I still think there’s no way for all his problems that we can get anything close to equal value.

We ABSOLUTELY shouldn’t make a trade during this season. NO WAY.

Maybe depending on the playoff results you consider options this summer.

No, I’m not tolerant to slackers and lack of effort situations. That hasn’t changed. But I wonder if he has it in him. (insert Jordan Gatorade commercial).

I am extremely disappointed at how he’s turned out, don’t get me wrong. But after a while, most people aren’t any more than the sum of their parts. Every once in a while someone comes along that can reinvent themselves in adulthood. Amare has overcome a lot. At some point the coddling has caught up with the raw desire he had as a rookie. Phoenix screwed up royally by not hiring someone like Paul Silas to get in his face. They felt like they didn’t need PS since Shaq was there to do the dirty work. But Shaq is just a big baby with a huge ego, and he is not going to subjugate his legacy to pimp a whiny kid.

I thought Amare was going to be a quicker Karl Malone. Malone didn’t have anyone to push him, but he just pushed himself.

My point is, the griping and stuff isn’t getting us anywhere. And with Shaq here and playing so well, Amare is never going to get back to 26 and 9 or more. Let me ask you, who puts more pressure on a defense, Shaq scoring 26 a game, or Amare? I think the answer is obvious. It’s Shaq. If the braintrust could figure out how to utilize both of them, we’d have a championship. Amare is in the presence of a bigger dog, and he’s just falling in line.

We call ourselves sports aficionados and debate endlessly the abilities of our heroes. But they are just people. This is a psychological game. I remember reading a blog where college football enthusiasts were debating whether Tim Tebow was grandstanding when he announced his return to Florida for a senior season. Some were pointing out that he wasn’t going in the first round anyway, and that it was no sacrifice to stay in school. The blogger pontificated on how Tebow was stupid and slow, and couldn’t QB in the pros. I thought of his story, how he wasn’t supposed to be alive after his missionary mother had a severe bout of malaria while pregnant with him. The baby was supposed to be severely deformed. Look what Tebow has accomplished.

I daresay some sage old grandmother in Orlando didn’t think Amare would make it through his teen years.

Now if you want to take the human element out of it and judge him by the yardstick of Malone, Jordan, Jabbar, Magic, and Russell, yeah, he’s a bum, and we should trade him.