07-13-2022, 03:24 PM
(07-13-2022, 02:50 PM)KillerLeft Wrote: It's only my opinion, and I'm sure some will find it unreasonable, but once every opportunity to trade Brunson had passed (TDL, previous off season, whatever), with Luka's rookie max extension kicking in, I believe Cuban should've been prepared to go all the way to Brunson's max to keep him, if that's what it took. He clearly was not, and was just hoping no other team (that Brunson liked) would be able to make a compelling offer. I think Cuban believed that there'd be a dog-and-pony show of interest from either IND or DET, forcing Brunson's price up a little, and he'd re-sign here for about $19-20 million per.
We'll never know the full extent of what trade opportunities came up for Brunson along the way leading up to this summer, and while you can convince me in a general sense that they might not have been very good opportunities when weighed against the underlined sentence above, you'll never convince me they weren't presented with an opportunity at some point better than losing him for nothing, which, while unfathomable for most of the fans, seems to have been a very real concern for quite awhile.
Now, maybe willingness to go to Brunson's max wouldn't have made a difference. I can't prove that one way or the other. But, if I'm Cuban and I learn that Brunson is going to NY come hell or high water, you'd better believe I'm getting it out there that "we offered the most we possibly could. More than any other offer, by far. Dude just wanted to go to NY. We wish him well."
We never heard that. Instead, we got the weak (and false) "we never got to make an offer." If you think Brunson didn't have a clear picture of what both Dallas and NY were offering (and each of the teams a fairly clear picture of what the other was offering) before making this decision, I have a bridge to sell you.
This spin control approach, to me, signals that in addition to all of the NY connections for Brunson, apparently going back to childhood dreams, the Knicks also valued him more and were very willing to go north of the Mavs' self-imposed price range to prove it. Of course the Mavs lost him, given all of that. And, it's hard to imagine that they didn't have a pretty clear picture of what was about to happen beforehand, given that they're on the inside of all of this.
Once every opportunity to trade Brunson had passed, with the Mavs' cap situation the way it is (and likely to be for awhile unless they take several steps back with their roster, which is now feeling all too possible in the coming years) I don't think they could afford to let Brunson go, no matter how "overpaid" the contract would've made him. That's the bottom line for me.
If they had made a better offer than NY, and he had STILL chosen the Knicks, my unhappiness might've been directed more towards Brunson and less towards the Mavs in that scenario.
That's the most depressing version of events, and the most likely - that Cuban (and Nico, if you will) got outchessed. The Mavs' reported confidence in keeping him up to two weeks prior to FA is troubling.
At the risk of redundancy, Cuban doesn't know professional basketball from his ass or a hole in the ground. You see, there were these games in May called the NBA playoffs. Had Cuban watched those games, he would have known definitively that the idea of keeping Brunson at their self-imposed price limit was intelligence-insultingly ridiculous.