2020-2021 MAVS NEWS: Archived

[StrandedOnBeauboisHill]

As we can see in the article - Mavs defense is good when only one of the stars plays.

I thought this was the biggest takeaway for me from the article, to see that the pairing is the biggest problem and that KP seems to hold his own a little better when we have defenders in front of him who are better at fighting over screens than Luka.  Having said that, it's not like Luka isn't going anywhere and it's hard to really understand what kind of solutions we can put in place for them to gel defensively on the court together.

I sure hope the Mavs are ready to fix it this off-season.

I was pretty firmly in the camp of we need to keep KP for the duration of his contract until seeing how much more competent we look in a switch heavy defense when he's off the court.  I understand why people don't want to "sell low" but I would argue having a healthy KP who's averaging nearly 20/10 on the trade market is not selling low and that holding on to him at this point is really just giving into sunk cost fallacy.  To me our timer for urgency doesn't truly start until Luka's next contract kicks in so I can see them giving this another year but my hope is that we explore all of our options very heavily this offseason.

It's funny because I think most people think GM's don't want to trade for KP because of his injuries but I think that's very overblown and that the real problem is exactly what we're experiencing, it's hard to build a competitive defense with him on your roster.  I'm rooting for the dude because our ceiling is much much higher when he's locked in and playing well but I'm incredibly worried that he'll never be the anchor of a championship level defense.