New Jersey Nets general manager Billy King said this morning that the team’s inability to pull off a trade for Denver Nuggets star Carmelo Anthony does not mean the team will never be able to bring an established superstar to the franchise.
“Kevin Durant is a superstar and he’s in Oklahoma City, Reggie Miller was in Indiana, when Michael (Jordan) went to Chicago, the Chicago Bulls were a franchise where you could just walk on the street and get a ticket for. He turned it into that,” King said. "Sometimes you develop your own star and I don’t foresee players looking at this and saying I don’t want to play in a billion dollar building in Brooklyn at the Barclay Center. I think they’re going to be saying they’re in the Barclay Center playing there and I want to be a part of that.”
King appeared on WFAN in New York with Joe and Evan Thursday morning to try and put the best face on owner Mikhail Prokhorov’s decision to walk away from the Anthony trade talks.
There is no question that the 11-31 Nets, who won just 12 games a season ago, were hoping Anthony would be the centerpiece of their effort to rebuild the moribund team as they prepare for their move to Brooklyn. The difficulty for the Nets now will be that the NBA trend, started by LeBron and friends in Miami, is that NBA superstars want to be in places where they know they will be joining, or be joined by, other superstars.
“We’ll have 23 million in cap space, we have picks, and whenever the new CBA comes in, we’ll have the flexibility to make decision(s) to better our ball club,” King said. "Then the fact that we have a young Derrick Favors, Brook Lopez is really young, and the majority of our roster is really young and we’re going to add players to it.
“If you look at some teams and how they’ve been built through the draft, that’s how they’ve done it. Then they’ve added a player when they need be. You’ve got to get lucky in the draft but also you’ve got to add talent and sometimes young talent is the best way to go.”