DAL OFFSEASON: Trade & FA | Mavs "mostly done...but you never know."

[Jason Terry]

@"fifteenth" my position is that the Mavs have been obsessed with cap space since 2012 and that's been the case. They value cap space over trades for any player that is not a star. The KP trade was great and it leveraged the MBT's nuclear winter idea which actually panned out for this one unique circumstance.

The thing I was commenting on is that I would much rather have a Gordon-type even if they aren't a "star" rather than thinking hey we can sign somebody like that in 2021 with all this cap space. As we saw last offseason, we had cap space and Curry was the only asset we came away with. We shed Barnes for basically nothing when he could have been a potential asset on a 1 yr deal. That's my issue.

I think that's all reasonable, except maybe that the Harrison Barnes comments that have been floating around seem a little revisionist and based on hindsight. 

The thing about 2021 cap space is that there are some differences with the team pre-offseason, some differences in this cap space opportunity, and some differnces in the team's current competitive timeline when compared to all those post 2011 plan powder teams.

This team has Luka, and Luka just had a season that included being a top 5 player in the league and being even better in the playoffs. Luka is the free agent draw. The plan powder teams never had anything close to that as a draw.

The possibility of teaming Luka with Giannis, combined with Luka as a draw for Giannis, or for a fall back free agent, makes the opportunity of this offseason more inviting than any of those other plan powder offseasons.

Lastly, and you may disagree with this, but the Mavs aren't quite in "win now" mode. They're more in "win now if we can, but the priority is to keep building this team" mode. This team's real championship window probably opens in 21/22. 

So here's the deal. I hope the team does enough due diligence to know if a pursuit of Giannis is worth it. They obviously failed at that with Kemba. But the upside of landing Giannis, lure of Luka, and the team's timeline all suggest that the pursuit might be worth the gamble this time.

Agree with all this. I do think there’s moves we would make that cut into 2021 cap. Jrue and Gordon i don’t feel are available to us. There’s several teams that would give multiple firsts for them and that’s not available to us. It’s too early in our timeline to trade picks any farther into the future. I think the best way to describe our plans would be opportunistic. We would definitely sign DJJ for the same contract Seth got for instance. Moves in trade like that too for young guys with multiple years of control are on the table. It would be easy to make room for Giannis no matter what we do really. All our contracts are easy to trade and so would anyone we add.