Nene will opt out of the final year of his contract worth nearly $12
million and, as a result, become an unrestricted free agent, a source
familiar with the situation said Wednesday night.

It means Nene can sign with any team he wishes without the Nuggets
getting a chance to match the offer when free agency begins after the
expected NBA lockout, which likely will start Friday.

Nene had until today to make a final decision.

The Nuggets tried to sign him to a contract extension before today, the last day of the NBA’s collective bargaining agreement, but to no avail. Instead, Nene figures to have many suitors — including the Nuggets — as he explores his options.

Nene opted out of the final year of the six-year, $60 million contract that he signed in 2006.

Nene repeatedly has said he would like to retire in a Nuggets uniform. But he expressed concerns about his situation in a wide-ranging interview with The Denver Post after the season.

http://www.denverpost.com/nuggets/ci_18380674

Anthony later laughed off his coach’s attempt at humor because that’s
all it was – a joke. For all the goodwill inspired by the Nuggets’
season-opening rout of their Northwest Division rival, Anthony told
Yahoo! Sports Wednesday night that he still doesn’t intend to sign the
team’s three-year, $64 million contract extension.

Anthony actually considers these Nuggets more talented than the team he helped take to the 2009 Western Conference finals. But even that doesn’t seem enough to convince him to stay, despite the best intentions of Karl, Nuggets president Josh Kroenke and new vice president of basketball operations Masai Ujiri.

”They want to sit down and talk, but my thing is it’s way beyond this year,” Anthony told Yahoo! Sports after scoring a team-high 23 points in the Nuggets’ victory. ”It ain’t got nothing to do with the new GM, Josh, the players. For me, I feel it’s a time for change.

”If I do nothing now, I’m never going to do anything. I feel like my time is now to make a decision if I want to leave or if I want to stay.”

League sources still expect the Nuggets to try to trade Anthony rather than risk losing him for nothing when he can opt out of his contract at the end of the season. Denver’s options could improve after Dec. 15 when free agents who signed in the offseason can be traded. Sources close to Anthony say he is worried about being dealt to a team that has to gut its roster to acquire him. Possible trade partners also aren’t going to want to give up much for Anthony unless they receive some kind of assurance he’ll sign an extension. Another potential roadblock is the $1 million trade kicker Anthony has in his contract.

In July 2006, Anthony signed a five-year, $80 million contract extension that included an opt-out before the final season. He passed on taking a shorter deal like the ones that allowed his fellow draft class members LeBron James(notes), Dwyane Wade(notes) and Chris Bosh(notes) to become free agents this summer. At the time, Anthony called it a ”no-brainer” to take the guarantee of another year of salary – even though it limited his flexibility – because he still remembered how much his family struggled for money when he was growing up.

http://sports.yahoo.com/nba/news;_ylt=AlXUbpPNHSm3YydG2No9LQy8vLYF?slug=mc-anthonynuggets102810

But believe this: Nuggets owner Stan Kroenke will do what is best for
his hefty investment in an NBA franchise, even if that means trading
Melo.
There is no way Denver can afford to lose the face of its franchise for nothing as a free agent.

The Nuggets are now considering a strategy to part ways with their 26-year-old star forward, according to a league source.

After quietly gauging trade interest in Anthony for weeks, the team’s consternation has only risen as he has made no move to accept a $65 million offer for a three-year contract extension that was formally presented more than a month ago.

The Nuggets don’t want to get LeBron’d.

LeBron James toyed with anxious minds in Cleveland before ripping out the hearts of Cavaliers fans by announcing a departure from his home state on live television. As was first reported by The Denver Post in June, the Nuggets are prepared to trade Anthony rather than watch him opt out of his contract next summer.

With a resume that includes an NCAA championship won at Syracuse and an Olympic gold medal that helped restore international luster for American basketball, Anthony has the skills to make the dream of the first NBA title in Denver a reality. But the team and its best player seem to have drifted slowly apart.

So what would be the trade market for Anthony?

His 28-point career scoring average through seven professional seasons should attract keen interest in Anthony from a franchise looking for a star to sell tickets in the regular season or hit a big shot at the buzzer during the playoffs. Anthony’s contract situation figures to give him leverage in trade negotiations, because any team looking to add the 6-foot-8 forward would want to be assured of keeping his services long term.

http://www.denverpost.com/nuggets/ci_15800179

Both had contracts due to become fully guaranteed for next season had
they remained with the team following Aug. 15. The source said the moves
were made Friday, the last business day before Sunday’s deadline,
although the Nuggets made no announcement. Calls to Nuggets officials
were not immediately returned.
Coby Karl is the son of Nuggets coach George Karl. Sources had told FanHouse earlier in the week the coach expected his son to be waived and was sending out feelers to see what other teams might be interested in him.

