1. Production
You are complaining about paying $26M / $28M to a guy who had a per of 22 / 20 / 18 over the past three years?
Al Horford, Avery Bradley and Jae Crowder had PERs of 17.7, 14.4 and 14.9 (respectively) for us this season - and they were the 2nd, 3rd and 4th best players on a #1 seed.
Like Melo, Horford's PER has been consistently dropping over the recent years:
19.8
22.0
21.7
19.4
17.7
Yet Danny Ainge was happy to gave him a 4 year max contract.
Do you know that Paul Georges career average PER is 18.5? The higher Per number of his career was 20.9 in 2015/16.
Gordon Hayward's career per is 17.7, which is about the same number as what Melo put up on this one bad year.
So I'd just like to take this opportunity to clarify - a per of 17.9 is actually not a bad number, and putting up a PER like that on an utterly garbage Knicks team is really quite reasonable. I will entirely expect his PER to drop last season since he was sharing the ball with a horrible (yet extremely ball dominant) Derek Rose it's only natural his production was going to go down.
2. Rebounding
Carmelo Anthony played Small Forward this year, and has done so throughout much of his career. How many small forwards do you know who averaged more then 6.6 RPG for their careers? However you might like to know that in 2013/14 (the last season in which he played PF) he averaged a career high 8.1 rebounds per game.
May I please also note that Blake Griffin, has averaged 7.9 rebounds per game over his past three seasons, and has averaged over 9 RPG only 3 times in his 7 year career? But you think HE is going to help our rebounding, do you?
3. Injuries
Because over the past two seasons Blake Griffin has missed 41% of his possible regular season games and 46% of his possible playoff games. That in addition to the fact that he was idiotic enough to miss important playoff games one year due to a swollen hand that he got as a result of an ill advised fist fight. Guys who are going to be stupid enough to get into fist fights while their team is in the playoffs - yeah, that's what you want.
Comparatively, Melo has only missed 11% of his possible games over the past two seasons. I would rate that as just a wee bit less concerning.