LeBron James & Carmelo Anthony: Will Star Movement Change NBA Landscape Forever?

The New York Knicks have returned to relevancy. Last night was the exclamation point as the "New York Sucks" chant has made its way back to NBA fans' vocabulary. 

With major market teams like the Lakers, Bulls, Celtics, Knicks and Heat all playing good basketball, you have to think that the revenue these teams will now bring in is good for the league—right? 

In reality, this is a false statement.

Magic Johnson tweeted after the Knicks trade that Melo in NY is a good thing for the league. Actually, it's the start of a problem that the league will have a lot of trouble fixing. 

What is happening in the league right now?

Teams lack control of their players

As soon as a player becomes unhappy, the media explodes it into a huge story. Deron Williams is a perfect example.

Williams got into a fight with Jerry Sloan, and all of a sudden he wants out of Utah. The media turned it into a "Deron demands trade to NY" type of thing. Once Utah management got word of this, they started to fear that their franchise point guard was not what they thought. With Utah not knowing the future of their team, they jumped at the first trade offer they saw.

Teams are now afraid of being "LeBron'd" (meaning that a star player leaves his team with less than nothing for a better opportunity). They saw what Carmelo Anthony did for Denver and realized that getting something back now is better than getting nothing for their superstars. 

Lack of competition as well as lack of competitors

Where are the Michael Jordans? Where are the Kobe Bryants?

Right now, the NBA is a league that lacks players who want to win a meaningful championship. Bryant and Jordan had talent around them on their rosters, but they would never have jumped at an opportunity to play with other top five players in the NBA.

The league right now lacks competitors—and I fear that once Kobe is gone, we may not have anybody like him left.

Why can't players be more like Kevin Durant? Durant signed a five-year extension with a small market team in Oklahoma City. He has every intention of sticking around and bringing an NBA championship to those fans. If he wins, he's going to have a feeling that no Heat player will have. He will have won a championship with the team that drafted him. He will have stuck around through thick and thin to bring the Thunder a championship.

What's rewarding about LeBron James winning with a team capable of playing in the Olympics? Absolutely nothing. 

Non-voluntary contraction

The idea of contraction has come up numerous times lately when talking about the NBA. Let's face reality: While it may not be official and these teams are still here, contraction has already taken place.

There is barely a middle ground anymore. There are about 17 playoff-caliber teams (six in the East and around 10 or 11 in the West) and outside of that, there are the teams that lack the talent and the market to stick around. The bottom teams are irrelevant in the NBA and while they may be good for an upset here and there, they basically cease to exist.

The NBA is currently facing a huge problem—and not just the CBA. The league needs to figure out a way to keep star players in the cities that drafted them.

How can they do this you might ask? There aren't many options. 

My suggestion is to add a franchise tag, similar to what the NFL uses right now. The NFL has limits, but I think that the limit should be made higher in the NBA.

Some people may think it's unjust to give these players no options on where they can play, but have the league's "role models" not already abused this privilege? Cleveland was left with the worst team in the league when LBJ left, and the Raptors were stuck marketing DeMar DeRozan, Sonny Weems and Amir Johnson as the "Young Guns." DeRozan is solid, but the other two wouldn't even get playing time on the teams that the Harlem Globetrotters play against. 

If this was made a rule, the players would have to accept it.

LeBron wouldn't sit around and complain about having to spend another couple of years in Cleveland, because it's a league rule.

Melo wouldn't demand his way to New York—he'd be thinking about how to win in Denver because he knows he can't leave. These guys are people, but this is a job. If it's a rule, it'd make the league much better. 

Another way to maybe prevent these stars from leaving would be to threaten them. Yes,  it's harsh—but an idea I saw in a Bill Simmons article really stood out to me:

What if Denver said to Carmelo, "Sign an extension with us and play hard, or we're sending you to the D-League"? Would Carmelo have spent three to four months playing the quality of basketball I see in seventh grade recreation leagues? I think not. 

These ideas are admittedly unrealistic, but the NBA has turned into a league focused more on the future than the present. For two months, fans wondered if Carmelo Anthony was going to be a Knick in the offseason or during the season. They were hardly focused on who was winning and losing. ESPN spent hours covering it, and fans spent hours watching that coverage.

Once the Carmelo saga ended, another started: Will Deron stay or will he leave in 2012? What's next for the league? 

If something doesn't happen soon, you'll start to hear about John Wall and Blake Griffin being unhappy. David Stern needs to get a grasp of the league and try to do something, because the "role models" of the NBA are no longer trustworthy.

It's sad that, when Kobe is gone, the indisputable best player in the league will be playing alongside two other superstars and winning championships that mean less to me than the Frozen Four.