Real Hoops - Over-Melo-Dramatic

Finally, finally, finally, finally, finally!! It. Is. Over. The on-again, off-again trade that had more unnecessary expository discussion than an episode of Grey's Anatomy ("I signed an extension today."), finally happened. 

(Check out the full trade here.) 

It might not have been exactly how we thought (or hoped?) is would go, but ultimately, Melo is right where he belongs, as a New York Knick.  It really is a perfect match.  The Knick fans and the collective media, some of whom were soo in love with guys like like Danilo Gallinari (are you really a shooter if you hit 42% of your shots?), Landry Fields and Timofey Mozgov, that they balked at trading them for a Top 15 guy, get a new player to shower with unbridled and unwarranted adulation and declare their newest savior while ignoring all of his very obvious flaws (at least until they get sick of him and trade him to Seattle for Glenn Rice and some other assorted chum).  Carmelo comes to the big city, gets his wife off his back and still gets his money.  They deserve each other.   

Perhaps we're being a little ... persnickety.  To try to quell our normal urge to destroy, let's try to look at things a tad more objectively by examining the impacts on everyone involved:

Knicks

This is a deal the Knicks had to do.  Anytime you can get a Top 15-type player for a collection of role players, you have to make that deal.    By moving Chandler, Gallo, Mozgov and Felton, they sent away 4 of their top 6 players.  But Billups essentially cancels out whatever they lost with Felton and Melo is obviously a big upgrade over Chandler (who they would have had to renounce anyway to sign Melo in the off season).  They also managed to keep Landry Fields, a natural 2 who scores without needing the ball and plays defense.  He's a blender who seems like the perfect role player on a team with Melo and Amare dominating the ball. 

So they're only really losing Gallinari and Mozgov.  Mozgov, an undrafted 7 footer from Russia, who spent a huge portion of the season racking up DNP's seems unlikely to amount to much more than a rotation body.  Gallinari, while a good player who is 22 years old with a history of back problems and averages 16 ppg, 4 rpg and a PER of 15 (league average) doesn't seem to have the makings of a superstar.

(For comparison: At 22 Melo was averaging 28 ppg (PER of 22) and Dirk (the poster boy for slow-starting foreign born superstars) was averaging 22 ppg, 9 rpg (PER 22).)

So, how is this all going to play out?  Well, as we wrote a few weeks ago, Carmelo isn't a savior.  He's not on the level of LeBron or Wade or Kobe.  Still, he's an indisputable superstar (we're working on an "NBA Taxonomy" to sort all these labels out) and a great scorer but he's not all that efficient and he doesn't do much else. Playing with Amare in D'Antoni's system might help the former but, only a change in dedication and focus on Melo's part can change the latter.  In Melo and Amare, the Knicks now have two of those types of guys and until, they decide to do all the "winning" things (rebounding, defense, fighting through screens, etc.) the Knicks are going to be an exciting team that scores a ton of points, wins 45-50 games and gets beat in the second round every year.  Is it better than what they've been doing the last few years? Absolutely.  Are they championship contenders?  No f'n way.

At least not yet.  The trick for the Knicks is what they do going forward.  Role players or not, they gave up a lot of their assets to get Melo and now lack the depth and talent to make a real run.  The common theory is that they're just going to get another superstar, from the presumed 2012 free agent class of Deron Williams, Chris Paul and Dwight Howard (who are incidentally all better than either Melo or Amare), and be on their way.  (How'd it work last time you waited for the man on the white horse, Knicks fans? That's right, you gave $100m to a guy with bad knees.)  While that's nice in theory, in practice it's going to be a great deal more difficult.  With the cap likely shrinking the Knicks, with 2 guys making $20m+ on their cap (which is salaries decrease will be proportionally huge) simply won't have the cap space to make truly competitive (never mind max) offers to those guys.  Maybe Paul and his bad knee might take less to come to NYC but he don't seen either D-Will or Howard forgoing bigger deals from places like L.A.  Plus, after they shot their load in getting Melo, the only real asset they'd have to try to deal for one of those guys next season should they try to force their way out (and thus circumvent the cap issue) would be Chauncey's expiring contract, Fields and ...... nothing else.  Either way, it's far some a done deal.  If they can't get their third superstar, the Knicks will be forced to scramble to find the right kinds of role players (a center like Kendrick Perkins and a Shane Battier-type wing would be good starts) to cover up their stars' deficiencies, all without the benefit of many draft picks or cap room.  Again, easier said than done, but given what they've accomplished thus far, we wouldn't put it past Walsh and his crew (if, of course, Dolan let's them do their jobs).

