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[Mapka]

This is a very accurate observation about the Mavs ongoing desperate need for EXPERT Evaluation, and it goes hand-in-hand with the need for Expert Negotiation. It's not enough to know the worth to you of Player X or Y, but you also need to be able to excel in the way you navigate the competitive waters whether acquiring or disposing of them.

KP is a good example. He was holding the Mavs back. So the decision to get rid of him was good evaluation.

But their ability to get his value back in return? Not good at all. That accurate evaluation was negated by their negotiating ineptness.

What they got wasn't just a happenstance of opportunity, but rather a failure to know how to win a deal. The fact that they took on 2 bad contracts that the Wiz badly wanted to move AND had to give the best player in the deal AND had to sweeten the deal with a pick, rather than getting a pick and some commensurate talent to make up for all that bad salary, that was getting pantsed -- an outcome that's not anything new for Cuban in doing deals.

The excellence in competitive negotiation is what allows a team to efficiently acquire player assets, and turn them into more assets when they aren't the answer for this team. The Mavs tend to suck at the latter. Some of that is tied into poor evaluation skills beforehand, either in getting the player in the first place or in figuring out what he should be worth on the market, but there's also a lack of skill in playing good old fashioned poker with 29 other front offices. (And Cuban's NBA and Shark Tank go-to tactic of simply paying more than the competition doesn't work in the NBA, where every owner is a billionaire and where league cap rules tend to punish those who lose negotiations.)

Yeah, or that was just the best deal available.

With most of the deals the Mavs do, you can at least see why they do it.
That’s more than you can say about half the league.