Luka Dealt to Lakers: Nico Harrison is a Basketball Terrorist

[hakeemfaan]

The Cowboys will return to relevance before the Mavs for sure. Football teams turn around overnight all the time. Basketball takes a long time. You have to get lucky and find maybe the one player in the draft that comes around every three years or so on average that you can build a contender around. Then you need to wait about 3-4 years for them to mature. At the same time, you need a complimentary star (easier to find, but still difficult).  Finally, the others. It’s not a slam dunk that you can find the set of role players to fit perfectly around your superstar, but a competent organization should be able to navigate that challenge, though it might take a couple of years. This is all even more difficult, actually impossible to do, if you don’t control your draft picks for 4 years. The way I see it, if the Mavs don’t land a potential top 5 player in one of the next two drafts, the best case window to becoming a team worthy of fans won’t open for another 7-8 years, and probably longer. And we all know the Mavs can’t pull that off in the next two years. Get ready for a long period of irrelevance.

These days even football is highly dependent on a generational QB. So in that sense both sports are the same. 

The thing that Cuban realized after 2011 is that the Mavs are just another franchise.  They could very well be playing in Idaho. Other than the local fan base no one cares about them. Jerruh and his progeny can screw it up for another two decades. The Cowboys will still be a legendary franchise and you can go to some remote part of the world and you will find someone who has heard of the Dallas Cowboys.  That’s the part Nico and Dumont have not realized yet.  This franchise can fall off the relevancy map in a nanosecond and just having a really solid, maybe even contending, team is not going to get that relevancy. How many casual fans care about the Cavs or OKC?  It is what it is. The moment Dumont makes peace with that he won’t make a blunder like this one ever again where he lets a generational star slip out just because he feels that player might never get him a title.