So you can criticize the deal on those points if you want but one criticism we think is misplaced, however, is to question why they didn't just wait until the off season to sign Melo as a free agent. Why? Money, of course. For as much as Melo wanted to go to NYC and be a Knick, he wanted just as much to sign the 3-year, $65m extension. With pending changes in the CBA (including lowering everything from the cap to player salaries) opting out could have ended up costing him upwards of $40m (when you consider the opt out next year, plus the extension, he's banking $80m+ for the next 4 years, guaranteed) and nobody, no matter how rich, walks away from that kind of money. If the Knicks waited, there's a good chance Melo signs the extension to stay in Denver or even head across the river to Jersey. That's without even mentioning the fact that minds can change in the course of several months. Even if he followed through and opted out, Melo could have been pissed the Knicks cost him that money or someone else could have made a compelling offer. With no guarantees, the deal had to be done.

Nuggets

For a team with a superstar who demanded a trade and said he'd only go one place, you'd have to say they did well.  All of the players they acquired have proven they can play.  Their roster is now significantly deeper than before, full of tradable assets and stocked with draft picks to supplement.  They also managed to save a shit ton of money, getting under the luxury tax threshold.  The new regime now has all the tools they need to remake the team in their image.  All they have to do now is not screw it up.  Good luck fellas.

T'Wolves

In addition to drafting copious amounts of point guards and small forward, the T'Wolves have made it their MO to take on low-risk, high-upside guys and hope that the cold of Minnesota will freeze the crazy right out of them.  If they hit on 1, they've done a hell of a job.  If they miss on all of them, they've lost essentially nothing in the process.  It's worked to different extents with Darko and Beasley and now they'll try again with Randolph, a high ceiling shot blocker/athlete with serious make-up issues.  If he starts to play he's a potential star, if he busts completely all they lost was Brewer, a guy they'd have let walk anyway.  Sounds like a win to us.

The League

We've heard a ton of lamenting the past few weeks about how bad it is for the league that superstars are joining up with superstars because it's going to destroy the competitive balance of the league.  That's a good point, except, when exactly has there ever been competitive balance in the NBA? 

Are we really pining for the 80's when teams like the Celtics, Lakers and Sixers won titles with rosters littered with Hall-of-Famers?  Or the 90's when MJ and Scottie teamed up for 6 rings and the Dream and Clyde grabbed another?  Of maybe the 00's when Kobe and Shaq dominated?  This is the way it's always been.  For as long as we can remember there have been a hand full of really good-to-great teams, a bunch in the middle and a hand full of teams that are total crap.  Parity has never existed in the NBA and it never will.

So what's the difference, now?  The players are in charge, not the teams.  And, for some reason, that makes people uncomfortable.  We get all pissed when guys chase the money and now when they chance rings instead, they're ruining the league?  That hardly seems fair.  Everyone wants to be a player (we'd all play for free, right?) but when it comes to the business of sports, people send to side with the teams. Maybe it's fandom clouding our judgement (since more times then not our team isn't the place theses guys want to go - see, Nets, New Jersey) but if you played in rec league and were given the chance to team up with your best friends (who are equally as good as you) and win or stick with your work team and the old guy who doesn't pass, the fat guy who can't play more than 3 minutes at a time without needing oxygen and the dude who plays like he's never set foot on or even imagined a basketball court before, you'd leave to

So don't blame the players, just enjoy the fact that when these guys team up, they can make each other better and chances of seeing exceptional basketball only increases and the playoffs become something memorable.  That sounds awesome.  Even the people in Memphis don't care if the Grizzlies suck, so why should we?