Trade & FA 2023-24: Stein-Ingram Trade Inevitable| LAL Want Lebron Back On Any Terms

[omahen]

For those who want to wait until the summer:



Josh Bowe
@Boweman55
the mavericks big money offseason trade/free agent acquisitions since luka's rookie season:

delon wright, 2019
josh richardson, 2020
reggie bullock, 2021
christian wood, 2022
grant williams, 2023

That is true, but lets not neglect the fact that both big trade acquisitions (KP, Irving) were done at TDL while using some of the best assets available. This offseason will be the first one since drafting Luka where Mavs will actually have serious assets available. Another connecting dot for all of the moves above was Mavs opting for meh options instead of collecting/saving assets to use once the real opportunity comes. And then spending assets to dump those guys, whose main fault was that they were simply not good enough for the role Mavs wanted them to be. Wright, Richardson and even Bullock are solid rotation players, but none of them is close to the quality of third best guy Mavs are searching through this whole period (first third best guy to play next to Luka and KP and second third best guy to play next to Luka and Kyrie). The exact same mistake they are likely to repeat this TDL by spending assets on an average player that will just not be good enough for the role they need.

The big fail was free agency in KP years, where they had cap space possibilities twice but used them as described above. Even if big targets were not available or didn't want to come, a better approach would be to capitalize on cap space by eating some bad salaries for assets instead of signing and overpaying average rotation players.