The Butch move appears controversial since he suffered a serious knee injury last month in the NBA Summer League in Las Vegas. It’s expected the Nuggets must continue to pay Butch, who is out until January or February, until he’s medically fit to play. Butch’s agent, Keith Kreiter, declined comment.

The moves leave the Nuggets with 12 players with guaranteed contracts, one shy of the NBA roster minimum. Coby Karl was due to make the minimum of $854,389 and Butch the minimum of $762,195. The Nuggets are over the luxury-tax line so they also would have had to pay a dollar-for-dollar tax on the players had they been kept.

Coby Karl had been vying to be the first man to play for an NBA team coached by his father. Although he joined the Nuggets last April for the final week of the regular season, he did not get into a game. And Karl was not with the team then, having been replaced by assistant Adrian Dantley while he missed the final 1-1/2 months of the season due to a form of throat cancer.

http://nba.fanhouse.com/2010/08/14/nuggets-waive-coby-karl-brian-butch/

So let them eat Twinkies.

But please understand: Denver absolutely, positively cannot win a
championship this way.

And team management knows it.

This season cannot end soon enough, because team officials privately admit this NBA franchise has much work to do. If nothing will satisfy Nuggets owner Stan Kroenke except being No. 1, then he faces the most difficult decisions he’s had since purchasing the franchise a decade ago.

What will make it so hard?

There is much to like about these Nuggets, from the nearly unstoppable scoring of Carmelo Anthony to the unflappable leadership of Chauncey Billups to the snarling intensity of Kenyon Martin.

But, in its soft heart, Denver is a basketball team that wants to win pretty. On a Wednesday night that gave a raucous crowd in the Pepsi Center one more chance to get up and dance, the Nuggets avoided elimination, but the beauty of the victory was no more than skin-deep.

NBA championships are won by players who are defensively sounder and mentally tougher than these Nuggets ever can be. True champions do not have trouble summoning a professional effort until the situation is win or go home.

"I think winning eases everything," said Anthony, who acknowledged the team had endured more than its share of drama while struggling in the series. "When you win basketball games, there is nothing that can be said."

Give you one guess at the identity of the lone team in the playoff field of 16 that has shot at least 50 percent from the field during the postseason. It’s the Jazz, which also happens to the only team that has scored at least 100 points in every game of the opening round.

Those are the cold, hard statistics. "We know we have to play defense," interim Nuggets coach Adrian Dantley said.

http://www.denverpost.com/sports/ci_14981133

"Thrown into the deep end," is how Dantley described his predicament in a recent conversation. "More than anything, it’s about managing personalities, keeping the guys together in a really difficult time."

It got even more difficult late Monday night when the heavily favored Nuggets, playing at home, lost Game 2 of their best-of-seven playoff series with Utah, even though the Jazz played without two injured starters who are out for the series. It’s quite a predicament for anybody to be in, much less a bench neophyte, a man whose reputation was forged as a prolific scorer, first at DeMatha High, then at Notre Dame where he was collegiate player of the year nearly 35 years ago, then in the NBA for 15 seasons where he twice led the league in scoring. His became, officially, a Hall of Fame career two years ago.

Even so, it was star-crossed. Dantley is the only rookie-of-the-year to be traded, and was dealt in a swirl of controversy by the Detroit Pistons weeks before they began their back-to-back championship run. And now there’s this, trying to coach a group suited to Karl and perhaps only Karl. Nothing about being the substitute teacher is favorable.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/21/AR2010042104483.html

Chris Tomasson

This is Adrian Dantley’s team now.

Denver coach George Karl, undergoing chemotherapy and radiation for a form of throat cancer, missed his sixth game out of the last seven in Saturday night’s 102-97 loss to Milwaukee at the Pepsi Center. But there was one major difference this time.

Dantley didn’t even talk with Karl on Saturday. And a Nuggets official said the ailing Karl is not expected to be with the team for any games during a pivotal upcoming five-game trip, meaning Karl will have missed 11 of 12 at a time the Nuggets are trying to hold off Dallas for the No. 2 seed in the West and Utah for the Northwest Division crown.

"He’s going through treatment and was down so I didn’t talk to him,” Dantley, an assistant and the acting head coach said of Saturday, when the Nuggets lost just their sixth home game of the season to a team that had played a double-overtime game the night before at Sacramento while Denver rested.

But the Bucks are a playoff outfit. Yes, Dantley is 5-2 filling in for Karl during his absences over the past month, but Milwaukee is the first likely playoff-bound team he has faced.

Now, it’s just going to get tougher for Dantley. The Nuggets (47-23) start their five-game trip Tuesday at New York, but then it really gets rigorous. The last four games are at Boston, Toronto, Orlando and Dallas, three playoff bound and the Raptors likely getting there.

The game with the Mavericks (46-23) figures to be pivotal to which team gets the No. 2 seed in the West and possible homecourt advantage in the second round of the playoffs. The winner takes the season series 2-1, getting the tiebreaker.

