The Nuggets tumbled. They spent all of March fighting off the Dallas Mavericks for the two seed in the West and eventually succumbed at the end of the month. The tumble continued to close the season with the Phoenix Suns also overtaking the Nuggets, leaving Denver in a tie for fourth with the Utah Jazz.
The wheels coming off the Nuggets championship train manifested themselves in other ways as well. Kenyon Martin was dealing with chronic knee injuries and receiving platelet rich plasma therapy while not able to play during that season. Martin was upset to say the least, and threated to not return for the playoffs because he was so upset about the gag.
The clearly disjointed locker room without their coach ended up bowing out of the playoffs quietly, falling down three games to one to the Jazz in the first round before losing the series in six.
The Nuggets watched from home after exiting the playoffs in the first round for the sixth time in the past seven years. Everyone was paying attention to what LeBron and Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh were doing, the other players in the league, including Melo, certainly not least among them. For their part the Nuggets offered Melo the max extension as soon as the offseason began but there was another big event happened that summer that had his immediate focus: he got married to long time girlfriend and MTV celebrity LaLa Vasquez in her hometown of New York City.
By the time the season was set to begin the elephant was far too prominent in the room to be ignored by national media. It was clear the Nuggets and Melo were headed for a breakup. With the massive free agency summer of in the rearview mirror the Melodrama, as it became known, dominated the NBA news cycle.
Meanwhile with coach Karl back in the fold the Nuggets were trying to undertake a return to the conference elite while also going through a front office change. Denver had finally moved on from their weird triumvirate of executives running the team Bret Bearup, Rex Chapman, Mark Warkentein and instead went with an upcoming but relatively unknown see: cheap first time GM in Masai Ujiri. The Nuggets were stuck in a tough roster situation. They were filled with aging veterans like Billups, Martin, Nene and Smith, all part of a roster specifically built around Melo, and they were about to have to blow the whole thing up.
They were also losing leverage by the day. With the cat out of the bag that Melo wanted out, and with his ability to hold the Nuggets and their potential trade partners hostage due to his impending free agency, the Nuggets list of suitors was extremely limited despite having a superstar in his prime on the market.
The Bulls never gained much traction as a true suitor. Murray ended up being the big prize of the deal for the Nuggets, and the culmination of every bad decision New York made after they traded for Anthony.
The first order of business should have been finding an exit strategy from the bloated guaranteed contract given to Stoudemire in By no fault of Stoudemire, his knees and questionable fit with Anthony from a spacing perspective made him expendable.
In a stroke of luck, the Knicks were given the golden opportunity to do just that with the Amnesty Clause , also known as the Allan Houston rule, which allows teams to clear a player off their books without taking a cap hit. The clause was introduced in , and ironically enough the Knicks used it to clear Jerome Williams off their books that year.
In the Knicks could have done the same with Stoudemire and freed themselves to build around Anthony. Part of that rebuild could have featured Chris Paul, whose famous wedding toast and expiring contract made the possibility of Paul and Anthony a very real possibility.
Instead, the Knicks made one of the more moronic string of moves a franchise has made since David Kahn passed on Stephen Curry twice in the draft.
Chandler was a smart signing and one that could have been amplified even further if Paul or another point guard rounded out the Big 3. Their folly keeping Stoudemire over Billups only crowded the frontcourt and cap space, limiting further improvements. Smith and Steve Novak. The good times ended abruptly. The Knicks were eliminated by the Indiana Pacers in the conference semifinals in and have failed to make the playoffs since.
On July 10th, , the team made one of the worst deals in recent memory when they traded for Andrea Bargnani from the Toronto Raptors. There has been a lot of stupidity over the years involving the Knicks, but the Bargnani trade is in a class of its own.
The Knicks received Bargnani in exchange for a first-round pick, Steve Novak, Quentin Richardson, Marcus Camby, and a pair of second-round picks and To say the trade was a disaster would be an understatement.
Watching the trade come to fruition was like watching the Titanic approach the iceberg. The infamous meeting -- 3 o'clock in the morning -- and it's just like, 'What are we gonna do? We have to figure this out. The Nuggets and Knicks were able to do that, with a little help from the Minnesota Timberwolves. The teams finally pulled the trigger on a player deal that was headlined by Anthony and Chauncey Billups going to the Knicks. The trade was a massive shift for the NBA landscape, as Anthony was one of the biggest stars in the game at the time and landed in one of the biggest markets in New York.
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