The Knicks are playing two games of poker. One, with Morey to up the assets. Two, with Melo to adjust his trade destinations. Melo is holding on to Houston but we don't have ANY insight to his thought process. The GMs are easy to predict (OF COURSE Portland and OKC want Melo. That means nothing.) Melo, on the other hand, is harder to predict. But I know from personal experience, once a place is poisoned for you, going back is never an attractive option.
It should be the Knicks.....but that would only be the case if they were even a little bit competent. Given that they are not, they probably don't realize how bad it would be for them.
Houston is talking with NY again. Still a similar trade structure that requires 3 or 4 teams to complete the deal. It was dead quiet for a while though after being nearly a done deal. I'm sure you guys were feeling a lot of the same frustration as the front office. The best things in our favor is that Melo wants to be here and Gilbert overvalues his guys a ton. I think the Kyrie news becoming public slows things down even more though. Does a 3rd team want to help us if they can potentially be part of a Kyrie deal instead? Do the Knicks want to send Melo here if they think the Cavs will stop demanding Porzingis as well? Melo doesn't want to get bought out. He knows a contending team will need his bird rights to pay him.
@ch44 Several twitter insiders have said a deal would be finished early this week. Have you heard anything like that or have an opinion on it?
I appreciate whatever news you might have. For example, which teams might want Ryan Anderson (I don't want to include EGO, but we'll have to give to get, and we don't want to yield Capela, I'm sure).
Thanks for the update! News has been so slow recently. Any idea how close it is getting this time around?
The 2 yard stuff was true, and there was a interception returned about 90 yards by Steve Mills. There were no talks for a while after that and I feared it was dead. New York is just in absolutely no rush, so who knows, could be tomorrow, could be training camp. They don't really have a team direction right now and there is no market for Melo with his NTC. If you're NY, what is your play? Hold out and hope for a better offer since you aren't competing any time soon anyway? I think they know our offer is something they can fall back on later.
If NY wants Melo to expand his destination list, one way to do it is to look on the surface like your trying to appease him, but in reality, stalling the trade process with Houston as long as possible for the very reason you stated. NY can continue to play this game, Houston and Melo can not. So Houston and Melo need to work together to either expose NY's real intentions publicly and try to turn the public and media against them, and/or to somehow make it in NY's best interest to do this deal sooner rather than later.
No we haven't. We've seen how he can look alongside a ballhog that rarely allows him to get shots to get a rhythm. Prior to coming to OKC he had more value than everyone on our team not named Harden. The same goes for Adams and arguably Kanter, prior to the Westbrook show last year.