07-15-2022, 01:27 PM
(07-15-2022, 12:16 PM)cow Wrote: It's not a knock on Luka but threading the needle on a one way superstar like Luka is going to be challenging for any organization. Curry has been bolstered by defensive stalwarts like Draymond or amazing two way players like Thompson. And while the Mavs did this with Dirk, the free agency and trade market game has changed and we certainly haven't kept pace.
I do think Donnie and Rick had a lot of blame in that regard but so far Nico and Kidd haven't faired any better and maybe worse. Not getting conversations with big named free agents was a trend in recent history. We couldn't even get a conversation with Jalen Brunson.
And while we have hope for the Christian Wood pairing, no matter how well it works out this could be a very short term relationship. In my head, even if Wood and Luka play well together, the Mavericks really aren't any better than last year, at least not more than marginally.
I don't think Luka is going to ask out of Dallas anytime soon but we do need to start moving in the right direction. We accomplished that last year but Jalen walked for nothing. We can't keep spinning our tires. The good news is that we will own all of our FRPs after next years draft and the Dwight Powell era will be over. The bad news is that we still have Bertans terrible contract and Utah is asking for 6 picks for a player of Mitchell's caliber. We'll never be able to afford that as we don't have a way of generating first round picks. I'm just not seeing the path to getting off this treadmill. KP was such a terrible decision by the previous MBT.
I agree with most of this, but I think you are focusing a little too much on a Danny Ainge offer that was not even accepted. The Jrue and Murray trades are the standard for what we want to do in the next two off seasons to be a contender. Ideally we could have gotten there organically or at least built up some assets so we would not have to mortgage our entire future to make the trade, but due to this organizations constant failures that is where we are at.