No Plan to Trade Melo

They lied to the agent and the agent should know better. Any team would want to keep preliminary trade talks secret from the player's agent both because they are preliminary and unlikely to lead to a trade, and because if another team offers a good deal, they want to hold off the player and his agent from interfering for as long as possible in the process, because the team hopes that by the time the player and/or his agent gets involved, the trade has become almost a done deal.

If you were about to be fired, and you called the personnel department and asked about it, do you think you would get a straight answer? No sir.

There were and will continue to be trade feelers put out by the Nuggets. The Nuggets' front office staff have backed themselves into a corner because of their Karl addiction, whether it is voluntary or involuntary. And at this point how else are they supposed to spend their off-season time other than putting out trade feelers, including for Carmelo Anthony?

 

^^^
That's not to say that the Nuggets should not have C. Anthony in the loop regarding free agent signings and trade talks not involving him. They should keep him in the loop, but they probably will not, because it seems to me that Mr. Karl realized that if he made Iverson the sole captain of the team (without informing the relatively politically gullible Melo about his demotion to ordinary player) and allowed Iverson to play any way he wanted, while hounding Anthony and tormenting JR Smith, that this would eliminate any chance Karl would be forced to resign or retire due to a lack of playoff wins. Because as a result of the total freedom and near worship granted to him by Karl, Iverson has naturally become Mr. Karl's number one backer. And when you as the Coach have Allen Iverson as your number one backer and Allen Iverson in turn has become, for better or worse, in use and in misuse, one of the cornerstones of the franchise, you have achieved total job security whether or not you can win playoff games and whether or not you know what you are doing.

Another way of looking at this is that Mr. Karl has taken as much advantage as possible of the relative gullability of both Anthony and Iverson. He seems to have known in advance that Iverson would respond with blind loyalty if he was left to do what he wants, and that Melo would be extremely slow to understand that his team captain days are over, and to understand that his Coach does not believe that he should be a team captain, nor that he is at Iverson's level, due to Iverson's much longer resume.

It was a shrewd calculation on Mr. Karl's part, who seems to know a lot more about micro politics than he does about micro basketball. We already knew that Karl fancies himself as kind of an expert about psychology in general and personalities in particular, so is it any surprise that he would know about micro or office politics? And what about the basic fact that Karl is one of the "super coaches" with a marathon head coaching resume? He had to know something about micro power politics to achieve that.

So if Melo is kept out of the loop, I for one know who to blame.