MAVS 107, BULLS 117

[mvossman]

I am wrong about a lot, and could be wrong about this as well.  But this offseason, I thought the Mavs had to think bigger.   I like Hardaway and think he is a good player.  Although resigning him pretty much said the Mavs were working around the edges to improve the team.   I thought they first needed to prioritize about adding talent before worrying about improving on the edges.   

So my mantra all offseason was I would not be giving a good offseason grade if they tried to improve around the edges.   I would have targeted Derozan (In fact, I would have tried to sell both Derozan and Lowry, although looking back that probably wasn't in the cards or $ feasible).   I would have then went after a top 3 and D wing (Batum, Danny Green, etc).  And then use the rest of the money for a 4/5 big man who provides some toughness and ideally could score inside if needed.  

Would that have been a better offseason?  I think so.  Others may disagree.

I was on the same page that they needed to do something bigger as this was potentially the last offseason they would have room to operate under the cap for a while.  I was not a fan of DeRozan (especially at 26 mil/year) as I was concerned about his fit with Luka, but given how little we did this offseason I probably would have preferred that to what we did (essentially nothing).

Just to be clear though, if we signed DeRozan that would have meant no THJ or Bullock unless we make moves to dump salary as we would only have roughly 6 mil leftover.  The exception would be if we could have convinced the Spurs to take on KP in a S&T.  We do that and we might have managed to squeeze in Holmes, THJ and Bullock under the cap.  That would be a trade of KP/WCS for Holmes/DeRozan.  Easy call at this point.

I heard we went hard after Batum but he wanted to stay a Clipper, and when have we not gone after Danny Green?  My guess was Bullock was the best 3&D we could get for the MLE.  Along the lines of your thinking, if we could not land any big fish at all, I would preferred to go for the 3 MLE guys that we could spend a few extra mil on.  If Bullock was our best 3&D option, then I probably would have preferred a Theis/Bullock/Caruso offseason to THJ/Bullock/WCS.

If nothing else, if we were intending to do this two big lineup to "protect KP" then I have no idea why we did not at least get Holmes.  He would have been way more impactful than Bullock, and all that would have cost was letting WCS walk.