Trading for Carmelo Anthony probably wouldn’t have been a bad deal for the New Jersey on-their-way-to-Brooklyn 
Nets. This is a team that doesn’t exactly have a sizable nucleus. Sure, there are some promising players, but they were all movable parts, with the exception of Brook Lopez and possibly Derrick Favors (whose name was mentioned prominently anyway in trade talks).
It’s not just a matter of what the Nets could do on the court with Anthony. There are sizable marketing and merchandising considerations. If you’re trying to reverse the fortunes of a losing team, you had better have something else to offer than fan in the meantime. In this particular case, the Nets may have found some short-term relief, as there was the opportunity to put not only Anthony, but Chauncey Billups and Rip Hamilton into the lineup as well. That may have been a pacifier, for as long as it lasted. And with the planned move to Brooklyn, which is supposed to take place in 2012, it may have been worth it to put a legitimate star before the public. And say what you want about Carmelo Anthony’s fundamentals, he is, by NBA standards, a big star.
And as was demonstrated by the Miami Heat this past off-season, sometimes when you have one star, it can serve as a magnet to get other stars, and you just know that some of the people in Nets’ management was thinking about what the landscape might look like with someone like Chris Paul dishing the ball.
But there’s only so far you can go.
Mikhail Prokhorov, the new owner of the Nets, is committed to winning. That much should be obvious. He’ll spend what he has to. At the same time, he’s not a sucker, and there is a tendency for establishment types to look at the new kid on the block as a “lay-down.” Denver got way too greedy with what they were asking in exchange for Anthony (that’s assuming Carmelo was going to sign an extension anyway), and at the end they got left at the altar. Now, if the Nuggets can’t unload him to the Knicks, their options get much more limited. They may have to let him go for a song just to get something for him at all. And who knows? That might bring talks right back to the Nets. Stranger things have happened.
So Mr. Prokhorov played this one well. I would normally say he’s a fast learner, but he probably had enough street sense already to know that he was the guy in the leveraged position. I doubt he’ll be underestimated again.
