Trade & Free Agency 2026/2027

[Dundalis]

No I'm fully aware of how great Luka is. I personally never want to watch that style of basketball again. That's just me. I don't want him back.

I feel like this is somewhat revisionist history. NO ONE in the fanbase wanted the ball in anyones hands but Luka and then Kyrie when he came, for the majority of the Luka era. No one wanted to see more touches from the likes of DFS, Reggie Bullock, DJJ, Maxi, even a THJ or Dinwiddie. If they even tried it, people would be hammering the door to put the ball more in Luka's hands, because the others would consistently make garbage decisions when they had the ball and actually had to make meaningful decisions. And you can see that by the fact a lot of them had their most success playing with Luka, and were crap in other situations.

When Kyrie came, Luka willingly deferred to him because he recognized he actually was good enough have a significant amount of usage and not make the offense dysfunctional with dogshit decision making and lack of self creation skills. Luka never had a cast of multiple starters with him that were high level connectors who could create their own offense or make high level decisions with the ball.

I'd also say there was plenty of exciting basketball during that time, and anyone saying differently is telling fibs. It's very easy to look back at that and simply pin the entire playstyle on Luka when literally no one wanted us to play any differently because the FO never put the quality of players around him that would make the offense look any better playing differently, and when Kidd came along we didn't have a coach who gave a shit about implementing any kind of structured offense in the first place.

I don't think it's happening, but Luka coming back automatically makes this team a true contender, and that trumps just about every other complaint anyone has. If he actively reaches out and wants to come back, I think any FO thats even half competent attempts to make that happen. By that time Coop will almost certainly have established himself as one of the premier two way players in the league, and he'd be treated the same way Luka treated Kyrie, where 100% they both made each others lives much easier having each other to take defensive attention away from the other. Coop is gonna be doubled and tripled for his whole career, a player like Luka would completely erase that defensive attention in a way even Kyrie won't be able to.