07-20-2021, 12:44 PM
(07-20-2021, 12:28 PM)ItsGoTime Wrote: I will say to that, I think MC is with them in that thinking. That is the one thought that really matters. I think it’ll take a healthy, ok playing, KP up to the TDL (at the earliest) for MC to come slightly down to my line of thinking.
Tough to judge what the Mavs brain trust, as a whole, thinks about this, actually. It's possible that they're as conflicted about it as we are here.
But, my speculation about it hinges on this: I'm pretty confident that KP was a Donnie-driven acquisition. He's exactly the type of player Donnie has always coveted. Donnie is the guy who wanted to draft Pavel Podkolzin at #5 instead of Devin Harris. Thankfully, his father's experienced voice won out there, or we'd have another terrible draft choice to list among the scad of others.
I'm also confident that a guy like Voulgaris looks at the season KP just had and probably has a pretty low level of hope that he can live up to a max contract on a good team.
Cuban is clueless about such things, imo, and always has been.
What we DO NOT have any info on, even to speculate with, is which way Harrison/Kidd are going to lean here, or whether their opinions will even have a ton of weight in THIS high-stakes of a situation THIS early on in the relationship. Will Dallas be more analytics driven or less? I'd guess that Donnie was not very into math, but Carlisle seems to have had a healthy respect for that stuff. If one or both fall into the "can't teach 7'4"" category, blind to all else, then I think KP is here another year, for sure.
Then again, moving a guy with that kind of name and contract is so hard to do that whether or not he's traded won't definitively tell us much. One of the things I've consistently read over the past few years is that the newest generation of GM's seems less than brave enough to pull the trigger on deals like this. The idea being that you can't lose big trades (and get fired in the process) if you don't make them.
...so who knows, tbh.