Clyde_Style wrote:robillionaire wrote:
Well in fairness to melo you can’t totally blame him for taking what was offered. The organization made bad moves for years, gave him a bad contract, and should not have added a no trade clause to it and never had put him in such a position to begin with. So the pre-Leon front office deserves more of the blame for what went wrong than the player for not wanting to take less or waive his no trade clause just to bail them out. They also didn’t have the foresight to realize the game was moving away from the outdated way that melo played basketball
Conversely we don’t have to blame anybody for Randle because it ended in a positive outcome, the team started from the post-Melo cellar and improved for years to become a playoff team and then traded him to improve once again by trading him for a great value. There’s nothing to complain about from an organization standpoint really other than just a personal dislike for the guy or aspects of his game we didn’t like to watch. I don’t think I’d have done anything differently, I like having towns here
The danger with such high usage players when you run your offense through them the offense can stagnate. I think Melo was more impactful when he was a younger Nugget with a better roster than the ones he had on the Knicks. By the time he came to the Knicks he no longer played with the same athleticism and he become more of a ball stopper.
Melo was wasted on inferior Knicks teams. I always felt his greatest impact would have been as a 6th man on a contender. His ego couldn't have handled that, but that was the perfect role for him at the point of his career when he came to the Knicks. It doesn't matter now, but he could've won a ring for himself if he went to a contender and took more of a supporting role.
Melo's game was too flawed to build a championship team around him as the # 1 option. He was a mercenary scorer who needed a better player to mentor and guide him and mold his game to the team's needs. In reality, Melo was happier being the big fish in a small pond like lesser Knicks teams than he would have been subjugating his ego to a player like Lebron which would have done him a world of good.
I don't consider Melo a winner because he was most interested in his stats and his money. If he was really that selfless he wouldn't have put off surgery just to get another all-star game nod. That was just pathetic. He was always a me-first player.
Randle, on the other hand, might be able to thrive as a sixth man. It could be worth trying. He's very much a first quarter player as we saw once again last night, so I don't know if you can come off the bench at all. But you really cannot build a contender with an offense that goes through Randle. That will get you nowhere.
KAT, though, is the perfect guy to touch the ball almost every time you have possession. He just makes things happen. He's the anti-thesis of both Randle and Melo.