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Jalen Rose wants Carmelo + the Knicks to revisit his no-trade deal
It’s completely true that the New York Knicks should look to trade Carmelo Anthony this summer. They should have tried to deal him during February’s trade deadline, or last summer. Hell, they probably shouldn’t have even re-signed him at all, diving into a proper rebuilding instead of giving the (still, very, very good) All-Star five years and $124 million in 2014.
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Instead, even with a series of veteran helpers and the promising rookie year of Kristaps Porzingis, the Knicks have gone 3-16 since a 22-22 start, with the latest loss coming in what seemed like a sure upset win in Boston on Friday night.
Earlier in the week, Anthony jokingly told a heckling fan to team owner for his ticket money back. Everyone appropriately took the line as the innocuous joke it was, but James Dolan (a humorless man that enjoys the music of The Eagles) still felt a need to press Anthony to go along with a canned PR “apology.”
This is part of the reason why Anthony admitted to being in “kind of a rough patch” on Friday. This turmoil also influenced former Knick and ESPN guy Jalen Rose to basically demand that Carmelo Anthony’s no-trade clause be illegally-quashed. Via For the Win:
“If I’m James Dolan, I don’t want him on my team anymore. I just paid Phil $65 million to build me a roster that can compete in the Eastern conference. $25 million for Derek Fisher, who was recently fired. $125 million for Carmelo Anthony, who I had to mortgage a lot of my future assets … to even make the deal happen. I would not appreciate that one of my players basically himself distanced himself from me to my face, in my arena, during my game for which the roster I am paying has lost 15 of its last 18 games.”
Save for the part about having the red rear-end about a joke with a heckler, all of these basketball reasons are true.
Then, Rose goes into Bowie Kuhn-mode:
“If I was the owner, that would just tell me that the writing is on the wall, that Carmelo is going to waive his no-trade clause and the Knicks will be trading him this summer.”
Maybe this is Jalen Rose misspeaking, but it sure sounds a heck of a lot like he’s demanding that James Dolan find a way to waive the no-trade clause that he happily signed Anthony to in 2014. A signing that came in the face of the whole of the NBA wondering why, exactly, the Knicks would want to retain a 30-something that would go on to nearly miss half the first year with knee issues.
Anthony earned his clause by playing four years with the Knicks and eight NBA seasons in total. He’s under absolutely no obligation to waive anything no matter how many times James Dolan harrumphs, from now until 2019.
If Rose is asking Dolan and Anthony to come to a solution that mutually benefits both, fine. Again, we’re just hoping Jalen wasn’t completely clear in his thoughts.
If Rose is demanding that Dolan find a way to waive the clause against Carmelo Anthony’s (a player that clearly wants to stay in New York, despite all the storm and stress), then this is rather bogus. And, in the NBA, illegal.
Jalen has a bit of a history with minor frustrations with team ownership, even if they were eventually resolved.
In 1999, following two great seasons on two championship-contending teams in Indiana, Rose hoped to opt out of the final year of his contract and become a restricted free agent. The problem was that Rose signed his rookie deal all the way back in 1994, and by 1999 (following the 1995 Collective Bargaining Agreement), there wasn’t such a thing as restricted free agency.
As such, Rose had to play all of 1999-00 for $2.4 million, which even then was around half of the league’s average salary. That’s a season that saw Jalen have a fantastic year: starting 80 games for a team that made the Finals, while averaging over 18 points and winning the NBA’s Most Improved Player award.
Jalen eventually got paid – to the tune of seven years and $93 million, but the ruling cost him money in 1999-00, and it may have cost him another multi-year deal near the end of his career. Had he become a free agent in 2006 when the bloom wasn’t fully off the (pardon this) rose, Jalen may have been able to finagle something like a two-year, $5 million deal with a free agent suitor.
Instead, even the lowly Knicks paid him over $14 million (the final year of his contract) to go away before 2006-07, which had to hurt his free agent reputation. He signed a one year deal with Phoenix that season, but was ineffective and out of the league following the season.
It might not seem like much to a happy guy with a plush ESPN gig that made over $100 million in his career, but the loss of a few more million in 1999-00 and another potential few more in 2007-08 has to sting a bit.
If the Knicks try to pull every skeevy tactic possible in order to convince Carmelo Anthony that life in the city of his choice is untenable, well then that would be very Knicks-ian. The fact that you might not like Carmelo’s style of game or that he’ll almost assuredly be overpaid toward the end of the deal is immaterial.
Anthony signed a legally-binding agreement with a Knicks team that had been told by all corners not to commit to. He should be shamed into allowing the Knicks to trade him away from the city that he wants his family to live in, no matter how much money he makes.
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is an editor for Ball Don't Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at KDonhoops@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter! Follow @KDonhoops
