All Signs Point to an Amare Collapse

When Amare Stoudemire didn’t make this summer’s Olympic team, we all figured it had to do with bad blood between him and Jerry Colangelo, or his injury history, or the fact that, like fellow reject Gilbert Arenas, Amare is just a little too free-spirited, too unpredictable, to rep the USA overseas. But in retrospect, it seems like just another chink in this young superstar’s armor. He was all-NBA after his miraculous microfracture recovery in 2006-07, and made the second team this past season. And Shaq, however decrepit he might be, opened up Amare’s game in new, radical ways.↵
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↵But as Upside and Motor so vividly describes, taken as a whole, recent events in Stoudemire career point to a gradual collapse, or irrelevance on the horizon:↵↵⇥Or, if you’ll pardon the game table analogies, the whole Amare thing is more like Jenga. Major injury? Take a block. Trading away Marion, an asset on offense and his fail-safe on defense? Another one. Ship out D’Antoni, whose offense gave Stoudemire wings? Slip another brick out. Shaq’s eventual breakdown? Push that middle one thr-NONONONONO NOTTHATONE! Look, right there. RIGHT THERE. I’m pointing at it. I don’t know what else I ca-OK, you got it. Then the big one: Steve Nash finally breaks down, moves on, or retires? That’s gotta be two blocks, at the least. Who knows if that will be enough to make the tower, Standing Tall And...Tall, wobble a bit too far.↵↵

Nash in his sunset years, Shaq effectively done, Amare having to decide in 2010 if he wants to stick with what will most certainly be a team on the skids (for $17 million, naturally). Of course, he could opt out and join the 2010 march to destiny, but there’s the question of how much any other team can pay him, and whether he’s as high on anyone’s list as Wade or Bosh. I hate to say it, but by then, Stoudemire could be little more than a very, very rich man’s Zach Randolph.↵
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↵Good thing he’s taken up the piano. If your career on the court is screeching toward destruction, why not -- as Amare’s been doing all along -- make sure you pay attention to the man outside the game. That’s the difference between dragging a franchise down and being the prisoner of circumstance.↵