Carmelo Anthony revealed on Dwyane Wade’s The Why podcast that the Denver Nuggets almost sent him to the Los Angeles Lakers and not the New York Knicks. In fact, Melo said the deal was done but reconsidered by Nuggets ownership who doesn’t want to see their star player stay in the West. The podcast will make even more news for Melo by saying he never requested a trade from Denver. Once it was clear that he would be moving, one of the deals on the table would have seen him move to Los Angeles in exchange for Lamar Odom and Andrew Bynum.
The deal would have placed the former Melo on a team he had just lost to in the conference finals a year and a half earlier. Anthony would team with Kobe Bryant and Pau Gasol for Denver’s biggest rival.
If Melo had been traded to the Lakers, the history of the NBA would have changed quite significantly. While Melo would win only one playoff series the rest of his career after leading the Nuggets to the conference finals, Kobe won only two more playoff series in his career at the point the trade would occur. If it had gone ahead, Melo and Bryant probably would have fared better against Dirk’s Mavs, who swept the Lakers and the new Thunder a year later. The trade would also have meant that Dwight Howard would not be traded to Los Angeles for Bynum, who was now with the Nuggets. And that probably also means that Steve Nash wouldn’t have ended up in Los Angeles. All in all, the end for Kobe may not have come so soon, and Melo probably would have had a better chance of making it out of the West than the East, where Wade teamed with LeBron James and Chris Bosh in Miami. Melo won a scoring title in New York and was still a perennial All-Star, Bryant could have expanded his window, and Melo’s could have been a Lakers icon who took the keys from Kobe and handed them to LeBron.