Carmelo Anthony Trade Rumors: Going to the New Jersey Nets Would Be a Huge Mistake

The New Jersey Nets want Carmelo Anthony more than Snooki wants a pickle or a juiced-up, gorilla guido that will probably beat her and be the final nail in her coffin to a Celebrity Rehab stint just after a beautifully done Where Are The Now on VH1.

There are a few people out there (mostly in New Jersey) who are pulling for this and think that Carmelo is going to be the key piece into making them a long term playoff and championship contender. They will be holding victory parades in Newark and Brooklyn and we’ll all have egg on our face.

The Nets would be on top of the world.

Or so they think.

Carmelo Anthony would be making an enormous career faux pas. The Nets can offer him nothing better than the situation he currently is in. I personally think he should stick it out with the Nuggets or try to end up on the Clippers.

What do I know though? I don’t get paid to write about sports, I get paid to turn one computer into 400 through innovative software.

The Nets are not just a Carmelo-away from dominating the Eastern Conference. To get Carmelo they have to give up just about everything that makes them remotely competitive. No Favors from last year’s draft, no draft picks for the foreseeable future and they get Richard Hamilton and Chauncey Billups a couple of years before they retire and a couple years after they were remotely any good.

Good news for Carmelo is though in three years when Chauncey and Rip retire and they’ve yet to win a playoff series he can become a free agent again and actually join the Knicks at that point in time.

I spent a few days trying to rack my brain and come up with a minimum of at least ten reasons that Carmelo shouldn’t sign with the Nets, it coming back to this point over and over again. Why waste three years of your prime winning 38 games a year, getting swept in the playoffs and going out for sushi after games with Brook Lopez and Chucky Atkins?

Carmelo wants a championship and it’s definitely not coming while he’s wearing a Nets uniform and the Nets are on the right path. They’ve stock piled so many assets they can start building like an Oklahoma City or Chicago. Why waste all these picks for losing records and playoff losses?

There are some decent drafts coming up and New Jersey could be sitting extremely pretty in the next two of them. Save the picks, save your young, former All-Star point guard, add a few pieces, move to Brooklyn and compete against Carmelo, Amar’e, and the Knicks in New York.

It would be a return home for both Carmelo and LaLa if he did sign with the Nets, they’d be right back where they were born and (for Carmelo partially) raised. Carmelo then could sign his $65M contract and everything would be fantastic.

It’s obviously not about the money though; if it was Carmelo would have signed with the Nuggets when they put that carrot under his nose last summer and this whole discussion and column would be irrelevant and never written. I could have spent this extremely windy evening hanging out with my fiancée and playing Kinect or writing about something completely different.

It could be about location, but if it were me I wouldn’t want to commute from Brooklyn or Manhattan to New Jersey every day. I know it’s supposedly not that bad for an east coast commute, but I hate commuting and have worked very hard to make sure that it only takes eight minutes from the second I get into my car to the moment I’m sitting at my desk at work.

It could be winning, but if that were case he’d stay in Denver and work his butt off to get the Nuggets over the hump and over the Lakers and Spurs. Take that route. The Knicks aren’t ready to make the leap over the Celtics, Heat, Magic or Bulls.

It could all just come down to the team and his love for that team. He could love the Knicks more than any team and he’s so absolutely passionate about it that no other team is going to be insufficient to his wants and desires.

If that is the case then we are going to end up right here again this summer when New Jersey or whatever else Denver trade comes up and we are right back to where we are right now.

That or he gets traded to another team, Denver gets a huge haul and is sitting pretty for the future, while the team that traded for him is left in shambles as Carmelo signs with the Knicks.