Danilo Gallinari has spent enough time looking back to know exactly where the fork in the road was. For him, it wasn’t just injuries that reshaped everything. It was the 2011 trade that sent him from the Knicks to the Nuggets in the Carmelo Anthony deal, a move he says changed the course of his career.
Speaking with HoopsHype, Gallinari said the subject still comes up when he’s around the people who knew him best in New York.
“No, I sometimes talk about it. I think about it just with friends and family when we sometimes talk about basketball and my career,” said Gallinari in a chat with HoopsHype.
“We think about it, or when I come back to New York, and I talk to my fans or people in New York who still work for the Knicks, we talk about it, but there is a lot of, unfortunately, because of my injuries, there is a lot of what-if in my career. I don’t know, I’m probably the biggest what-if guy in the history of the game, maybe.
But it’s part of an NBA career. It happened to me, unfortunately, more than any other athlete probably, as far as injuries, but I don’t think about it too much.”
That move put Gallinari in a difficult spot from the start. He was brought in as the player expected to help replace Anthony’s production, and the pressure came fast.
Then the injury bug hit again, with Gallinari tearing his ACL in 2013 before the playoffs. Denver had won 57 games that season, and the timing only sharpened the frustration around what might have been.
“Yeah, when Masai Ujiri and coach Karl talk about it, they blame it on me because I tore my ACL right before the playoffs that season, and then we lost against Golden State, and we were supposed to go all the way to the Finals, and so after the season, if I don’t get injured, the season goes differently, and coach Karl being the Coach of the Year and Masai being the GM of the Year, maybe they have a different path,” Gallinari added. “The Nuggets have a different path, but that’s another huge what-if.
But I had a great time in Denver; it was the only team that I played for more than two years. I played there for six and a half seasons, so it’s definitely the city and the team that I’m closer to.
And so I had a great time in Denver.”
Gallinari entered the league with real expectations as the sixth overall pick, and by his second season in New York, he was flashing the kind of all-around game that suggested something bigger was coming. He was averaging 15.1 points, 4.9 rebounds, 1.7 assists, 0.9 steals, and 0.7 blocks per game while shooting 42.3% from the field.
That early run in New York made the trade feel even heavier in hindsight. Gallinari had something building there, and then the path changed. Between the trade and the injuries, the “what-if” label has followed him ever since.
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