I'm in the minority that thinks that while the Mavs had to do better than this (it's looking like general ineptness when you can't figure out how to keep a player you drafted and developed) that there was never an objectively good time they could have extended him as an alternative.
It doesn't take any more than a few minutes to review the earlier parts of this very thread and see that Brunson entered the season with MASSIVE doubts of his future worth and desirability here (because he wasn't a starter and the fit was tricky, and he had been a playoff flop). In that offseason you also had all the iffiness of a new regime, and how to fit in all the players with KP playing the 4, another big on the floor, and so on.
Then almost right out of the gate in the fall, he got some starts, looked really good, and the conventional wisdom here was that he would not take the max extension the Mavs could offer. This is by Nov, not after the turn of the year.
The idea that the Mavs could have gotten him on such an extension in early 2022, I think it was just BS-ery. I know who said it, and who wrote it, and I really think both were playing to a common agenda in which no hard questions were asked and a transparently-nonsensical story got circulated. There's no way JB would have done that, and he's never said that he would have (only that it would have been nice to get the offer, but never that he was willing to sign at that number).
Then, he did escalate his value in the playoffs. MASSIVELY. Whether his size and skill set would be able to be useful in the playoffs was the biggest question mark on him, that could not be answered without playoff games, and his performance raised his value through the roof. It can happen. He is not the first player to get paid an enormous number (that dwarfs all prior expectations) that is being justified primarily because of his playoff run.
It doesn't take any more than a few minutes to review the earlier parts of this very thread and see that Brunson entered the season with MASSIVE doubts of his future worth and desirability here (because he wasn't a starter and the fit was tricky, and he had been a playoff flop). In that offseason you also had all the iffiness of a new regime, and how to fit in all the players with KP playing the 4, another big on the floor, and so on.
Then almost right out of the gate in the fall, he got some starts, looked really good, and the conventional wisdom here was that he would not take the max extension the Mavs could offer. This is by Nov, not after the turn of the year.
The idea that the Mavs could have gotten him on such an extension in early 2022, I think it was just BS-ery. I know who said it, and who wrote it, and I really think both were playing to a common agenda in which no hard questions were asked and a transparently-nonsensical story got circulated. There's no way JB would have done that, and he's never said that he would have (only that it would have been nice to get the offer, but never that he was willing to sign at that number).
Then, he did escalate his value in the playoffs. MASSIVELY. Whether his size and skill set would be able to be useful in the playoffs was the biggest question mark on him, that could not be answered without playoff games, and his performance raised his value through the roof. It can happen. He is not the first player to get paid an enormous number (that dwarfs all prior expectations) that is being justified primarily because of his playoff run.
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