MAVS NEWS:

[cow]

Honestly my biggest conspiracy right now is that Nico and Kidd have been planning on trading Luka for months. This doesn't come out of the blue. I think Nico+Kidd were obviously tired of Luka. Nico's comments and his hit pieces in the media say so.

But going back, at the start of the year, Kidd radically transformed how this offense ran. He put Luka off ball the entire time. No longer did we spam spread PnR's. Sure Luka had his pet spain PnR but those were few and far between compared to last year. In fact, what Kidd replaced the PnR's with were dribble hand offs with the big man at the top of the key. More post ups. More paint touches. Looking back, it feels like Kidd changed his offense with a dominant big man in mind. It's almost like he wanted to prep this team and these guys to run a certain play style before they had the guy he really wanted.

I mean we see it when we put Gafford at the 3pt line and have Klay run around him, Gafford's defender flat out ignores him and is free to double Klay or whoever is coming off the dribble hand off (DHO). But imagine if you had, I don't know, lets say Anthony Davis in that scenario. You cannot leave AD alone in a DHO situation. He can absolutely put the ball on the floor in that situation and make teams pay.

What if Nico, and by extension Kidd, knew Luka would come into the season out of shape? What if they were ready to move on since October? What if they were planning this trade for AD for months in secrecy? As in, "if Luka does what we'll think he'll do, we cut bait". And that's exactly what happened.

I mean I don't find it a coincidence our coach changed how to run a Luka offense to a big man oriented one where the centers are creating opportunities and DHO's are used incessantly and  the very same season the team trades Luka.

Just had that thought.

I'm sure the idea had been brewing for a while but trading Luka wouldn't be received as poorly if the return hadn't been pitiful.  They've basically shortened the championship window of this team two years beyond this one if you are being generous and that's if you can get Kyrie to resign.  And in that timespan, you've got a few up-and-coming teams that will probably figure it out (even if it feels like we have OKC's number).  This year seems like a throwaway with the team in perpetual injury hell.  I really hope this goes poorly and they trade AD before the next year's TDL so we can recoup some assets.