Btw. Believe the Bargnani trade may prove to be a far more costly trade as it may be a lottery pick.

What really killed the Knicks is using their Amnesty so early on Chauncey Billups. If they had reserved it for Amare knowing what they knew, maybe they could've taken advantage of Melo's "prime" and get him some help sooner instead of this withering broken down 31 year old version we have now.

HofstraBBall wrote:

StarksEwing1 wrote:Here is my issue with the trade. Melo could have easily signed here as a free agent and we could have kept some of those assets or used them to get another player to pair with him. I was perfectly fine with melo coming here BUT all the dude had to do was to wait until after the season to sign with us and I guarantee things would have been better.

You may be right. However we did build a decent team that won quite a few games and got us to the playoffs without them. Also, would we have been able to keep Chandler and Gallo who signed for more than 27m a year combined?

The bigger issue to me was the moves we made after that. The Billups decision was the worst. They gave up the amnesty to sign Tyson, then we were stuck carrying a massive cap hit for a dead body (Amare). Tyson had the one good year, but signing him also prevented us from addressing our biggest need (the backcourt). That move set us back about 5 years.

The team also overvalues it own talent a lot as they did with Fields and Shump. If we sold high we could have got something.

ChuckBuck wrote:The trade per se didn't damage or severely set back the Knicks. The Knicks ended up in a mediocre limbo pretty much, not great but good enough to qualify for 2 postseasons.

What really killed the Knicks is using their Amnesty so early on Chauncey Billups. If they had reserved it for Amare knowing what they knew, maybe they could've taken advantage of Melo's "prime" and get him some help sooner instead of this withering broken down 31 year old version we have now.

Chuck, with the exception of the broken down part (Melo is still playing his best basketball in his career), i completely agree with you for once. The trade was a good trade, we got a player who could lead us to the playoffs, which was a place we hadn't been in a long time, but everything else following it was a disaster. Using the one-time amnesty and immediately replacing with Tyson, thinking we had the team to win it all despite having no backcourt, was what set us back. The following summer we really could have looked at our options and gone a different route, but summer 2011 set us up for long-term failure.

StarksEwing1 wrote:Here is my issue with the trade. Melo could have easily signed here as a free agent and we could have kept some of those assets or used them to get another player to pair with him. I was perfectly fine with melo coming here BUT all the dude had to do was to wait until after the season to sign with us and I guarantee things would have been better.

We were entering a lockout. No one knew what to expect. No reasonable person can expect someone to forgo that security being offered to him at that point and time for the complete unknown.

crzymdups wrote:

Knixkik wrote:

StarksEwing1 wrote:Here is my issue with the trade. Melo could have easily signed here as a free agent and we could have kept some of those assets or used them to get another player to pair with him. I was perfectly fine with melo coming here BUT all the dude had to do was to wait until after the season to sign with us and I guarantee things would have been better.

We were entering a lockout. No one knew what to expect. No reasonable person can expect someone to forgo that security being offered to him at that point and time for the complete unknown.

Yeah, what if the lockout determined that the value of max contracts went down to $15M per season max for three years max.

It's pretty easy for the armchair fan to say Melo should have cost himself up to $60M or something - but I bet if any of us were in the same situation, we would've done the same thing.

He worked with Denver to facilitate a trade and let them get something back. It's not his fault Dolan is a terrible negotiator and he overruled Donnie Walsh by including Mozgov and more picks.

Lots of $$ to go around...and the owners can't keep themselves from making bad deals on contracts no matter what the CBA says. If Anthony had really wanted to be on the Knicks he could have proved it by waiting, and it just might have helped him as far of being on a team building itself in a permanent playoff contender, because the Knicks would have had extra assets to deal away.

Instead, they had to go geriatric, and we know how long that worked out.

WaltLongmire wrote:Anthony stated that he wanted to come to the Knicks...he had complete control over where he was going to play the next season.

I could be wrong...but wasn't the advantage of a sign and trade so Anthony could get an extra year on his contract...and didn't he end up opting out of that extra year to sign the contract he negotiated with Phil? Anthony would have had the same ability to sign a few contract when he did if he signed with us as a FA...No?

Even if you didn't care for the players we gave up in the trade- you could have used them as trade assets at a later point. We all know that the Cavs were willing to fork over picks for Mosgov, and Gallo could have gotten you something as well.

By the way...no guarantee that Gallo or Chandler would have gotten hurt they way they did in Denver if they had stayed with us.

Gave up our 2014 #1, which I don't think was as good of a pick as Denver hoped it would be, but it might have gotten us a decent player, or it could have been used in conjunction with a player to help the team improve.

Not sure how Denver used the 2nd Rnd picks we gave them.

Would have saved our Amnesty option- not even a need to decide on whether Billups should be amnestied because he would never have been on the team.

If I'm wrong on any of this, especially the part in bold letters, folks should let me know.

All good points, in retrospect. Did not take into account their trade value. Although Denver had these trade assets and still were not able to use them in a way to get the team to a high level. The seconds were used on guys playing in Europe right now. My point was that people bring up the trade as though it was a sure thing we would have won a chip if not for it. And like you said, there is no guarantee. We did however go from a team who was a joke to a team that won 54 games because of Melo.

I do agree with waiting until off season but feel that points to management issues and not Melo. Everyone blames him for wanting to come here. Management was the ones responsible for not waiting for the offseason to make the trade, signing Amare to max in spite of recorded knee issues, giving away 1st round pick for Bags. Getting rid of Smith and Shump when they had no value. Trading Calderon for Tyson. Lowery trade that could have been. Basically not surrounding him with high level talent. One can argue that he has never had a strong supporting cast here. Even the cast which surrounded him in his best year here was not exactly the cream of the crop. Smith, Shump, Felton, Chandler, aging Kid and a bench filled with current journeymen. Yet they were a good team, due to him. Last year was a D league roster and this year it has been filled with other teams cast aways besides our promising rookie. Just don't feel it's Melo's fault but understand losing always needs a scapegoat. I'm hoping Phil can bring another high level player, get a point guard and make some bench adjustments. Or else the finger point should once again be on management deficiencies. Something I hoped would end once they hired PJ.

We can go on and on with this franchise.

We haven't made a decent basketball decision in a long time.

All of our decisions were driven by Dolan's goal to sell tickets.

And he figured having Phil will be another puller for ticket sales, while we tank and rebuild.