Freedom's Just Another Word For We Hate You

Leading the charge at Yahoo Sports this evening is a long form piece from Adrian Wojnarowski on how the Denver Nuggets' best player, Carmelo Anthony, has told the team that he wants out and isn't interested in signing with them once his contract is up, at the end of the 2010-11 season.

It also tells you all that you really need to know that this perfectly straight-forward declaration of intent from Anthony and his representation is described as "threats and ultimatums and a swagger suggesting that the sport belongs to them."

Now, to be fair, I'm kind of in the tank for 'Melo. He went to my school and won them a championship. He's a four-time member of the national team, has continually built on his game to be a plus defensive player, has an increasingly all-around game and, the occasional personal peccadillo aside (ganja, the "Stop Snitching" video, the Knicks brawl), has more or less kept his nose clean. He's endured years of George Karl without demanding a trade or going psycho, played hard even in lost cause playoffs, and is one of the more watchable players in the Association, especially in crunch time. He does his charity work, and hasn't inflicted an obnoxious ad on the world. By the modern standards of the Association, he's a borderline saint.

(I suspect he's kind of overrated, in the way that high scoring players generally are, and his rebounding rates aren't up to the same standard as the rest of his game. If he's the best player on your team, you probably aren't winning a championship, but by that standard, there are only three to five players in the league that are worth watching.)

But with the media so clearly in the tank for teams over players, there's just no winning for Anthony, short of performing a Boxer from Animal Farm routine in Denver for the rest of his life. And honestly, if I were him, I'm not sure I'd go in any other direction. Staying in Denver means hitching your wagon to an ailing Karl, an aging Chauncey Billups, the decrepit Kenyon Martin, the insane J.R. Smith, the unstable Chris Anderson, the cursed Nene Hilario... well, honestly. It's not going to take much to send this team back to the 35-win level, especially in the stacked West.

There's also this. Anthony is married to Alani Vazquez, who the Web tells me works in the business of show. He's got a child with her, and Denver can't be the best place for her career. He also grew up in Baltimore and went to school in upstate New York. Moving back East means that his family sees his kid more often and more easily, and even if you are independently wealthy, that makes your life better. He might also want to avoid so much time in planes, given that every road game in Denver involves the airport.

Finally, there's this. There's no way, short of a wildly improbable Finals run, that Anthony can get any bigger as a star. He plays many of his games after the East goes to bed. His scoring average isn't going to go to the 40-point per-game range. The regular season has been shown to mean nothing.

So put yourself in Melo's shoes. You tell your team that you'd like to go. This makes you a threatening prima donna. You don't tell your team that you'd like to go, which means that everyone is going to spend the year speculating about it, or accusing you of being a liar. And in the post-LeBron age, we're just dying to bury these guys are soon as we can.

For just a moment, let's consider the Nugget culpability here. They are the club that can't get their personnel together, or follow the time-old dictate of only one loon per locker room. They are the folks who have tied their worth to Karl, otherwise known as the coach who couldn't win the big one, and who could throw his team under the bus with a quickness for being, well, just like him, in that they are talented knuckleheads. These are the guys who can't tie up enough money in injury and suspension prone big men. They are the guys with the more or less forgettable drafts, the constant battles with the refs, the inability to staff a bench well enough to keep Anthony's minutes down in the regular season.

Now, Melo's not perfect. But he's a hell of a lot better than this franchise, and he's given them many solid years of service to get to the point where he has earned the ability to name his address. So why, exactly, does anyone short of Nugget Fan want to bury him for that?