Luka Dealt to Lakers: Nico Harrison is a Basketball Terrorist

[mavsmagic]

I think the rest of your post is reasonable and you might be right on target, but I didn't think he showed up in shape this year AT ALL, and one of the things that came out this week was that his first injury of the season was made up by the organization so that he could take a couple of weeks off and try to get into better shape. He was not playing well at all to start the season off and was only just recently starting to pick things up before this latest, real injury. 

Oh, and this was the second, consecutive year they've had to manufacture an excuse during the early months of the season for him to miss time for conditioning. 

You might be absolutely right that betting on him long term is the smart play here, and you ARE absolutely right that he has proven to be great time and time again, but if we're going to be objective about things, we have to acknowledge that his conditioning is a train wreck and has been trending south for the past 3-4 years consistently.

I think train wreck is a bit of an exaggeration. He definitely could have done a lot better, but for him to play the amount of games & minutes he did (and make all-nba first team 5 times) he obviously wasn't that bad. Also, I don’t know how many times I need to say it, but no superstar is perfect or without flaws. Especially not at 25. Dirk, for example, didn’t even take conditioning seriously until he was 28. 

https://www.reddit.com/r/Mavericks/s/ldnlk2LFY0

Speaking of Dirk…per Marc Stein, he will be at Luka’s Laker debut tonight. I think that says a lot. It’s nice to know loyalty still means something to at least one person.

https://x.com/TheSteinLine/status/1889108761983500304