MAVS NEWS:

[F Gump]

.... if you trade your 21 year old center at his lowest value when he's shown top 10 center in this league potential already then ....

ITEM 1 - I absolutely 1000% think this ^ is a massively wrong evaluation, even though thoughts like this about Lively (expectations he is looming as a future all-star dominant big) from lots and lots of posters are often repeated in various threads.

What is being ignored - and imo it's a MAJOR part of player evaluation -- is that a player has to be evaluated based on "regularly repeatable" ability, not on "peak" ability. Lots of players can look like an all-star in 1 game, but the true all-star is the one who can play at that level in about EVERY game. 

And Lively has not ever shown "regularly repeatable" ability to play at a high level in every game - because he hasn't shown that he can be available, way too often, to even play at all. Even when he plays he's not really a 30 mpg guy on a regular basis, as far as we have EVER seen. The injuries have been an issue over and over and over and over. As the old saying goes, the top ability for a player is availability. We have seen no potential at all for Lively to have ongoing consistent availability.

ITEM 2 - Now do some of you vocal critics see why I have been saying it would be a mistake to trade Gafford? In our desire to make trades, we keep ignoring how bad it is to be without good centers, where the team gets manhandled and dominated on the boards, and take for granted the difficult task of getting 1-2 good ones to handle the needs for 48 minutes. 

Where will we ever find minutes for all of these centers, you demanded to know? In fact, we haven't really had enough minutes played by GOOD centers this season. Even with the [supposed] "too many centers" roster, we have seen a steady early-season diet of C minutes going to the meh 3rd stringer (Powell) and the raw 2-way guy (Cisse) and at times no one at all (because you might as well try small ball and see if that helps) because we just don't have other options. Ugh.    

To be clear, I don't think the best plan is to have a bunch of gimpy centers and hope you have 2 of them healthy each game. But because of the injury tendencies, for now, the Mavs are FAR from having too many good centers and not enough minutes. 

Does it really matter this season? IMO not at all. But for the long run, the priority needs to be getting players who can suit up every game, or close to it.