How many of the current stars in the nba have championships, maybe D-Wade but other than that, only the old heads have them. Are playoff runs the key to success in the NBA? Or is it getting rings? Because Melo can still catch up.

Carmelo is great player with an interesting career twist. He's struggled to get out of the first round; it happens. There are many stars from every era that don't have the great success, because your talent alone won't decide it. How much you want to bet that there will be some this decade.

I look at like this, there's a saying that whatever can go wrong will go wrong. Likewise you could easily say that just as certain people will attain great achievement others will possibly fail. But has anyone actually looked at why he failed? There's the what and there's the why, and the latter is rarely ever talked about.

I would divide Carmelo's career into 2 halves. There's the pre conference finals and the post conference finals. Before his run to the WCF, Melo lost 4 times to the Spurs and Lakers the 2 best teams in the NBA and once to the temporary, but quite talented Clippers. He's never lost to a lesser team. Then he managed to avoid the Spurs/Lakers teams in the 1st round and he made it to the 3rd round in 2009.

It's no small thing to go that far, it might be played down but it proves his potential, and how dangerous he can be. So what's happened since then? His teams have suffered massive instability that's what. Mostly injuries and other problems. Yes in 2010 too.

In 2010 George Karl missed the season after getting cancer, Hilario appears to have suffered an injury in the playoffs and Billups was 2 old to guard a superstar like D-Will. The Nuggets lost in 6. We know what happened circa 2011/2012 in New York so there's no need to get into it.

Melo's not completely off the hook here, he spent much of his early career playing a Marbury/Iverson type of inefficient basketball. Once he got experience he should improved his offensive quality and promoted a more hardcore defense for his team, but he didn't. If he would have, he might have gotten a couple more post 1st round playoff runs, at least one more. A championship is something I would doubt.

Effeciency won't automatically guarantee success either, just look at McGrady and Garnett. It still requires good circumstances, but you can recover. There's no current star who Melo's career imitates more than Garnetts and he recovered successfully in Boston.

At this point no one really knows what type of career Melo will have, but the Knicks completed their roster this season and found some answers to their chemistry. In the mean time Melo is improving his game now, so it's the right time to have him as a player on your team. I actually believe that the 3 superstar small forwards could be the key to league domination so it's nice to have one on our team. He should be given one more season before the real questions are asked.