Non Knee-Jerk Takes

[KillerLeft]

I don't mind KP being traded. Looks like this was their primary goal. I also don't mind who he got traded for. 

However:

1. It is a fact that Mavs were giving up best player in the deal. As others have pointed out, Dinwiddie and Bertans both carry significant injury risk with them. Even before the trade, some analysts have pointed at Bertans as worst contract in the league. Dinwiddie contract is no pearl either and they are both on a down year. So Mavs were trading best player with similar money owed to a team, that is desperate for relevance (not tanking team). How well will those players perform for Dallas is basically irrelevant in this discussion, as is future flexibility they allegedly provide. Fact is, their trade value at this moment is very low. Based on all this, Mavs didn't get enough in return in this deal. The goal of trading KP was executed very poorly.

2. I am extremely concerned what this means for Brunson and true Mavs intentions regarding him. 

3. Roster construction will be just awful. Mavs will have three bench players paid over 15 million each. Bench player paid over 15 million is a bad contract in its very definition. They are also not some high upside players, they are all vets near 30 year old. I can agree that flexibility has increased, but it remains to be seen if Mavs will be able to take advantage of it. We have years of proof where good contracts of the likes of Maxi, Powell and similar generated zero possibility for upgrades.

This, to me, is a great post. 

I don't agree with every word of it, but I think most of it is right on the money. And, more to the point, you can tell when reading that a lot of thinking has been done before and during the writing of it. You can see how the thought process got the writer to these conclusions, and how the points fit together. Posts like this one make me re-examine some of the things I think. 

Best of all, it doesn't come off like it's defensive, or directed at anyone here. It's literally just @"omahen"'s carefully considered (and valuable) take on the situation. 

The board atmosphere has, imo, not been super fun for the past 24 hours or so. We don't all like the deal, I get it. More accurately, there's only 1-2 people (I can only think of @"Kammrath" and @"audiosway") who DO like it. There are 5-10 more of us who have attempted to look for positives in a bad situation, but we hate the situation just as much as the rest of you do. 

Speaking for myself, I have been feeling the way you all feel today almost nonstop since before LAST SEASON'S trade deadline, when it first dawned on me that this kind of ending to the Porzingis era was likely (would love to have been wrong). Every day since then, when we all had to try to pretend it was going to fine, THAT was terrible. It's over now, and while I DO NOT like the trade, I can find a little peace in the idea that the worst of it is finally behind us and there's now a chance of things getting better (though that's far from a guarantee - trust me, I understand that). 

I can totally see how those who actually thought KP had value around the league and was valued by the Mavericks were totally blindsided by this. He didn't, and he wasn't. I'm not meaning to criticize those people, either, because during his best moments this season, I admit he was slowly starting to win me back to a more hopeful frame of mind about his chances here. Hell, I was even starting to imagine that he might be worth a little something in a trade (wrong). I get how crushing this must be for some of us. 

I just wish we could be pissed about something the team does without flooding the community with negativity, or at least without turning on each other. It's not even about specific people, either (although I do think some are more predisposed to not approving of team choices than others, regardless of what those choices are). It's about the people who are pissed being even more pissed when they see that others are not pissed. I have done it. We've all done it. Being on this side of it today, I've got to say I think (just my opinion, not an "official" MavsBoard policy or anything) we can do better with that.

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After reading and listening to a lot of people in the last day, it seems people are placing some king of symbolic value on moving on from KP.  Like it signals a new direction for the franchise and we dont really care what the return was but we had to address the elephant in the room.  Maybe there is something to that idea that I'm not giving enough credit to.

Still seems like poor execution and asset management to me.

I would say that they do care about the return, but maybe not as much as they care about what you're calling "symbolic value"...which is a great way of wording it, and pretty close to accurate. Only, I think there is actually quite a bit of tangible value mixed in with the symbolic value, personally. 

But yeah, you are zeroing in on why some of us aren't freaking out, even if we're not super excited about the deal.