Amar'e is not a franchise player. Steve Nash was the franchise player in Phoenix. Players like Dwight Howard, Kobe Bryant or Tim Duncan are franchise players.
I said it before and I say it again: STAT is a very very one dimensional player and that's definitely not enough to be a franchise player. He's an excellent sidekick to a franchise player and would be devastating in combination with Kobe or Wade, but on his own he's just a scorer. No defense, weak rebounding, turnover prone.
Lucky we have our franchise player in Melo then huh!
When Melo plays like last night, sharing the ball with ease, this team is amazing to watch. If Melo can reach that kind of level consistently he could potentially be the best SF in the league. If you look at Melo vs the other top SFs it goes pretty much like this:
Scoring - Durant > Melo > Lebron
Playmaking - Lebron > Melo > Durant
Defending - Durant > Lebron > Melo
Clutch ability - Melo > Durant > Lebron
Also Melo is almost as good as Durant going one on one or creating his own shot, really Durant just relies on his size to get easy scores over the top of smaller players and same for defense his size and length is a nightmare at the SF spot.
Anyway point being, when you compare these guys like that, you can see Melo is very very close to these guys in terms of overall skill and potency as a player. If he develops the kind of unselfishness he showed last night he would be an absolute force.
Oh and just to put this back on topic, Amare shot 6-20, it's not the end of the world. If he went 10-20 we would have been right in this game, probably still having the lead with 2 min to go and who knows how it would have gone down.
Amare is not a great defender but last night he actually played above average defense so to call him out right after that game is silly. He did shy away from Howard for most of the game, and in the 4th when he only had 1 foul he went on Howard, picked up 4 fouls in about 4 minutes. And just so you know the decision of who guards who is usually made by, you guessed it, the coach
As a TEAM you have to defend well which we did last night (to the best of the ability of the players on the floor), and on offense some of your guys have to make up for their lack of ability on defense. Remember David Lee won us plenty of games last year giving up 20+/10+ to his opposite number but himself putting up 25+/15+...