Help is on the Way: Antonio McDyess is Returning to Detroit

Denver has been thinking for god only knows how many years that if they could just make enough nifty trades so they could just get enough older, quality veterans, they would be able to win. Come on, give me a break. Does that sound like it's enough to build a winning franchise? What about drafting? What about having a scheme or two or three? And what about working the star players into winning schemes that make sense? What about making sure those veterans don't end up like lone wolves the way Iverson was left to be? What about making sure they are fully integrated into the team?

Antonio McDyess was supposed to be included along with Chauncey Billups and Chiekh Samb in the trade for Allen Iverson. But McDyess refused to become a Nugget. You see, McDyess knows that Denver does not know what it's doing and that Denver wants to blame any lack of winning on player styles and personalities and he wants no part of that. I wouldn't either.

I just want to add here for any Pistons fan especially that Pistons' General Manager Joe Dumars must have known that McDyess would never play for Denver, and would probably end up back in Detroit. Whether or not Denver knew that McDyess would never play, it is obvious that the Nuggets are gradually self destructing and ultimately heading in the direction of the bottom of the West. Don't be fooled by the surprising start.

The owner, Stanley Kroenke, and his wife are ultra rich, but they are big in real estate, retail, and the investing business, and these days they can be losing millions of dollars a day. They are clearly in a financial panic that is probably even more of a panic than other owners are going through. They don't give a damn what happens to the Nuggets these days compared with what happens to their vast investment holdings.

On the streets they would say that the Nuggets "got played" by the Pistons. Long term, they did indeed, and they may be aware of that and not care. From my vantage point, the Nuggets are going to eventually end up paying a huge penalty for not knowing how to work Iverson into their team. While the Pistons, by working Iverson in correctly, have a golden opportunity to demonstrate a big difference between a top tier franchise and an also ran franchise: the top tier franchises do what it takes to make sure every superstar has a good scheme for success and the other franchises don't.
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