12-28-2021, 01:01 PM
(12-28-2021, 10:13 AM)Mavs2021 Wrote: I advice to get rid of some of THJ, Bullock, Powell, WCS, Kleber, Burke or Boban instead. That´s an insane amount of salary, roughly 60M for guys that are all inferior to Brunson. Just give Brunson his $17M/year. Then it only becomes a question of whether Brunson is satisified with being the 2nd or 3rd best guard on the team, possibly the 6th man of the year or if he wants more.
Brunson is a 25 year old UFA. Right now he´s averaging 16/6/4. That´s right in the ball park of guys like N. Powell, Trent Jr., Rozier or Lavert. 17M seems a fair number for him. It´s not cheap, but we are paying THJ more for 15/2/4, so it´s very simple. You talk to Brunson´s agent right now. Lay out the plan/usage, lay out the contract and say you want to extend your deal or not. He says YES, you work the trade market for THJ. He says NO, you work the trade market for Brunson.
I´m pretty confident you can get Gary Harris or Jeremy Lamb for THJ with the old Mavs connections and those teams lack of FA options. Those are also two players that will probably be re-signed for less than the MLE next summer, so you actually get to keep them, but they are no threat for Brunson´s status.
I'm not sure that having multiple bad contracts that need to be dumped (Maxi does not belong on this list) is a great argument for signing Brunson to 17. The right answer might be to let all of them go (eventually).
Lets say you can get Brunson/agent to agree to end of season contract prior to TDL (I am skeptical), then the question is do you want Brunson as sixth man at 17, or whatever you can get in a trade? What if you can get Mavs 23 pick for him? Which would you rather have?