Well, this is what it looks like. This is what it feels like. Do you remember? Do you remember caring this much, this late in a season, this close to a trade deadline? Do you remember what it was to look at the Knicks, scan their roster, scan the league, try to figure out ways to make the team look better on paper and on the court? It hasn’t been forever, just 10 years.
But the Knicks are making up for lost time. They are reportedly on the brink of turning their roster upside-down and turning the city on its ear, reportedly knee-deep in what would be a dual triumph of importing a second star player, Carmelo Anthony, and reminding Nets owner Mikhail Prokhorov that while you can see Manhattan from across the Hudson River in Newark and from across the East River in Brooklyn . . . well, it’s still Manhattan.
And it’s still the Knicks.
We aren’t there yet, of course, and if there’s anything this long and occasionally ludicrous saga has taught us it’s this: an Anthony deal is never more far away than when it seems to be imminent. The Nets already have learned that lesson twice, to the point where Prokhorov issued his paper-thin proclamation in January that he was out, out, out of the bidding. And now, with another deal set in place pending Anthony’s approval, it seems the Nets are being played as patsies yet again.
Are they?
Before All-Star Weekend is over, we likely will know for sure. What we do
know for now, with a reasonable level of certainty, are the following three things: Carmelo Anthony wants no part of playing in Newark, and even if he is a Brooklyn native he seems less than sold on the idea of playing out his career in the borough of his birth.
It is an understandable reluctance, no matter how enticing it might be to join megawatt forces with Prokhorov and Jay-Z, because the Nets remain the littlest little brother of any team in New York. They’re littler than the Mets and Jets for sure, and in some ways just as small, if not smaller, than the Devils and Islanders. If Jason Kidd and back-to-back runs to the Finals — while the Knicks were lying in state all the while — didn’t change that, Carmelo Anthony won’t, especially because the reputed trade would not only gut the franchise’s present, but its future, too.
The Knicks, while giving up more than they would like in the potential deal first reported by Yahoo! Sports, would remain on track to end their playoff drought with what remains this year. They would keep fan favorite (and future glue of an elite-level version of the team) Landry Fields, and would be perfectly set up to add either Chris Paul or Deron Williams in the summer of 2012, if not sooner.
“New York already has something there,” Anthony said yesterday, while meeting the national basketball media in advance of Sunday’s All-Star Game. “I think the city is looking forward to bringing back great basketball and they’re looking forward to that. So if that’s my destination then that’s something that I can bring to that city.”
Amar’e Stoudemire’s take was a bit more grandiose.
“A combination of us two would be great,” he said. “It would definitely uplift the city and the economy and New York.”
But it’s clear the Knicks’ centerpiece already has pondered life with a wingman, and life without a solid core of teammates — Raymond Felton, Danilo Gallinari, Wilson Chandler — who helped reinvent interest in pro basketball across the past 4½ months.
And, let’s be honest: he should. Trades are tough. They’re supposed to hurt a little. And when the return is a player like Anthony, sometimes they hurt a lot. We should know by the end of the weekend if it will hurt at all, if the deal is finally consummated and the Nuggets finally pull a trigger. And if it does, it will spark the sweetest reminder of all: what it was like to care about a team that matters.
And — soon enough — perhaps a team that contends.