Luka Dealt to Lakers: Nico Harrison is a Basketball Terrorist

[KillerLeft]

I'm not positive we get a better deal by making this an open auction.  Luka loses a ton of money in this deal.  If this becomes public, he probably says he will only extend with this team or that.  Possibly just the Lakers and probably for a lesser package than what we got.  There is a world in which Nico actually gets less than this if he went a different route.  There isn't any single player who would have satisfied us (maybe Jokic or GA).  Without AD in the package, you probably need to move on from Kyrie and Klay also.  Doing this deal differently may have landed us more picks (been there done that) while costing us any chance to compete in the near term.  I'm not that interested in being a team with a dozen upcoming picks led by PJ Washington and Dereck Lively.

Great post! 

I agree with basically everything until the very last paragraph. I understand the point of how going public affects how much leverage can be applied, and from where, but I don't agree that there's even a chance they end up with a worse deal than this. They might not have ended up with AD or any other passable "win-now" player, but they'd have gotten better draft compensation, and THEREIN lies the disconnect between Harrison and fans, I think:

I do not really care whether the Mavs are good now. It's not because Luka is gone - I agree with everything RTG, FGump and you are saying today. It's because they are now a team filled with a bunch of old guys who I don't perceive as Mavericks. I'm not sure I could've actually predicted this, but I'm just not connected to this team, all of a sudden. I'm morning the loss of the promise that was the Luka Doncic era, I suppose. Luka Doncic the person was starting to suck the fun out of things for me, too, but he was 25, and I guess I still believed he'd mature past it all and claim his place in history right behind Jordan and LeBron, and while wearing a Mavs uniform. I think what's gone today is hope, really. 

I would've preferred blowing it up once the decision to trade Luka was made. I would've preferred to go forward with Hardy, Lively, O-Max and all of the picks in the world. THAT would be exciting, at least on some delusional level, because it would have hope baked into it, and would help with closure on the Luka thing, to some extent. The thrill of searching for the next era. 

Obviously the current team will be better this way than if they'd held an auction. It would've gotten messy and they'd have then made other tear down moves, but I just can't seem to find it in me to care much about the current team at the moment, and I was a Mavs fan more than a Luka fan. Maybe that will change if/when the team starts to play well, but something was lost here that is truly depressing.