What Denver wants and what Denver gets are 2 totally different things.
1. They wait untill its to late (after trade deadline) and they get nothing for him.
2. They trade him to a team of his choice and get whatever is offered.
Mello holds almost all of the cards in this game/deal, so either they try and rape a team for a one year rental or they let him go this summer for nada........ or they trade him to NY for a slightly less than fair deal. ($$$, cap relief, draft picks and Will)
Bingo.
If they lose Carmelo for NOTHING then they're going to look like the joke of the league. Better to get a bag of chips in return than nothing at all.
Honestly I think the Nets are balking at how much it's going to cost them, and I've yet to read anything substantial that says Melo would sign an extension with the Nets...everything out there speaks of the contrary. Seriously, the Nets are 9-23 right now. They're on pace to win 23 games this season. If the Nets aren't a playoff team without him, at best they'll be a borderline playoff team
with him and I don't think Carmelo's interested in 5 years of mediocrity (ie 8th seed, first round loss every year to the Heat).
The Knicks are already a top 5 (or 6) Eastern Conference Team WITHOUT Carmelo so with Carmelo they can easily catapult themselves into the top 3 discussions along with Boston and Miami (Celtics might not even be there if Garnett is out for an extended period of time).
Even if the Nets lost NOTHING and gained Carmelo I
still think they'd be nothing more than a .500 team good for at best #7 in the Eastern Conference and a loss to the Celtics/Bulls/Magic in the first round.
I'm still having trouble believing that Carmelo would accept 4 years of mediocrity just to get the extra money the extension would offer him. We're NY, the biggest media market in the world, we can find a way to make up the difference that he'd lose (ie endorsement deals out the ass, get Alex Rodriguez to buy him a house, I dunno,
something). There's a salary cap in the NBA, luckily that means Prokohov can't just hand Carmelo a $50 million dollar/year contract...which is good news for us