04-23-2025, 01:00 PM
(04-23-2025, 12:23 PM)ThisIStheYear Wrote: Watching Luka last night and just how great you have to be to lead a team, even to have a chance because the TWolves are a super difficult matchup for the smaller and less athletic Lakers, through round after round of playoff hell where scoring goes down 30 points a game because of the intensity, makes me realize how few players are built for that. Luka is one of the few who is. AD and Kai are very good, but they’re just#2s mentally and in style of play and are too late in their career to develop as a #1. It may be a generation before the Mavs acquire another #1 and become a true contender again. Nico is a complete idiot.
Luka is one of the very few superstars that plays better the higher the stakes are. Kawhi is another, Curry as well. You never trade those kind of players if you‘re serious about winning. You try everything else before you do that - throw Kidd out and get a Thibs-style hard-nosed coach like Avery was for Dirk to get him defense and conditioning focused for two or three years before you change the coach again to a Carlisle 2.0, try different iterations of co-stars and supporting casts etc… But never trade your by far most valuable asset.
My fear is that this is just the beginning of the demise of our beloved Mavs - the theory of the Adelson-grandson taking over in a couple of years for the next decades scares me a lot.