JohnStarksTheDunk wrote:KnicksGod wrote:blueNorange wrote: 
when the trade happened gallinari and chandler were balling, mosgov was the answer at center, and amar'e wasn't dead.
melo fans love altering the universe to make him not the culprit in all of this madness.
On the one hand, I would reverse the Melo trade if I had to do it all over again. Because the results have been so bad. Melo isn't bad but the team has gone nowhere, actually it's gone south. So I would undo that trade today. Definitely.
On the other hand, I don't think the guys they gave up, or Denver drafted, have turned out well. They didn't look like very above average players at the time of the trade, and they don't now.
So I guess what I'm saying is that because we do KNOW that Melo and that pathway have failed badly, you should not want to repeat it. We don't know what would have happened had we stayed with what we had. Even if you let Gallo/Chandler/Mozgov just leave via free agency, or you trade them for someone other than Melo, maybe you build a team that is better in the end.
Of course, you could still say -- well what if we had just built a better team around Melo after getting Melo? Fair enough. So there are endless what-if scenarios.
I'm not even factoring in the picks we gave up in terms of how WE might have used them.
So the Melo pathway as it has played out has failed in a huge way. You'd have to be crazy not to take just about any scenario other than this.
If given the chance, I would probably un-do the Melo trade as well. Amare's situation probably would have played out the same, but at least we would have had our own picks.
However, as long as we are un-doing things, a more obvious choice would the be Amare deal in the first place. Obviously this is unrealistic, since we needed to sign SOMEONE after striking out on LeBron, but Amare ended up being a hindrance for us to ever improve the team (much like H20's injury made the Marbury trade and Crawford signing turn out much worse), and even when "healthy" he was never really a good fit with Melo. Then when we had the chance to un-do it, instead we used it on a guy with one year left on his contract, who actually played pretty well with Melo, and ruined any chance we might've had to acquire Chris Paul.
And that's the thing. The Melo experiment has been a failure thus far, but it's also because we failed terribly at ever putting a good team around him.
KnicksGod wrote:This is a can of worms but I think the Melo era, as it played out, was doomed the minute we let Lin go. That brought in Felton, made JR more prominent, and led to a downward slope. The next season was 54 wins but a real crash and burn in the playoffs. Then we never recovered.
We needed to build a ball-sharing offense with Melo and Lin could have been key to that. He's not great but he's a good PG, who had thrived as a Knick. In retrospect, the Rockets contract was a bargain.
Interestingly enough, Lin was one of the few things we could have done to help Melo. We were limited in what we could do to improve the team, and Lin kind of fell in our laps, but then we blew it. I often wonder what kind of deal the Knicks could have come up with on their own and how likely he would have actually been to accept it, instead of telling him to go out and get something for us to match.
Really good thoughts and I don't disagree that mostly we blew it around Melo, rather than Melo being himself some big problem. He's far from enough by himself though, and it seems the Knicks sort of bought the idea that Melo + nothing spectacular would be good enough. If I had to choose between him and Paul Pierce to "build around," just to take one random example of a guy whose numbers have always been lesser, I'd take Pierce easily. Basketball IQ matters a lot to whether you can be a piece to a big winner.
We messed up the Lin thing and this is directly tied to the above paragraph. If we think Melo is some powerhouse, we don't care that much about Lin. Get another offer, sure, play it loosely rather than carefully. Besides just underrating Lin which it seems almost everyone did/does, we also didn't understand that you can't put crap guys around Melo and away you go.
We wouldn't win a title with Lin and Melo but it at least shows recognition that you need to make ball-sharing a part of your offense if you have Melo. Not just finding guys with checkered histories who look decent some nights and can "put points on the board."
So we make the fateful decision to tie our (and Melo's, to be fair) lot to Felton and JR. You might as well tie both ankles to cinder blocks and go for a dip in the East River.
RIP mags
