Gaurav Garg : I was reading an article on ESPN recently and in the article (it read) that all the Bulls need to do to get Carmelo Anthony is amnesty Boozer and trade away Dunleavy, but I thought that it was much more complex than that. Because looking at the Bulls payroll as is, for next season they are at 63M, which is right at the cap, maybe a little over. So if they amnesty Boozer and trade away Dunleavy for nothing, that gets them to about 44-45M. But now wouldn’t they have to set aside 6M for 2 likely 1st round draft picks, plus then have 2M in cap phantoms eaten into their payroll, leaving them with only 10M to offer Anthony, not to mention having to renounce the rights to their FAs and not able to bring over Mirotic. I personally don’t want the Bulls to sign Anthony. I think we could be title contenders with Mirotic, and a healthy team. I really think if Asik was healthy in the 2011 ECF, the Bulls knock off Miami. The Bulls gave Miami a lot of trouble with their bigs when Rose was healthy. Miami had no answer for our big men.
Sam Smith : You certainly are ruining your chances of working at ESPN. The “Noah recruits Melo at All-Star” was the Anthony rumor of the week. Is it July already? Yes, we’ve got four months of these coming. But you are correct. It’s a lot more than the breezy summary ESPN offered. But when ESPN promotes something, it gets attention; they are great at that and we all do watch. They do say Entertainment before Sports in their name. Anyway, Anthony can sign with the Knicks this summer for $129 million; the maximum the Bulls or any free agency team could offer would be a four-year deal worth about $96 million. But the Bulls would need to be $22.5 million below the cap for that amount of about $33 million less to be paid Anthony. The Bulls without Dunleavy have about $42.5 million committed next season to Noah, Rose, Gibson, Butler and Tony Snell. The cap is expected to rise to about $62 million from the current $58 million. If you also gave away Snell you’d be close to that $22 million base salary. But it would require an amnesty for Boozer, releasing Hinrich and Augustin, trading both your first round draft picks for future draft picks and telling Nikola Mirotic you are not interested this summer. So then you basically are trading Augustin, Hinrich, Dunleavy, Boozer, Snell and two first rounders for Anthony. And Anthony still could not get that full $96 million because you have cap holds for roster spots as you have to have placeholders up to 12 on your roster and the Bulls would have just four players other than Anthony.
– “Ask Sam”, Bulls.com, March 7, 2014
Over at Posting & Toasting, Seth Rosenthal suggests the Knicks treat Melo like “a human adult who’s been around the league a while and has already seen this same organization clean out so they could acquire him” by way of pitching a more conservative deal than the maximum (ie. if New York’s maxed out, they can’t assemble proper pieces around Anthony). Ideally, Rosenthal hopes Anthony, “understands that the Knicks should be months past the point of valuing the present season over the long term, isn’t fooled by some harebrained plot to scapegoat the coach that’s both self-destructive and a tacit admission that the roster sucks…and recognizes that it would take sacrifice to repair all of the above.”
I don’t know who this amazingly unselfish, highly insightful Carmelo Anthony is, but I’m sure we’d love to meet him someday!