Furthermore, the Nuggets, who have the league’s toughest remaining schedule, are still trying to hold off the Jazz (45-25) in the Northwest. And there’s no guarantee either Oklahoma City (42-25) and Phoenix (43-26) can’t knock the Nuggets out of one of the top four seeds if they falter down the stretch.

Who knows if Karl can help Dantley, who calls the trip a "big challenge,” with any phone calls during it? After beginning a 6 1/2-week treatment program in mid-February, the last few weeks have always been expected to be the toughest.

Karl was on the bench last Tuesday against Washington, but his mouth was so sore he could barely talk. To understand how tough these days are for him, Karl elected not to meet the media in the past week, something the talkative Karl often has enjoyed doing and something that at times has been therapeutic.

http://nba.fanhouse.com/2010/03/21/nuggets-are-dantleys-team-with-karl-expected-to-miss-key-trip/

If a report is accurate that Denver Nuggets power forward Kenyon Martin
has a partial tear of his left patella tendon, he said he hasn’t been
given that information about his knee.

Regardless, the Nuggets, who had previously been looking for a big man,
will spend this weekend discussing what they might do. Agent Mark
Bartelstein told FanHouse the Nuggets have inquired about five of his
free-agent big men: Mark Blount, Mikki Moore, Brian Cook, Jake Voskuhl
and Rob Kurz.

How quick the Nuggets might want to make a move could depend on what the team learns this weekend about Martin, who sat out Friday’s 122-114 win over Indiana with what the team reported as chronic left knee patella tendinitis. However, Yahoo! Sports reported unnamed sources as saying Martin has a partial tear of his left patella tendon and surgery is among the treatment options being considered.

"I don’t know where Marc Spears got that from, man,” Martin said in an interview with FanHouse after Friday’s game, referring to the writer of the story. "It’s a little more than tendinitis, but I don’t know if it’s torn. I had an MRI (on Thursday). They looked at it. There’s a lot of speculation going on. … It’s more serious than tendinitis but I don’t know yet.”

Martin said he should know more Saturday. He said MRI results are still being evaluated, and he added no one has told him anything yet.

The doctors, they’re just now getting to the results so how does anybody else know?” Martin said. "It’s just a report. I’m going on what the doctors say. I’m waiting on Dr. (Richard) Steadman (an outside doctor Martin is seeing in Vail, Colo.) to look at it and give me a synopsis, and then we’ll go to the team doctor and everything else.”

Nuggets vice president of basketball operations Mark Warkentien, on the road scouting, declined comment and referred questions to Nuggets athletic trainer Jim Gillen. Gillen did not offer any additional information on Martin, saying, "If I have anything to tell you, I’ll put it on a sheet of paper.”

The Nuggets distributed a release before the game that, in addition to listing the injury as chronic left knee patella tendinitis, called his condition day-to-day.

Nuggets coach George Karl said he didn’t have "enough information” and didn’t want to speculate about the health of Martin, who has been the team’s defensive backbone all season. But Karl said he’s "hoping everything is going to be OK.”

http://nba.fanhouse.com/2010/03/06/martin-in-dark-about-possible-knee-tear/

“J.R.J.R. Smith has been with the Denver Nuggets since the summer of
2006 when he got traded to the team from the Chicago Bulls, who he was
with for only a few days after coming over in a trade with his original
team, the New Orleans Hornets. It’s looking right now like he’ll remain
a Nugget despite all his recent unhappiness., according to ESPN.

Smith openly sulked on the bench last Saturday night about his playing time while his team beat his former team, the Hornets, in overtime. Since then, team execs have been yapping internally about him ever since, trying to figure out the best way to deal with a petulant child. (May we suggest "Transforming the Difficult Child: The Nurtured Heart Approach"?)

There was also talk in-house supposedly of just packing up Smith and his emotional baggage and sending him on out of Denver before the Feb. 18 trading deadline.

But according to ESPN, Smith isn’t going anywhere. Guess the Nuggets like those 14.5 points per game.

http://ca.sports.yahoo.com/nba/rumors/post/Nuggets-not-trading-J-R-Smith?urn=nba,215954

Bret Adams, an attorney representing the Nuggets’ coach, met with
officials from Kroenke Sports Enterprises and afterward said: "It’s a
complicated discussion and process because of the potential lockout
(after 2010-11). It’s a different economic environment. All of that has
added a complexity to contract negotiations that simply hasn’t been
there before.

"But both parties are professionally and diligently working to keeping George Karl in Denver."

Karl repeatedly has said he wants to stay in Denver. Karl is under contract for the rest of this season, and he’s seeking a potential three-year extension.

With 958 career wins and annual win-total improvement with Denver, Karl feels he should be paid as one of the top coaches in the NBA. His current $3 million salary does not put him in that group.

Read more: http://www.denverpost.com/nuggets/ci_14196245#ixzz0cjBlH5pk