MAVS NEWS:

[michaeltex]

Welcome to the 'bargaining' stage of grief.  Unless you believe one of the conspiracy theories, then yes, this seems to be Nico's thinking.  It is a $350mm bet he didn't want to make.  Unfortunately for Nico, I don't think he can win over the fans still firmly entrenched in "anger".  If Dallas makes a long playoff run, fans will say "Luka could have done that".  If Luka balloons to some massive weight or continues to miss large swaths of time from injuries, fans will say "you can't prove it would have happened here".  And that doesn't even account for the scenarios where Luka plays well or AD suffers a serious injury.

FWIW, I think the $350M extension is the crux of the whole deal. Luka (rightly?) wasn't going to agree to anything less than the max DAL could offer, so the idea of signing on to a lesser value for the extension is a non-starter. However, the trade makes the supermax go away for the next contract, bad for Luka but it takes the problem off the table for DAL.

Throw in the basketful of conditioning/injury/play style issues discussed here and other places, then I can see how the MBT felt cornered if they didn't make a move now. Perlinka read the tea leaves and correctly deduced Nico's dilemma whereupon he used the leverage to reduce the return to DAL. Then was an a$$hole to discuss it publicly. If I was Nico, I'd take him off my christmas card list, but waiting until the offseason was just going to make it worse. 

Look, we had our unicorn in Luka, but AD was considered a unicorn when he came into the league as well. He still has a lot of that cachet, it's just been hard to see with the LBJ spotlight in LA.