NEW YORK — Donnie Walsh isn’t ready to pull a Prokhorov and pull out of the Carmelo Anthony Sweepstakes, but he admits concern about the distractions swirling around his players.
“I’m not talking about the [‘We Want Melo’] chants, I’m talking about reading your name in the paper every day or every other day,” the Knicks president said Friday before the Knicks hosted Kobe Bryant and the Lakers at MSG.
Asked specifically if Wilson Chandler’s play had suffered because of the trade rumors, Walsh said, “He’s hurt, too, so it’s hard to pinpoint one thing. He was hurt [ankle sprain], no longer hurt. I think he’s starting to try to play himself back in to where he was before he left, which was at a very high level.”
Chandler’s name has repeatedly come up in trade talks involving Anthony. Under one potential three-team trade with Minnesota and Denver, Chandler would land in Denver, Anthony Randolph and Eddy Curry would go to Minnesota and Anthony would come to New York.
The NBA trade deadline is Feb. 24.
“I know this, that you better get used to it [trade rumors],” Walsh said. “It’s a young team, they haven’t been through it.”
The Nets are 6-6 since Russian owner Mikhail Prokhorov announced Jan. 19 that the team was pulling out of the Melo Drama, while the Knicks are 4-7 in that same span.
When Walsh was asked if he made anything out of that, he said, “Yeah, I think about that. I don’t know what the answer is, but I think about that because they [the Nets] did play much better right away. Yeah, I do.
“It [getting traded] is probably a bigger thing for players than you guys think it is. I mean, you’ve got to move. They have families.”
But when asked if he wanted to suddenly announce that he was no longer interested in Anthony, Walsh declined.
“I’m not saying anything about Denver,” he said. “I told you that.”
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