Actually, Melo is entirely to blame for the reason he has to do everything. His greed forced us to give the depth and supporting cast that a player of his caliber needs to win. Remember, Melo had a great supporting cast in Denver, it wasn't just him, he had a lot of talent around him.
You're right, Denver had a pretty good roster back then. They made it to the Conference Finals, but the Lakers were just too strong, nothing Melo or any other Nugget could do about that.
I think it's wrong to blame one single player for our situation, this season completely aside, I think most Knick fans start to realize that we'll probably never win a championship with a trio of Melo/STAT/Chandler and no salary cap.
Today's NBA is so competitive with all those superteams emerging, Rondo/Allen/Garnett/Pierce, Wade/James/Bosh, Paul/Griffin/Billups/Jordan, Westbrook/Durant/Ibaka/Harden/Perkins, maybe even Deron Williams/Dwight Howard soon....it's tough.
Of course we will improve and we should be a playoff tea for the next 3-4 years, but with no cap space and/or good raft picks in the future we seem to be too weak to beat atleast Miami, the Clippers and Oklahoma in the next few years. Chicago look good too.
Melo/STAT/Chandler is a trio with too many individual flaws compared to those other contenders.
But to win a championship was the ultimate goal here. This seems to be atleast very questionable now and people are disappointed. I can fully understand that, it's good to be in the Playoffs again, but this city is not about first round Playoff exits, it's about Finals and championships.
I'd say the major flaw in this organization is the lack of patience and the notorious trade-happyness. It all went downhill when we initiated that Denver trade back in 2002, Camby and Nene for McDyess, who played about 20 underwhelming games for us...
From that point onwards, we never showed patience to rebuild via the Draft and get future franchise players on slim rookie contracts, we always wanted to hit the homerun and signed expensive, cap-eating free agents, who were all supposed to be the next big thing, but none of them were, but we traded away all of our picks and our cap space was ruined for years.
Then Donnie did a good job clearing all that cap space, but the best free agents available acted like bitches and decided to form that Big 3. We had no picks to rebuild via the Draft, so the pressure was on our front office to deliver and they signed Stoudemire for $100 million. Can't blame Donnie for that move, he had to deliver after all the cap clearing and all the hype surrounding that free agency, but it's a huge difference whether you get STAT for $100 million or a guy who's won rings like D-Wade, who can deliver on any team and on both ends of the floor.
I think a more patient approach back at the start of last decade, hen LJ retired and Ewing was done, rebuilding via the Draft would see us in a much better position right now, so many great players have entered the league since then, but we placed our single bet on the 2010 free agency and Lebron or Wade.
We had assets back then, like Sprewell, Camby, Kurt Thomas etc. who were all traded, but traded for bullshit, we should have kept them or atleast traded them for lottery picks, high lottery picks and not Keith van Horn, an injured McDyess and Quentin Richardson.....
then came the Isiah days....that completely finished us off.
The Knicks are a story of incredibly bad management over the last decade.....I wonder what we have done to the man above that we always end up in those blind alleys.
Donnie Walsh was a good GM, but he arrived at the wrong time, when the damage was already done and nobody knew that Lebron and Wade would act like this....Donnie had no choice but to go with Stoudemire, because saving the cap was ot an option for Dolan and we had no lottery picks at that point either.
We were still in a decent position though, but then Dolan intervened and pulled the trigger on the Melo trade, and while Melo is a good player and I really like him, it was the dagger for our championship hopes. The Tyson Chandler contract is just the icing on the cake.