DRAFT: #18 [Green] & #31 [Terry] & trade for #36 [Tyler Bey]

[Scott41theMavs]

Ugh... Whatever happens, I just desperately need this not to be a repeat of the extreme whiff of the 2019 offseason.

If the Mavs are able to pick up two additional contributors who bring as much to the table as Curry and Boban do, I will be THRILLED.

I understand the Gospel of the 2019 offseason according to KL, but it's not part of my canon. The Mavs had massive cap room. With league-average-minimal recruiting skills, they could have quite easily brought in a third-best player complementary to Luka and KP in a way that didn't jeopardize future moves. Their failure in this either indicates that they are grossly incompetent recruiters or abjectly moronic team builders. I prefer to believe the former. However, even the salvage efforts after the initial humiliating whiff fell way short. They signed KP way too early, when it should have been the capstone move, tying up cap. Instead of waiting on a guy like Danny Green, who wouldn't have moved the needle much, they could have signed another bargain player or two so that the Mavs had more of a talent base for this offseason - let alone a better team on the floor than what they did.

I believe that the root of the Mavs' debacle of an offseason was one gigantic fail in their judgment - believing that healthy Dwight Powell was a good enough player to start for a contending team, when binarily he wasn't good enough to start for an NBA team with an objective other than tanking. We were waiting on Green to bring THJ off the bench - KP and DP were always the frontcourt. I know that this board is full of hood-winking apologists who are with the MBT on this (i.e. healthy Powell was really good enough), but it just factually isn't so. With that kind of foolishness as your team-building foundation, of course that erroneous premise is going to lead to further horrendous mistakes. The Powell injury and its medium-term (if not long-term) consequences have hopefully forced the MBT to go in different directions.

I do agree with you that it behooves the Mavs this offseason not to do anything which gets the team stuck on the treadmill of mediocrity (i.e. team-finishing moves that prevent future movement when they're at a position where they need to make several more moves in order to be "finished") and perhaps even to preserve '21 capspace at all costs as their best shot pre-Luka extension of finishing the team, but that's because of the horrendous errors of the 2019 offseason, not in dogmatic imitation of them.