Trade & FA 2024-25:

[F Gump]

You are talking about a very young team that just made the finals.  I'm not sure they need to do anything other than maybe retain DJJ.  Given their limited assets, you could make a strong argument that they should simply focus on holding on to him and improve around the edges.  But that's not very fun to talk about.

I think this makes a lot of sense.

To retain DJJ, it looks likely that it's solved by an off-loading of THJ, and if just a swap for air there's almost room for both 12.9M NT MLE and 4.7M BAE. How much would be left over for BAE would depend on the exact cap, exact Apron 1, how much DJJ gets paid, how much cushion the Mavs want to leave, whether they want to carry 15, etc, but it's certainly enough for DJJ and then some. Maybe a player would come back in that trade to fill the BAE-ish-sized slot, or maybe not.

As a side note, the emergency bailout on THJ (so that they have more space to re-sign DJJ) is a SW, if the price to swap him into cap room is exorbitant. That yields less than NT MLE, but gets the number up to maybe 9 or 10 or 11M, depending on all the factors noted above. But I have to think they will work to avoid that as their answer, with its lesser cap room and its hit on 2 more cap years.

In a trade of THJ for air, Mavs would also get a sizable TPE, for THJ's full salary (even if a BAE-sized player is coming back), which could be helpful in off-season of 2025.

If we start with that, then there's flexibility, and perhaps they roll with the same cast less THJ, and then do a tweak (or bigger) at the TDL after seeing how it all is playing out over a longer time frame..

There are reasons they might not be in a rush to do more than that. For example -- About Grimes, do the Mavs like Hardy more? About Deni, would they rather play OMax and Green? And is Deni worth the competitive price tag (assuming he's really available, which seems too easily assumed to me)? On other deals, how do you package pieces together to make the deal dollar-neutral? It's way harder than it looks.