I'm telling you, this guy, he is not about it.
It was all fun and games against Dominican Republic, which is like a very good high school team, no disrespect to DR.
Goes against some Brazil Balls and look what happens.
I don't think the Knicks should have built around Carmelo, but that's what they've done and now we will live with it. I don't think he's a player you build around because he doesn't play two ends of the court, he has to save his donut energy for putting up 50 shots a game.
I saw an interesting post on a very good blog, but I do not remember where this blog is, and this post was discussing "Star" players. The conclusion was that many guys you think are "Stars" are just bums that take a lot of shots. I believe that Melo falls in this category. He is a fugazy star who appears better than he really is because of the number of shots he takes. If you take a lot of shots, you will score a good amount of points, and that's Melo's biggest upside, that's his strength. If that's a guy's strength, then the guy is a bum.
I don't believe he will lead the Knicks out of the First Round unless they meet a really weak team, but they will struggle.
It's funny, guys used to get on MDA because his "system couldn't win a championship", but MDA had 5 times the post-season success that Melo has had. I think it's the Melo system that will not lead us anywhere.
Can Melo play with Amar'e? I think it's been proven that he can't. Amar'e is a turtle shell of his former self and we are seeing his negative emotions manifest in fire extinguisher punching, twitter name calling, things like that.
A full season, even if it was shortened, plus the 20 or 30 games after the trade, that's plenty of time to see if something will work or not. I'm not buying the "need more time" thing. In reality, you can see if some pairing will work together very quickly. If it hasn't happened, it won't happen.