Only Fantasy Traders in the Building (The Mitchell Case)

[F Gump]

It’s not hard to see. Mavs would be “giving up” 3 guys. Losing one of them is a loss. Losing the other 2 is a gain. 

You make sense when you say you don’t want RW. You make sense when you say the option to get under the cap isn’t valuable to you. You don’t make sense when you call sending these 3 guys out the door stripping down the roster.

Please stop strawmanning me. I never said "sending these 3 guys out the door [would be] stripping down the roster." I never said trading for RW would, either. That's a fabrication of you and others who have chosen to make this discussion personal.

The proposed plan (which is what I replied to) was to get a top-level free agent, by trading for RW. That plan does require stripping down the roster.

For the plan to work, you need two things, which no one can answer so they circle around to attack the messenger --
(1) to have excellent FA choices that are likely to come to Dallas ...I keep being told "That's not a problem" but no one is giving me 4-5 names that will be out there that the Mavs would want and that could very likely want Dallas, to make it desirable to head down that path. Not a single name, just personal attacks.
... Looking at the list, the 2 best FA choices for Dallas might be Wood and Kleber, and imo the Mavs would be wise to try to extend both and keep them out of the FA mix.
(2) to strip down the roster ... Assuming you keep your players and don't strip down the roster, you don't get any cap room by trading for RW and letting him walk away. None.

I'm also reading the idea that the Mavs could merely do the RW swap and then could go out into free agency, with the rest of the team intact, and add a couple of mid-tier players. Again, no, that isn't an option because you have no cap room.

The fact is that the Mavs are about 42M over the cap. If they did this trade for RW, that number would be even bigger. Then when he walks, his 47M salary is gone, and they will be near or a bit over the cap assuming they want to keep players like Wood and Kleber, and can do so at about the same salary.

So as I pointed out, this plan is predicated on stripping down the roster, as there will be no cap room without stripping the roster of players you really need.

So if you don't really intend to strip down the roster, take that end result out of the equation, and in that light, I think you're way better off to have your smaller pieces than RW for a year, followed by air.