THE CRUCIFIX: Cato: Wood isn't thrilled w/ his role...Will depart in the summer

[MrGoat]

There is a reason why seven other teams have given up on him. The dude can't play defense. He constantly gets lost. Until he improves, he is at best a bench scorer.

I like him, but for a limited role.

If another team offers him significantly more money than the Mavs offer him, then perhaps I was wrong about him. But I think the market will reflect his value at what I think he is: a bench scorer with little other utility.

The seven teams narrative is the dumbest narrative about Wood. He was an undrafted player and barely got a chance to play at all for his first four teams, he had to fight and claw to stay in the league. In fact he even had to spend an entire year in the D league in the '18 season so it's actually 8 teams. His fifth (really sixth) team was the first team he was on that gave him any chance for any real playing time and that was Detroit. 

He finally showed what he could do but he didn't really fit their timeline so they traded him to Houston right before they blew it up, Wood's attitude soured a lot after that because he wanted to win and he initially thought he was going to get a chance at that in Houston. Wood handled Kidd's mistreatment of him very professionally because this was the best team he'd been on with a real role. 

People will simp for Kidd just because he's the head coach, but I won't. Wood is actually pretty good at certain parts of defense (look at his opponent FG% at the rim) and it's a failure of Kidd that he hasn't found a way to maximize what he can do. We've seen what happens enough times in the playoffs with Powell. Powell is the ultimate regular season fool's gold player, his advanced stats look good because he brings more hustle to the regular season than almost anybody else and he rotates well. But he gets exposed in the playoffs when other players start bringing the same level of effort because of the higher stakes and we'll ultimately ask too much of Maxi yet again. Wood actually has some skills that could tilt a series and it is coaching malpractice by Kidd not to try to integrate him harder. Almost reeks of intentionally trying to hurt his market value which will backfire in our face this summer when he might pull a Nerlens Noel and take a small deal just to get out of here out of spite and spread more bad stories about Dallas to make sure that we still can't land a free agent without overpaying.