Knicks
If there’s one widely held belief in the NBA, it’s that you need a superstar or two to win a championship.
What the New York Knicks did was land a surefire superstar who can score as effortlessly as anyone else in the league in Carmelo Anthony. Who cares if you have to trade 80 percent of your starting roster to get that?
If you thought Spike Lee was already irritating, just wait until he sees Amare Stoudemire and Carmelo “doin’ work” in the Garden.
Now that the Nets have added a great player of their own with Deron Williams, the New York area has become a basketball arms race. While the Nets are going nowhere fast, the Knicks have a serious chance of downing the third or fourth seeded teams this year.
This is just a fair warning to all those Chicago, Orlando and Atlanta fans.
The Knicks will only have three players under contract when the 2012 free agency begins. From there, they can add anyone from great guards Chris Paul and Russell Westbrook to the top-flight center of the league, Dwight Howard.
While it guarantees no championship this year, the Knicks are well on their way to be NBA championship contenders once again.
-Zach Berg
Nuggets
After turning down a 3 year, $65 million dollar extension and a long flirtation with New York, it became quite obvious Anthony wasn’t long for Denver.
The chances of getting struck by lightning over the course of an 80-year lifetime are one in 6,250, according to the government’s lightning safety website.
George Karl had a higher chance of getting struck by lightning than keeping his star player.
With that in mind, the Nuggets gutted the Knicks for all they were worth.
The Knicks quietly accrued talented players via small free agent deals (Raymond Felton) and the draft (Danilo Galinari and Wilson Chandler.)
And now in one swift move, all of that hard work turns into two talented players, Anthony and Chauncey Billups, and bench players, while the Nuggets unload monster contracts and get young talents to rebuild around.
The Nuggets had their opportunity to win a championship in the George Karl era and whiffed. So now they get the chance to retool and start over.
Had they held on to Anthony for the remainder of the season, they risk the likely chance that they would receive nothing for Melo.
Now that the Nuggets have added younger pieces and draft picks and lost the burden of the “Melodrama,” they can move on in peace.
-Bill Hopkins
