In his latest NBA notebook, Marc J. Spears of Yahoo! Sports reports the Denver Nuggets missed a chance to acquire L.A. Clippers shooting guard Eric Gordon this summer. “The Clippers,” Spears says, “were open to trading Eric Gordon in a package for Carmelo Anthony last offseason,” but they changed their minds when they saw his performance for Team USA in the World Championships.
Now in his third season, Gordon’s emerged as a fringe All-Star candidate, averaging 24.1 points per game, which ranks eighth in the league; SB Nation colleague Mike Prada wrote more extensively about the 22-year-old’s greatness earlier this week.
To be clear, there’s no indication the Nuggets were ever interested in trading Anthony to the Clippers, or that Anthony would have signed a contract extension in order to facilitate that trade, so it’s hard to know for sure if Denver truly missed the boat on Gordon. But as it stands, it seems unlikely that the Nuggets will get a player close to Gordon’s caliber in an eventual Anthony trade.