Phil Jackson Made It Impossible For The Knicks To Do Anything Good With Melo

Adrian Wojnarowski of ESPN reported this morning that Carmelo Anthony is still expecting the New York Knicks to complete a trade that will send him to the Houston Rockets to play alongside James Harden and Chris Paul. The remaking of New York’s front office has apparently not persuaded Melo to stick around and make another go of competing as a member of the Knicks.

This is only a thing worth reporting, though, because newly-promoted Knicks president Steve Mills and new general manager Scott Perry are apparently dissatisfied with the returns of proposed Melo-to-Houston trades, and are reportedly sniffing around the possibility of postponing any potential Melo trades for the time being. Can you imagine why?

As Perry starts to shape the front office and impact policy, another realization has washed over the organization: Months of organizational harping on Anthony, driven largely by deposed president of basketball operations Jackson, has dramatically lowered Anthony’s trade value. Mills and Perry are evaluating whether it’s worth allowing time for Anthony’s standing around the NBA to be rebuilt, as opposed to trading him at an all-time low, league sources said.

So, Phil Jackson’s years-long campaign of public grumbling about his best player—which achieved no conceivable organizational benefit, but seemed mostly to satisfy Jackson’s urge to separate the ongoing dysfunction of his basketball operation from his reputation as a brilliant basketball mind—had the unintended effect of driving down the player’s value, such that the very move the organization was hoping to make now has become unfavorable and unpalatable? Truly, no one could ever have  seen this coming.

But it gets even worse!

The Knicks realize the odds are long of convincing Anthony to simply forget trade talks and accept a return to New York, especially given how aggressively Jackson pushed to run Anthony out of town.

Phil Jackson, basketball genius.