Say what you want about A-Rod, but I've never heard him demand anything from the Yankees or the Steinbrenners other than his salary. I'm sure doing so would have gotten him an invitation to leave the party, and rightfully so. It's time for the NBA's owners to show some fucking stones.
Yeah, you're totally right -- NBA owners don't have/exercise nearly enough power. If only they could all get together, collectively, and tell the players they're not going to let them play until the players give up some power. That would never happen, though, because of those gosh darn hip-hoppers like Carmelo and all those kids who like them.
It was Dolan's choice to hire D'Antoni, a coach known for running a system-heavy offense; it was Dolan's choice to pair Carmelo (an isolation-heavy ball-dominating player) with the systems coach he had hired; it was Dolan's choice to ignore his GM (and D'Antoni) when they said it would be a terrible idea to gut the team to trade for Carmelo, when they could just wait until the end of the season and sign him. Based on most of the roster moves Dolan made while D'Antoni was coaching, it seems as if upper management was never really interested in building a team appropriate for D'Antoni's style of coaching; they hired D'Antoni not for his coaching, but because they had wanted to hire a "big name" coach and he was the highest on the list who said "yes". They threw so much money at Amar'e and so many trade prospects at Carmelo for similar reasons -- not for any coherent vision of how they would fit together, but just because they were Names and look, we're bringing Names to New York!
I'm no fan of Carmelo; I think basketball is a lot better when offenses run like D'Antoni's, not like Melo's; but this one is on Knicks ownership, not on Anthony. They knew exactly what they were getting when they traded for him, just like they knew they were getting a scorer who can't play defense and definitely won't stay healthy for more than a year or two in Amar'e. The Knicks defense actually wasn't bad at all this year, in spite of D'Antoni's rep and Carmelo/Amare's indifference -- Chandler, Schumpeter, Jeffries, etc, were good enough to put them around 9th in the league at defense. Their offense was the real problem.
First of all, I said it was on ownership in my first post. For more, see the Isaiah debacle. Secondly, you can't really blame D'Antoni since, for the full 3 1/2 years he was here, the management never provided him with a roster that remained constant. The Knicks have been in a rebuilding phase for like forever. They hired Walsh expressly to undo the mess that Isaiah created (see above), and then the owner, while drooling over that big name, overrode Walsh when he advised against the Melo trade. The Knicks operate in a truly dysfunctional way. They will no sooner win a championship than they will stop sucking Spike Lee's cock.
I do not care if they knew what Melo is/was. Athletes like him do NOT belong in professional sports, period. He's being paid. Fucking force him to play a team game. It is that simple.
