TDL Archived: The 2nd Rnd Pick Yankee Swap

[MarkAguirreWrathofGod]

I agree Killer Left. The West is going to be absolutely brutal. Connolly moved to Minny along with Gobert, Ainge is in Utah and they have a young enthusiastic owner, Durant will likely find his way to Phoenix, Memphis is well run from owner to gym to coach. LAC have Ballmer and LA. Lakers are the Lakers. I already ran down the West teams and how they all improved or punted (SA and Utah) in another thread. I’m honestly still sort of shocked that Cuban drew a line in the sand on spending with Brunson. He may have left anyway; we just can’t afford to let players/assets walk for nothing. Sometimes the mere appearance of being cheap is almost as bad as the real thing. I mentioned before that Desmond Bane and Mikhail Bridges trolled us on Twitter for letting Brunson walk. That’s in part because Cuban went cheap. If we offered more $ and made him feel super valued and he walked then that’s different. Utah and SA, run by shrewd operators, sent out stars(and Royce O’Neal) for a boatload of picks and punted on the next couple seasons. They’ll bank on being part of the next wave after the current crop of contenders—minus Dallas, Denver and Memphis— age out. The Mavs are in the precarious position of having perhaps the shallowest asset pool of the West contenders and only one star. Thankfully we have THE star. Denver is most analogous to us with Jokic but then they have two potential Robins.