Like somebody else said in this thread, Melo was the clear Rookie of the Year in 03-04, LeBron simply carried a worse team to more mediocre heights and had the Sports Illustrated/ESPN launchpad.


Part of why I (admittedly in increasingly Quixotic fashion) attached myself to the Melo wagon was that he was exactly the player you wanted in the mid-2000s and he was immediately that dude in a way most rookies just weren't. Yes, he wound up being hard to build around and teaming him with Iverson, while a personal wet dream, proved to be poor team building...but J.R. Smith and Kenyon Martin were also integral to those teams. They were highly emotional and volatile in an era when stoicism ruled, with Camby hurt too often to provide that sort of foundation.


It was also a shockingly dark time for rotation guards, and Karl did what he could with what he had but we're talking Anthony Carter, Chucky Atkins, Yakhouba Diawara, Sonny Weems, Dahntay Jones and Arron Afflalo. Some of them had moments, but when the bigs philosophy was so defensively focused, this is an embarrassing role call of backup playmakers.


But more importantly than any of that, while you probably can't pin the Jokic pick his trade to the Knicks, Murray is a direct result of that trade. And those bizarro Knicks Nuggets rosters had weirdly fun and successful seasons alongside Melo thriving in New York, the rare instance of a superstar trade treating both teams well.


~~~~~~~~~
"This is the streets, and I am the trap." � Jay Bilas
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/archive/contributor/517
Hip Hop Handbook: http://tinyurl.com/ll4kzz