Carmelo Anthony has played his last game as a Denver Nugget and will now head to New York to play with Amare Stoudemire and the Knicks
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Melo is headed to New York after Monday night trade negotiations that also sent Denver fan-favorite Chauncey Billups to the Knicks. ESPN and the Denver Post named anonymous league sources in reporting the trade late Monday night.
The Nuggets will receive promising young forwards Danilo Gallinari (22) and Wilson Chandler (23), rising 7-foot center Timofey Mozgov (24), and former All Star point guard Ray Felton (26) plus bonus draft picks and cash. The Knicks will get Melo, Chauncey, Shelden Williams, Anthony Carter and Renaldo Balkman from Denver.
This blockbuster trade begs the immediate question, though, which team got the better deal?
Certainly not the Knicks, whose surprise success early this season came on the wings of the gifted young players they just traded away. Despite now sporting the dangerous duo of small forward Carmelo and power forward Amare Stoudemire, New York was forced to cough up half of their team to get a deal done.
In order to grab the eventual first round draft pick that Denver demanded from this trade, the Knicks had to dig even deeper and give up yet more youth in Anthony Randolph, along with reserve center Eddy Curry. Those two will head to Minnesota and the Timberwolves will send guard Corey Brewer to New York plus a 2014 first rounder to the Nuggets.
And while Denver will have to wait three years to capitalize on that first round pick, the Knicks will have to answer to New York’s mad media right away.
Carmelo Anthony is a prolific scorer, of course, but New York has been running the league’s 2nd-best offense under coach Mike D’Antoni this year. Now the Knicks must continue their impressive scoring trends without their young core, while working to improve on a defense that is the 29th-worst in the NBA.
Anthony is a fairly stout defender, but the defensive problems on D’Antoni-coached teams are systemic. No help is coming for the Knicks when it comes to shutting down opposing scorers.  That means Melo will be charged with immediately providing ample offense once drawn from the young guys New York gave up to get him, in addition to fixing a defense that is fundamentally really, really bad.
Sounds like a no-win situation for Carmelo.
The Nuggets, on the other hand, just turned their ball-stopping All Pro forward into a bunch of young, malleable players capable of blossoming immediately under coach George Karl’s up-tempo offense. Melo so often turned Nuggets possessions into one-on-one testaments to his scoring prowess that he monopolized a third of Denver’s offensive attempts.
Now the Nuggets get to start from a clean slate with a bevy of talented young players (Gallinari in particular) who look willing and able to improve within a sound system. Coach Karl has already expressed his excitement for starting out with a fresh crew of up-and-coming talents, calling this “an opportunity to reinvent.â€
We in the Denver sports community wish Melo the best of luck in New York, and should do so with class and sincere gratitude. Anthony’s desire to sign a lucrative contract extension this season, along with his willingness to involve the Nets in pressure-filled negotiations over All Star Weekend, made possible a trade that gives the Nuggets a chance to avoid falling out of perennial-playoff-contender status.
Instead, Denver can either build on the pieces garnered from their deal with the Knicks, or turn around and trade off these young players for future draft picks. In a year that seems destined to end with either an NBA labor stoppage or a ball-breaking new Collective Bargaining Agreement, the Nuggets have positioned themselves perfectly to roll with the punches and then come out swinging.
