http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/17/sports/basketball/a-major-trade-leaves-questions-in-two-cities.html 2014-11-17 05:09:18 A Major Trade Leaves Questions in Two Cities The Knicks’ victory over Denver suggested that they were the clear winners of the Carmelo Anthony deal involving Danilo Gallinari, but Knicks fans should still question the long-term wisdom of the trade. === There was a moment in the second quarter Sunday when For Gallinari, a When we say “one-time,” that’s pretty much the extent of it. On a compelling New York night in late March 2010, during Gallinari’s second season with the “I took the challenge,” Gallinari said that night, after a 28-point tour de force. Donnie Walsh “He’s just scratching the surface on what he will be,” Walsh said then. Anthony, we know, had other plans for Walsh and the Knicks’ rebuilding project. From the Denver side, Gallinari was the feature piece of the Anthony megadeal forced upon Walsh by the Knicks’ owner, James L. Dolan, a year later. So Gallinari went west, where he fit nicely on a rising young team that left opponents gasping in the thin Denver air, until he blew out his knee late in the 2012-13 season. “That game was one of my biggest highlights in New York,” Gallinari said of the 2010 game after the Knicks broke their optimism-draining seven-game losing streak by Watching Anthony toy with Gallinari in the post on Sunday was almost painful for anyone who liked the early looks of him and hoped that a well-functioning unit was in the process of being assembled. Gallinari, who missed all of last season, came off the bench to make 1 of 5 shots from the field, scoring 5 points. He participated in an unsightly second quarter in which the Nuggets shot 1 for 16, were outscored by 31-8 and didn’t make a field goal until Ty Lawson banked in a layup at the first-half buzzer. Recovering from serious knee injuries can test a player. Sometimes the knee isn’t ready for the pace of the game, or the mind doesn’t believe the knee is ready to do what it once did. “I used to go to the paint and have a couple of dunks,” Gallinari said. “I’m not doing that right now.” Nate Robinson was a teammate of Gallinari’s in New York and is again in Denver, where he signed as a free agent last year. Asked for his remembrance of the 2010 shootout, and the place Gallinari happens to be now, Robinson snapped, “So are you saying he’s not a great player anymore?” Gallinari never actually achieved the level of a quote-unquote great player. But he was slow and out of sync on Sunday, and his coach, Brian Shaw, cited his lack of aggressiveness during the second quarter, when the Knicks essentially sealed a win for the first time since Nov. 2. The remaining former Knicks who were part of the Anthony deal weren’t much help, either, in a game in which Anthony and J. R. Smith each scored 28 points, smartly reducing, if not exactly ditching, their reliance on the triangle offense. Timofey Mozgov was clumsily ineffective; Wilson Chandler missed 10 of his 14 shots. So this was an easy call for those inclined to render a one-day judgment on the outcome of the trade. After dumping Coach George Karl last year, losing a couple of rotation players and scuffling through the 2013-14 season without the injured Gallinari, the Nuggets are a 2-7 mess under Shaw, their second-year coach. Shaw, who played for the Los Angeles Lakers and served as a Lakers assistant under Phil Jackson, uses only certain actions of the triangle in deference to his players’ skill sets. The Knicks are 3-8, mostly flunking their early-season quizzes in Triangle 101, but at least they have Anthony locked up on a new contract. Still, it is somewhat misguided to analyze the trade merely as a competition between the Knicks and the Nuggets, who have a better regular-season record than the Knicks since the deal was made in February 2011. The better question is how Walsh would have fared had Dolan not ordered the trade to keep Anthony from reluctantly accepting a trade to the Nets to ensure he got a new contract before a new collective bargaining agreement could go into effect. What else might the Knicks have done with the assets they had compiled, the draft picks Walsh was forced to surrender, had the organization not rushed into the Anthony acquisition just before announcing stiff ticket-price increases for the following season? Would the Knicks have been in the mix for Chris Paul? James Harden? Dwight Howard? Has it all been worth one playoff series victory in four years? Until Jackson assembles a squad around Anthony befitting his geometric visions of glory, that remains the unanswerable question. All we can say for certain is that Anthony is greater than Gallinari and the sum of all of Denver’s former Knicks parts.