The Carmelo Anthony fiasco may be even worse than "The Decision" and what LeBron James did to the Cavaliers.
View full sizeThere's no doubting Carmelo Anthony's talent. His character? That's another story.The Denver Nuggets star has an $18 million option on his contract for next season, which he can reject and then be free to sign elsewhere. But he wants a team to pick up that $18 million option and add the maximum of three more years at $65 million.
Denver is his current team, and they'd do it yesterday.
But Anthony doesn't want to do it.
Denver tried to trade Anthony to the Nets, who'd make the same contractual deal with Anthony.
But he doesn't want New Jersey.
No doubt the Cavs would love to add Anthony, and they have the salary cap room and trade assets to make a deal. But don't even think about Anthony coming here.
Anthony only wants New York. He wants it now. He doesn't want to wait until the July 1 free-agency period because that's when the NBA labor contract expires. This summer, there's an excellent chance the amount of money paid to free agents will go down when a new agreement is in place.
It's so true that James waiting a week into the free-agency period to make his embarrassing appearance on ESPN's "Decision" show to bolt to Miami was a new low for the NBA in terms of arrogance.
But as Nuggets coach George Karl told the Denver Post of a possible book about the endless Anthony trade speculation: "This has got a forward written about the LeBron saga this summer."
Yes, when James and Chris Bosh decided to join Dwyane Wade in Miami, it served notice to the NBA that it's old rules that allowed current teams to give their free agents one more year and more money than any other team would no longer keep players in town.
They want to form their own teams.
Chris Paul has been smart enough to keep his mouth shut lately. But before the season, the New Orleans star talked about playing in New York -- with Amar'e Stoudemire and perhaps Anthony.
As Denver comes to town to face the Cavs on Friday, Karl is doing one of his best coaching jobs. The Nuggets are 27-18, despite all the uncertainty over Anthony.
Anthony's gripe is Denver has not surrounded him with enough talent to win a title. In the previous three seasons, Karl led the Nuggets to 53, 54 and 50 victories. They have tried to team him with Allen Iverson, and later Chauncey Billups.
But they reached the Western Conference Finals only once.
You can argue that the Nuggets haven't surrounded Anthony with enough talent to beat the Lakers and Spurs, but who can? Those two teams have won nine of the past 12 titles since Michael Jordan retired in 1998.
In the end, Anthony probably will force a trade to the Knicks. Denver will figure it's better to get something than nothing for him -- in much the same way, the Cavs settled for some draft picks and a $14 million trade exception from Miami for James.
So we now have four players from the 2003 draft -- James, Wade, Anthony and Bosh -- acting as if the NBA were a summer league where players can jump from All-Star team to All-Star team. Maybe that's the modern NBA and the wave of the future.
Maybe it's even something Commissioner David Stern likes, given all the attention that the free-agent soap operas receive and how the NBA office is based in New York. But if the commissioner really wants to do what is best for the entire league, he will insist upon some type of NFL-type franchise player tag as part of the new labor agreement -- something to help teams keep their stars, or at least make better trades for them.
Source: http://www.cleveland.com/pluto/blog/index.ssf/2011/01/carmelo_anthony_fiasco_could_b.html
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