Melo-drama finally over as Knicks get their man

AMERICA AT LARGE:A hugh sigh of relief as the Carmelo Anthony trade saga is finally over

IT WOULDN’T be fair to say that the ongoing soap opera known as the “Melo-drama” has overshadowed the entire 2010-2011 NBA season. But anything taking place on the court for the past two months has certainly taken a back seat to it.

The other shoe finally dropped Monday night with the revelation that Carmelo Anthony had finally talked his way out of Denver. In what were actually two separate transactions, one between the Nuggets and the New York Knicks and a less earth-shaking cap-space clearing deal between the Knicks and the Minnesota Timberwolves, no fewer than 12 players changed uniforms on the eve of the NBA’s trade deadline.

None of the general managers involved seemed particularly happy about the deal(s), and while they’d surely had ample warning, fans in New York and Denver and Minneapolis will now have to re-educate themselves to root for half a roster’s worth of unfamiliar new faces.

Just about the only guy who did seem pleased by the culmination of events he alone had set in motion was ‘Melo himself, and not even he seemed exactly overjoyed.

All eyes, in any case, were on Madison Square Garden last night when Anthony makes his Knicks debut against the Milwaukee Bucks. You really won’t be able to tell the players without a scorecard; not only ‘Melo, but his new team-mates, Chauncey Billups, Shelden Williams, Anthony Carter, Renaldo Balkman, and Corey Brewer, will be wearing New York uniforms for the first time.

It would be hard to argue that any of the three involved teams significantly improved their immediate fortunes with this mass migration. In fact, the NBA teams that are probably gloating today are the ones that fell by the wayside in the course of the feeding frenzy that has characterized the past month. And the oddest part of all is that the Nuggets really never wanted to trade Anthony in the first pace, any more than the Knicks wanted to trade for him. It was more a matter of self-defence on the part of all the concerned parties.

Rather, like so much of what is taking place in the landscape of professional sports nowadays, the whole process was a matter of the tail wagging the dog. Not only was Anthony able to strong-arm the only NBA team for which he’d ever played into trading him, but was able to disrupt the lives of 11 other players in the process.

For those willing to follow the money trail, the key date in this process was actually July 13th, 2006. That’s when Anthony (who was already under contract to Denver) successfully negotiated a five-year extension that included a hefty signing bonus. ‘Melo said at the time that the deal assured him of playing in Denver, the only place he wanted to be, for the rest of his career. The fine print in the contract also included an opt-out clause that he could excercise after the 2011 season.

Last summer, two weeks after the Knicks had been frustrated in their pursuit of LeBron James, who wound up in Miami, Anthony was married in a New York ceremony attended by many of the NBA’s elite players. A Brooklyn native, ‘Melo got the ball rolling by waxing poetic of his dream of finishing out his career in the city of his birth. The Nuggets, who appear to have recognized this as the first salvo in yet another renegotiation, offered him upwards of $60 million toward a new extension, but were roundly ignored.

Initially, it should be noted, the object of Anthony’s desires weren’t the Knicks but the New Jersey Nets. With their deep-pockets Russian owner Mikhail Prokhorov, that team is scheduled to move into a new arena in Brooklyn a couple of years down the line. While the Knicks can safely ignore the competition posed by a team that plays across the river in Newark, a Nets team based in one of New York’s five boroughs is anther matter entirely, so while Knicks’ owner Jim Dolan might have been dazzled by the prospect of acquiring Anthony, he was even more concerned that the player not wind up with the Nets.

The current chain of events moved to the fast-track a bit over a month ago when the Nets sought and received permission from the Nuggets to negotiate with Anthony. Prokhorov appears to have at no time considered a deal that would not have been prefaced by a contract extension that bound ‘Melo to his new team. After just three days of face-to-face wrangling, Prokhorov walked away.

Mired in season-long mediocrity and derided even by their own fans, the Nuggets turned in increasing desperation to other clubs in search of a deal. Between late January and this week there were exploratory talks with both the Pistons and the Lakers. Knicks’ GM Donnie Walsh still felt Denver’s price was too high and that the proposed trade be counterproductive to the patient rebuilding plan he had initiated in New York. The Nuggets even made another run at Prokhorov.

In the end it wasn’t that Walsh changed his mind, but that Dolan, as owners are wont to do, decided to personally involve himself and took to negotiating directly with his Nuggets counterpart Stan Kroenke.

Monday evening the long-developing story was treated as a bolt from the blue; programming all over the country was interrupted to announce what was termed the biggest trade in NBA history.

The immediate effect on the Knicks, beyond a spike in number seven home jerseys, is that Walsh may feels so slighted that he walks right out the door. The immediate on the other affected teams is also questionable. With the four players – Wilson Chandler, Raymond Felton, Russian Timofey Mozgov, and Italian Danilo Gallinari – they had gotten from the Knicks watching in street clothes Tuesday night, the Nuggets had only nine players in uniform but still beat the Memphis Grizzlies in their first post-Anthony outing.

It should be pointed out that the Knicks have nothing beyond Anthony’s verbal assurance that he intends to sign an extension and stick around in New York past April.