Luka Dealt to Lakers: Nico Harrison is a Basketball Terrorist

[F Gump]

I think this is a valid point, too, which makes me wonder how they soured on Luka so thoroughly. 

I'm not saying Harrison is infallible - far from it - but I also don't think he's a moron. He mortgaged that 4+ year window you're referring to in an effort to build around Luka, specifically, so I don't buy for a second that he's been wanting to pull this rug for very long. I think he had an internal clock (or a literal clock, considering the impending extension eligibility) on a maturation process and finally just decided it was never going to happen. 

I think Smitty said it the best last week. We were discussing what type of event it would take for Luka to see how important proactive focus on his health and fitness was to his career, and Smitty said something like "reaching the Finals and losing badly certainly didn't do it." That, right there, is what happened, imo. I think Luka showed up for the season out of shape AGAIN, and this time worse than ever before, and any/all momentum that the team should have carried with it from last year dissipated. It might have been the wrong choice on the team's part not to fight through it again, but I bet a ton of people were super frustrated by that.

"reaching the Finals and losing badly certainly didn't do it."

To build on the above a bit, Luka ended the playoffs last year a bit impaired, but there was the implied promise that he had 3 1/2 months to heal and get his body right. INSTEAD, he played in the Olympics, getting banged up further, but still had time to work on getting healed - and then a couple months later came to camp in even worse shape than when he had left in the summer, from what I've read.

It wasn't just that he showed up out of shape this season, but also that he had been given a window of opportunity to work on what was broken, and didn't care to do so. He apparently didn't even try. That's really bad.

A million posts ago in all this head-scratching and discussion over trying to make sense of what's happened, someone made an observation about Luka's essential refusal to do what is necessary on his conditioning and off-court work on his game that really resonated to me, which I'm paraphrasing: We are upset about how the Mavs could be so disloyal to Luka. But loyalty is a two-way street.

And I think that's where I am. A Luka who doesn't want to take the needed personal actions isn't really all-in on the team and its success. FROM THAT PERSPECTIVE, it's easy to see why the Mavs FO wouldn't want to commit the next half dozen years being subject to his undedicated whims, especially when his style of play, and his contract, will make his personal improvement the absolute determiner of whether they can succeed or not.