Luka Dealt to Lakers: Nico Harrison is a Basketball Terrorist

[F Gump]

The kicker to me is that they had really built the perfect team around Luka - if they just would have waited for him to come back from injury...

I agree. I would not have traded Luka.

But I also recognize that WITHOUT Luka (ie, with him sitting on the sidelines due to conditioning and health issues, of his own doing they say) it's not ever going to be the perfect team we think it is. We got a good dose of that in the 2 months prior to the trade, and it wasn't that special. Rightly or wrongly, the Mavs FO contention is that those 2 months are way likely to be characteristic of where that "perfect" team on paper was headed.

Nevertheless I would not have traded Luka. I would have rode it out, and hoped he would one day wake up and get diligent about the prep to be better. If he didn't, I'd still sell tickets and jerseys and hope that fans would still flock to games. But to be fair, it's not my half-a-billion either. That's a lot of coin and commitment to a player you think doesn't give a crap about what has been shown over the years to be necessary to play years at that high level for a season plus the long playoffs. We'll see.