Accurately Assessing the Mavs Recent Personnel Changes

[mvossman]

I understand this POV, but I'm not buying it. I know this pushback might miss some of the nuance you're going for here, but I think, in a general sense, this line of thinking is a trend towards minimizing the magic of a specific group of players fitting together a specific way, both on and off the court. Personally, I don't view the two WCF appearances as being equal, or even close. This one seemed way more repeatable to me (maybe I'm wrong about that). I think there really is some cause for concern that this amount of change, more with DJJ than the others, might be too much to easily capitalize on the momentum last season's team generated. I mean, we've even got Jared Dudley saying he was "the best defender on the team" from Vegas, weeks after he left. 

I agree that it's silly in a way to look at guys like DJJ as irreplaceable, but that doesn't mean I'm able to get to a place where I feel like any comparable player can be plugged in to achieve the same results. I find that logic faulty on numerous levels. I do have hope that it can work out with these, specific replacements, but that's because I like the replacements, as well as the reasoning behind targeting them (or at least what I think that reasoning must've been). In fact, I think it's almost a no-brainer that Thompson will be better than Hardaway and Grimes will be better than Green, but with DJJ and Marshall, I think the change will require a pretty major adjustment from the team to succeed. The good news is that if they can make that adjustment competently, the team might be better for it in ways we can't predict. 

But, I still think it's true that if DJJ doesn't have the season he had (along with other lucky fits) the team would've been disappointing, Luka and Kyrie or not.

Agree on the difference between the finals team and the WCF team.  That team's frontcourt depth was decimated by the KP trade.  The only playable players were Powell/Maxi/Dorian.  I think it was Kidd's finest coaching job of his career to close the season strong and get to the WCF with that frontcourt.  At the time, Brunson was not near Kyrie level yet and with Powell struggling so much in the playoffs, they basically ran a 6 man rotation.  The only thing that team had over this one was a legit third creator (which is why I wish we would have gone down that route).