TankCommander17 wrote:battabing10 wrote:
but james **** dolan didn't know these things about melo, and both he and melo put $$$ above winning. walsh knew, though, which is why he said at the time "players are good at one price and bad at another." when you pair an overrated player/a player who overestimates his own abilities, with the worst owner in the NBA the results are doomed to failure-- which is EXACTLY what many savvy new york knick fans saw from day 1 of the melo era: that trading away of assets for such a player made it IMPOSSIBLE to build a winner, and by winner i mean a top 6 contender.
you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, but that's EXACTLY what so many obtuse knick fans expected, laying the blame on management for not being able to do the impossible!! in fact, the knicks were in the nascent stages of rebuilding after two years of teardown when dolan yanked the team into win-now mode. yeah like that was really going to work. dolan is so very stupid no wonder the knicks have been a laughingstock.
you can add in melo's inability to exhibit proper leadership, his stupid ill-timed pronouncements about other player's contracts and his stated desire to test free agency a week before training camp. and you can add to his horrible defense the fact that, as walt frazier himself stated, that it trickles down to the rest of the team: if your best player doesn't put forth real effort it will affect the effort of others.
just imagine: when Melo ended up a knick as a free agent, we could have parlayed gallinari, chandler, felton, and mozgov into something much better than what we ended up getting.
Mozgov sucked. Felton sucked. Chandler was meh. Gallo was meh.
The assets we lost were the picks. But those were not important till later.
The problem with you "omg we gave up so many assets" is that the only reason the Nuggets accept that poo poo platter offer from us was Melo's demand to come here.
You offer up that package for any other star in A FREE MARKET and we get laughed at and hung up on by another gm.
The problem was never what we gave up for Anthony. It was the mistakes Walsh made prior and the mistakes his successor did after.
Putting all your eggs on the 2010 basket then panicking and overpaying Amare when no one else would was the most impactful mistake and the thing that kept us from being able to compete during the Melo era. Also the pick we had to give up to get rid of Jeffreis. Not bottoming out during the 2008 and 2009 years. Instead trying to compete and ending up with the 8th pick instead of a top 3 pick. These things Melo had nothing to do with. The harm was already done when he got here.
Once the Melo trade was complete, Walsh kept making dumb mistakes. He gave away Corey Brewer for nothing just to appease him/his agent.
Then after Walsh left they compounded the mistake by giving up their amnesty clause on Billups to sign Tyson when we had a glaring hole in pg. So much so that the next season Tony **** Douglas was our starting pg.
Are those all Anthony's fault? Because it seems to me most of those mistakes were made PRIOR to the Melo trade even being a thing.
So yeah you revisionists will ignore all this and think I love Melo. I don't. I just don't blindly hate a player. I actually know what led to the demise of the Melo era. And it had already started way before he got here.
Btw I was all for the Melo trade. Because there were things that could have been done correctly to build appropriately. 1st and foremost the amnesty being used on Amare and keeping Billups. That in itself would have given us sooooooo much leeway.
Billups still had 1 good year left. We could have had the cap space from not signing Tyson and Amare. We could have had a gap year there and started to build correctly. Once Billups expires we could have a boat load of cap space. In 2012 Batum and Dragic were free agents. Those two guys fit around Melo.
There were ways to do it. Our management just messed up and rushed. That is not Melo's fault. Melo's fault is not adjusting to what the coaches wanted him to do. Not the way our team was built.
