Trade & FA 2025-26: Free Agency Starts 5pm CST/6pm EST

[KillerLeft]

I tried to point this out back when the trade happened.  LA had no guarantee Luka would stay and no real advantage to keeping him.  That has to be taken into account when determining value.  It isn’t to say Nico got enough necessarily.  It is to say that there was a limit to what he could get given the flight risk once the Super Max was off the table.

And even another way to look at it (building on this point about extracting value) is that LA was/is one of the very few teams plausibly able to convince themselves they could keep him, which is why a trade for Giannis from Milwaukee (just as an example) was never, ever going to happen. 

The Knicks had Brunson, and were very happy with their direction. 
Miami had nothing even remotely worth thinking about in exchange for Luka. Ditto for Brooklyn. Those teams didn't even have their own picks. 
I suppose you could make an argument that you'd rather have Kawhi than AD, but I wouldn't, especially at the time. 
Boston had the best team in the NBA and was trying to figure out how to get cheaper, not sign up for another max player. 

That's about the list of teams you could plausibly expect to want to get into the Luka business, isn't it? Even if you wanted to tear the team down and make a deal for "all the picks in the world," which Harrison clearly didn't, there aren't many teams with lots of picks left, and, due to his contractual situation (which is your point), those teams wouldn't have dared spend them on Luka at that time. 

The farther we get from the deal, the more I think it's about one thing, and one thing only: Some people just flat out don't think Luka should've been traded unless he had asked to be, no matter what. That is a defensible viewpoint, because he absolutely would've taken that supermax here. But, the Mavs didn't want to give it to him. So, we can either wrap our heads around that or not, but I'm kind of done criticizing the actual deal. I think they could've gotten a little more from LA, but I also think Dallas is in a much, much better position than LA is (yes, due to quite a bit of dumb luck, but not only because of that). I think AD is a great, great player to have, and I think there's reason to be very optimistic about the next few seasons.