Now that Carmelo Anthony finally has been traded, one question stands above all others: What will ESPN talk about? We mean, besides starting a countdown to when Chris Paul, Dwight Howard and Deron Williams are free agents after next year.
Anyway, three questions stand out now that Anthony is a New York Knick and the Denver Nuggets are now consigned to irrelevancy.
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Was it a smart move for the Knicks?
One executive said of the Knicks: “They will be relevant now and in the future. Period.” Superstars win titles and now the Knicks have two — Amar’e Stoudemire playing out of position at center — though neither player will probably ever win a league MVP. And neither plays any defense. But, as the executive said, “They didn’t give up very much in the grand scheme of things.”
Can the Knicks land another star?
That’s where it gets sticky. ESPN’s Chad Ford broke down New York’s future salary cap numbers and what it would cost to land someone such as Paul, Williams or Howard. It wasn’t good. But a couple years ago the Knicks were said to be in cap hell with no chance to clear enough space for LeBron James. They did; they just failed to land him. As long as Isaiah Thomas is involved, what can go wrong for New York?
Is it good for the league?
There’s no doubt the owners will want to push harder to institute new rules to prevent this scenario from occurring again — and again — in the future. It’s one thing when speculation dominates the offseason, but the NBA’s regular season is filled mostly with rumors about pending free agents — even players who are a year or two away from being in that position. That’s never good. And the health of the great majority of teams will take a hit if stars try to align in only a handful of markets. Then again, the NBA is a star-driven league that rarely has more than a handful of teams capable of winning a title. That was true even in the golden era of the 1980s.
