a test of his vulnerability and his ability to pivot. The road that led him to Orlando was no different.
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The pre-draft process was strung out, stretched from a few months to seven of them, playing out during a pandemic. Anthony read the mock drafts, which were volatile and confounding. Originally projected as a top-10 pick, he was expected to slip further down, perhaps even late into the first round.
Anthony tried to bottle up his emotions, Council said, but it was difficult to always keep a stoic composure. On the night before the draft, he cried. The next day, he landed with the Magic, taken at No. 15.
“This was a kid who went into his freshman year as being regarded as a special talent, as a legit top-five kid, blah blah blah,” Greg Anthony said. “All that stuff happened and the injury, so the narrative kind of changed on him. So he went from being one of those guys to now all of a sudden a project. But he never really stopped being one of those guys. If you really looked into who he was and what kind of player he was and really watched him, that was really the only time he was inefficient.”
Anthony insists he has nothing but fondness for the results of that draft. He got to join a team that just put him front and center of its rebuild and he gets to play alongside Mo Bamba, a longtime friend. But he has not forgotten the insult of that night.
He has kept that indignation burning. He discusses it with his father, Greg. The two mention it every once in a while in their conversations, a motivation he won’t allow to flame out.
On a rare occasion, he lets it out, too. In October, after dropping 24 in Toronto, he was unfiltered.
“I think about that joint every single day,” he said. “There was 14 dudes picked ahead of me. You think there’s 14 dudes better than me in that draft?”
It took some time for the goodwill to manifest into results, though how long depends on whether you’re tweeting at Anthony or talking to him.
He missed 25 games with a rib injury as a rookie; a fracture to his first rib, below his collarbone, that he says is usually seen in car accidents and made him initially believe he had broken his shoulder. For almost two months he felt as if he was being stabbed in his back. He says it took him a half-hour to get out of bed and he needed to tense his body just to walk.
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His season was bifurcated, and he looked far more comfortable after he returned, dropping 37 points on the Timberwolves in the season finale. His final stats — 12.9 points, 4.7 rebounds, and 4.1 assists per game, with a 44.9 effective field goal percentage — reflect the difficulties and successes of a first-year point guard in the NBA.
Anthony sees it as validation. He believes he used his rookie year to prove he belongs in the league.
“People clearly didn’t seem to think I did at all,” he said. “All I see is ‘Cole, you had a terrible season. You stunk that joint up.’ That’s cool. I’m just here to make people mad, do all that this year.”
This season has been less polarizing. The production has ticked up. So has the evaluation of him. He is a candidate for Most Improved Player.
His shooting has ticked up, not just from 3 but also at the rim. Hammond extols his rebounding and points to a further commitment on the defensive end. One scout who has seen him play multiple times this season pointed to Anthony’s ability to get his own shot and attack switches.
“He plays with a lot of confidence,” the scout said. “He’s a cocky dude.”
The scoring has been impressive, though Greg Anthony believes his son is still doing it on sheer talent. Recently, he told his son it was amazing he had become a 20-point-per-game scorer even though he did not yet know how to be just that at the NBA level yet, and he thinks that will come in time.
While the Magic continue to search for the core that will help them reinvent themselves into a playoff contender again, Anthony is making a strong case to be a key part of it, alongside Jalen Suggs, Jonathan Isaac, and a roster that has six top-10 picks since the 2017 draft on it.
After being thrown off his plan during his one year at North Carolina, Anthony believes he is back on schedule. In fact, he says, he is ahead of his expectations now. He needs to readjust, he says, and set new goals.
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“For me, personally, I had some numbers in my head,” he said. “I was thinking I was going to come into this year potentially 17-18, 6, and 6. But at this point I feel I can do more than that. I think I’m already ahead of that right now and I think I can get to 23, 24 points a game. If not 25, and also help this team win.”
(Top photo of Cole Anthony: Gary Bassing/NBAE via Getty Images)
