To send or not to send? The seesawing of where or when superstar forward Carmelo Anthony will be traded continues to dominate headlines. The question sprouted before the start of the season when he told the Denver Nuggets management that he wants out of their franchise and would not sign the three-year extension they offered him. His desire is to be sent to an East Coast team, an area he grew up in, with the preference to play at Madison Square Garden with the New York Knicks.
It is now nearly the middle of January, almost halfway through the NBA season, and he is still playing in the powder-blue Nuggets jersey.
The biggest issue with the prolonging of trading Anthony is the obviousness that he does not want to be there. The Nuggets management has done whatever it could to keep him and he still is reluctant to remain with the team past this season. Everyone in the league knows he’s on the market and is aware that his current team is vulnerable.
They also understand that he is a free agent after this season and that parting with valuable pieces for a player who has no desire to return to Denver doesn’t make sense to other teams. Why would anyone want to give up a promising young talent or draft picks when they can just wait another half a year to sign him?
The problem is obvious and growing more massive with each calendar month that’s turned that Denver has now put themselves in a corner. Rather than negotiating early on, the team felt they could put him on hold in hopes that maybe the Nuggets would play well and remind him that they are still a contender. They also assumed that they had an enormous amount of time and could work out a deal that would give them equal value for one of the best players in the world.
Those beliefs have now backfired as they are now in a precarious situation with the trade deadline a little over a month away and no current progress. A possible three-team, fifteen player trade is mulling around in the rumors column of sports websites, but that is quickly losing steam and it appears that Denver is caught in a last chance effort to get some value for their franchise player.
So here’s some advice for the Nuggets management: just get it over with.
The proposals, threats, assumptions, and hope that Denver has been clinging to produced no movement to persuade Anthony to stay or create a swap with another team of adequate value for him. Worst of all, they are forcing everyone to listen to it as if they finally found a conclusion to the situation.
It’s like listening to a broken record that continues to skip at the same point over and over; it can be tolerated at first, but if it continues, it begins to become annoying. So much so that you stop then you just throw it against the wall and stomp on it until you hear ultimate silence.
If the news is that he is finally sent to another team, then it should be reported; but if it’s just another possible idea or scenario, the Nuggets should just keep it to themselves.
The other end of this ongoing annoyance is who is to blame for this situation?
Do you fault Anthony for imposing his will on wanting to leave, as well as the specifics with destination and his reluctance to sign an extension depending on who gets him?
To an extent, yes he does. He should deal with the fact that sometimes you don’t have a choice in where you end up (just ask Kevin Love or Tyreke Evans). Yet, franchise stars are given the red carpet treatment that they can dictate where they play or the direction of the team. It’s been that way with all of the superstars in the NBA (like Kobe Bryant after Shaquille O’Neal left or Lebron James and the Cleveland fiasco).
No, responsibility of this exasperating, irritating mess falls squarely on the Denver Nuggets.
It’s amazing how far the team has fallen since participating in the 2009 Western Conference finals and losing the first round of the 2010 playoffs. It’s even more amazing how they have handled this situation terribly. Rather than just making the move early on, they prolonged pushing a trade in hopes of getting a better deal on their end or hoping to keep Anthony. Now with time running out, desperation is growing stronger to get rid of their star who’s a free agent after the season.
So, why in the world would a team want to overpay when they know the Nuggets have no leverage?
It is only a matter of time until the Nuggets finally pull the trigger on a Anthony trade. Yet, the drama of where he might go and the transactions being proposed is the bigger issue in all of this. What started as a light fog of likelihood has manifested into a downpour of ridiculousness with no forecast of conclusion in sight.
For the sake of the nausea this lengthy transaction has made, let’s just hope that the weather will break sooner than later.
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