There’s only one lingering off-season question remaining around the NBA world as training camps and the preseason get going. Will Carmelo Anthony be in a New York Knicks uniform once the offseason officially ends?
It’s been a summer-long soap opera between Anthony and the team that had previously said he’d be better offf somewhere else.
Now, it looks like Anthony himself is optimistic that he will indeed be traded to the Houston Rockets prior to the start of next week.
“Anthony’s camp is cautiously optimistic that a deal will be struck before Monday, and trying not to think about the potential media circus that will take place if Carmelo is still with the Knicks,” Frank Isola of the NY Daily News reported Wednesday.
The issue here has long been compensation the Knicks would receive from Houston in a potential Anthony deal. The Rockets traded more than a half-dozen players to the Los Angeles Clippers for Chris Paul earlier in the offseason. Those assets could have very well been used to land Anthony.
At this point, New York is pushing back on the idea of having to take on the remainder of Ryan Anderson’s four-year, $80 million deal. And for good reason. It makes little sense for the Knicks to take on bad contracts. In reality, they hold all the cards here. Anthony is still under contract. And whether he wants to remain in New York is irrelevant.
The larger issue here is that contracts would have to match up to about $5 million. This means Houston would have to likely send a bad contract back to New York in exchange for Anthony.
Either way, the All-Star forward is seemingly hopeful a deal gets done here soon. Whether that happens remains to be seen.