On Monday night, Carmelo Anthony slapped some wheels on Paul George, backed him down, spun and scored. Then he swept across the lane and George hacked his forearm. Jeff Teague switched onto him after a pick-and-roll with Derrick Rose. Melo caught a bounce pass near the baseline, turned, and faded over Teague to put the Knicks up two with 23 seconds to play. The game effectively ended on a blunder: Myles Turner tried to make a move toward the basket before he had fully corralled an entry pass and the ball went skipping out-of-bounds. Courtney Lee sealed the Knicks win with a pair of free throws.

It’s a mid-January victory in Indiana, which isn’t nothing for the plummeting Knicks, but the stakes of the contest were wordlessly articulated by TNT’s quarterly cuts to Larry Bird’s impassive stare. The Pacers are just okay. Turner’s evolution is interesting—he can kind of shoot threes now—and George is assembling what might be his best season. There’s not a lot to talk about beyond that, unless you want to wax depressive about Monta Ellis’s decline. Knicks-Pacers is a schedule blip: it happens because it’s mandated, three or four times yearly. Someone wins, someone loses. It drops into the memory’s mantle and melts.

This is the humble sort of stage Melo has trod since Amar’e Stoudemire’s knees gave out. Superstars occasionally get marooned. They get drafted by a hapless franchise or sign a lengthy contract at exactly the wrong time. Dwyane Wade played on some terrible-to-middling Heat squads before teaming up with LeBron James and Chris Bosh. Kevin Garnett misspent more than a decade in Minnesota, then finally permitted himself to leave town and win a title with the Celtics. Anthony Davis has made the playoffs just once in four seasons with the Pelicans. What’s unusual about Carmelo Anthony is that he seems more or less happily marooned. He gets frustrated with these unremarkable Knicks on a game-to-game basis, and he sulks whenever he perceives the media forgetting him to fixate on Kristaps Porzingis, but Melo has repeatedly made clear that he doesn’t want to leave New York.

Last week, after Phil Jackson used his friend Charley Rosen to float the idea that Melo has outlived his usefulness to the Knicks, Melo sat down with Phil and told him he’s staying put. He could theoretically join the Clippers, or the Rockets, or the Raptors, but he’s not going to. He has a no-trade clause; he’s in full control.

It’s not curious, if you think of Melo not as a professional athlete but instead a celebrity who lives and works in New York, why he wouldn’t want to leave. If you’re going to be young, rich, and famous, you might as well do it in the nation’s cultural epicenter, where you can spend your money on a well-appointed Manhattan apartment a short walk or drive away from some of the best museums, restaurants, and nightlife in the world. The locals mostly leave you alone. The architecture is beautiful. And if you like New York, you like New York specifically: it’s a singular city. Why move anywhere else if you don’t have to?

For the past few years, we’ve assumed the answer to be because the Knicks are messy and mediocre. That hasn’t persuaded Carmelo. We like our athletes to be competitive above all else, and Melo isn’t. The losing bothers him and he probably daydreams from time to time about playing alongside Chris Paul or LeBron, but it doesn’t move him to give up his life as a Knick. Content is a word that’s usually applied here—Melo is content to stay in New York, even though he’ll never win a title there—but contentment is a slippery and perhaps impossible thing to achieve. And it suggests a complacency, which isn’t fair. Sticking with the status quo is a decision, not a passive act. Melo has weighed his options, tried to examine his existence from 30,000 feet as we all periodically do, and he thinks staying in New York is more good than bad. Based on that conclusion, he’s signed an extension and nixed any possible trades.

Melo is 32 now, a little past his prime. He’s not invested every night. He could be in better shape. He’s still capable, as he showed against the Pacers, of catching the ball at the elbow and doing whatever he wants. When it’s late in a close game and he’s scoring over no less a defender than Paul George, a light in him that’s nearly always dim beams brightly. He’s his most appealing self. He reminds us of what he can be.

What he is, though, isn’t up to us. In the end, from our perspective, athletes are abstractions: not people, really, so much as bodies in motion with facial tics and Instagram accounts. We don’t know them. We understand them primarily through their in-game actions and if they have a sense of humor or give decent interviews, that makes us feel a little closer to them—which is to say they’re still strangers. Regardless of this distance between us, we still make demands of them, which we sometimes cast as having their best interests at heart. How many times has it been said that Carmelo Anthony and the Knicks should part company, for everyone’s sake?

This is disingenuous. We’d like Carmelo to leave New York because it would be more fun to have him on a contender, and Knicks fans would, on the whole, be relieved to move on from Melo and begin to build around Kristaps Porzingis without having to worry about stepping on the aging star’s toes. But athletes don’t heed our desires, even if they sometimes seem to. They do what’s best for themselves and we deal with the consequences of those decisions. So we get Melo wasting his supreme, waning talent on a spiraling Knicks team, alternately engaged and checked out, relishing crunchtime duty and the off-court benefits of his job. It’s only intermittently thrilling, not quite what we want, but that’s beside the point—the space in which fans rightfully, agitatedly live.