Ready to Stop Hearing About Carmelo Anthony

By Guest Blogger Geoff Nelowet:

Carmelo Anthony trade rumors have been in the news for months now, and with the February trade deadline looming, it will be a relief to finally not have to hear about this anymore. Regardless of how all of this turns out, Anthony has become as unlikable as LeBron James at this point. Obviously every player has the right to not want to play for his team, to want to play elsewhere. That’s fine. Just like LeBron, he’s allowed to go play for whichever team he most prefers. Is he seemingly frustrating, uncooperative, and fickle with how he works with the Denver Nuggets and New Jersey Nets front offices? Sure. Again, it’s his career and his life. That’s fine. But what’s vexing to me, is how he’ll come out and say that all of this trade commotion is about his audacious “desire” to win championships. Here’s what Carmelo had to say via NBA.com:

“I’m going into my ninth season. I have no time to waste right now,” Anthony said. “I want to see the light at the end of the tunnel in my future. That light is a championship.” “Going to a bigger market and all that stuff is cool, but if I feel like I have a chance of winning a championship in Denver in the next five years, then I’ll sign the extension. It really doesn’t matter. I just want to win. At the end of the day, that’s all I care about.” “If I feel I can’t do it here, I don’t think this is the right thing to do,” Anthony said. “It’s just the uncertainty in the future of the organization. It’s a lot of things that come into play, contracts, not knowing what’s going to happen in the future.” “At first, a lot of people were saying it’s a money situation. It has nothing to do with no type of money,” Anthony said. “I don’t care about the money. My ultimate [goal] at the end of the day is to win and win a championship. Whether I feel like I can do that here, whether I feel like I need to go somewhere else and do it, that’s my own ultimate decision.”

First of all, there’s no chance Carmelo will sign an extension with the Nuggets. If there were the Denver front office wouldn’t be having a Carmelo Anthony fire sale. If Carmelo had any serious inclination to sign an extension, he would have by now.

But more importantly, the notion that Carmelo would come out and say that his desire to change teams is all about winning, is completely insulting and verifiable false. He wants to win, so he chooses the New York Knicks – and only the New York Knicks? Sorry, but I don’t buy it. They’ve made it to the playoffs once this decade, and they haven’t won a title since 1973. They’ve been one of the most inept failures of a franchise over the last six years or so. Yes, they’ve put a few pieces in place this past offseason, but to say that New York is suddenly the destination of champions, is simply laughable.

Moreover, the fact that he turned his nose up at the New Jersey Nets’ laborious efforts to court him is telling in and of itself. I find it hard to believe that Carmelo is that short-sighted to think that one of the newest, most powerful, and most aggressive owners in the NBA in Mikhail Prokhorov has no shot – or desire to reinvigorate that franchise. At this point, there’s absolutely no reason to claim that the New York Knicks have a substantially better looking future than the Nets do.

Carmelo wants to be under the bright lights in New York City. Fact. And that in itself is fine. No one will be up-in-arms if simply wants to live and play in New York City. But to say that it’s all about winning is blatantly dishonest, and comes off as being entirely self-righteous and majorly delusional. If Carmelo wants to win, he should be trying to play for the LA Lakers or the San Antonio Spurs – not one of the worst teams of the past ten years.