[CBS Sports]Examining how the Mavericks went from champs to their current mess

1) (While on a winning team) "ability" to create cap space >> Than just cap space.

2) Build through the draft with cheap talent & pepper with FA >> Get Rich Quick schemes with FA and a bench bereft of talent.

3) Morey >> Cuban/Nelson

 

Sports are cyclical you are good and then you rebuild unless you are the spurs.

 

Luck played a huge role as well. What is the Nene trade had gone through. Then we would be back in Mediocrity city. What if the the warriors or wizards had been willing give up klay or beals. What if OKCs owners weren't so cheap.

 

I think he tries to do what Morey (and any good investor) does - buy low, sell high. Cuban's problem though, is that for whatever reason he only sees one viable "buy" option - free agency. He focuses on trying to hit home runs with big superstars in free agency or trading for "win now" guys instead of building a core with internal improvements or the draft.

In many ways, Cuban's approach is very similar to how the Yankees operate under the Steinbrenners. They trade away their young talent and draft picks for established names, and sign big name free agents. The problem for Cuban is that there is a salary cap in the NBA and that playing with an aging Dirk for Dallas has nowhere near the allure of playing in New York for one of America's most historic sports franchises.

 

Wow, I didn't realize Wes Matthews' offer increased to $70M! They were making it seem like he was such an honorable person agreeing to stay with the Mavs after DJ declined. They decided to give him $13M more if DJ didnt sign. That is a ton of money for a guy who is coming off major injury, just wow.

 

What I gather from the article is that timing was key to the Mavs peril. I also think the author overlooks player's desire to play with Dirk. It isn't just attracting free agents because you have cap space, it's the ability to say "hey, don't you want to see yourself playing with this guy". The Rockets got Howard because Harden is an attractive player to play around. He's young, he's versatile, he's dominant. Dirk was at his peak. Look at Kobe, he can't attract anyone to come out to LA. You have to have a magnetic superstar for a plan like the Cuban one to work.

The Cuban Missalot Crisis.

 

Personally I think the main problem with Cubes is they got too hung up on DDD. The NBA is unpredictable, but there are a lot of avenues to get better than just FAs you can also do it via trades and draft.

The Rockets went in a similar direction (star chasing), but because they didnt have a Dirk to lean on they covered all the bases, drafting good players, trading for undervalued players while maintaining cap flexibility. People forget but the Rox actually got rejected more times than the Mavs by Fas, Dwight rejected us 1, Bosh 2x, Melo 2x (or is it 3?). The difference is the Rox didnt put all their eggs in 1 basket like Cuban did, and so were able to swing a trade for a star anyway when we couldnt sign one in FA.

The other thing is the Rox never really went all in, they try to prioritize value over short term gains almost every team unlike Cuban. This resulted in the team being full of cap friendly assets they then cashed in for a pg they wanted, instead of settling for some overpaid player who was immediately available.

 

cuban
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he loves paying role players like superstars. too bad for him that there arent any superstars that would agree to be paid like role players :grin:

 

What I wonder, and haven't seen covered elsewhere is this: what would the Mavs have done differently during free agency if Jordan had never committed to them?

It seems him committing to and then reneging on the deal has brought a lot of attention to the situation, but that fundamentally the Mavs had a bad strategy (the point of the article).

My point is that I don't think Jordan really ruined the Mavs future. It was already no good, but if the longshot of signing him had come off it would have not made this so obvious.

 

So many points here and in the article that bother me. Deandre Jordan is no better in my opinion than Wesley Matthews. Yes, Wes got hurt, but if he comes back healthy, his addition plus the deletion of Monte Ellis means that the Mavs got better than they were last season. But the Deandre Jordan debacle had other unintended consequences. I like J.J. Barea as a player and a person (he met my stepson and was super cool to him), but he is not worth a 4-year deal, and he got that because of Deandre's reversal. Oh, and Wesley Matthews got a bump because of that, too. I'd feel sorry for the Mavs if Cuban hadn't talked ***** about the Rockets so much the past few reasons.

http://www.mavsmoneyball.com/2015/7/17/8985025/j-j-barea-signs-4-year-deal-mavericks-internet-is-baffled

 

Cuban claimed he would have rebuilt... But I don't believe him. He is a bright man and very successful but also very impulsive and lacks patience. I don't think he would easily enter a 4-5 year rebuilding phase.

 

FIFY

[CBS Sports]Examining how the Mavericks went from champs to chumps

 

It's about having a good plan but everything requires a little bit of luck. If Sam Presti and Thunder management hadn't panicked then the Rockets would never have gotten Harden and then Howard. We could all be lamenting on how Houston never gets any FAs right now. The Mavs and Cuban's moves are like a bizarro version of the Rockets and Morey... and I'm good with that.

 

I think he very clearly understands that. Let's not forget a critical difference between the Rockets and Mavericks: the Rockets are in the building stages. The Mavericks already won a title, and are now in the how-to-sustain-it stages with an aging superstar. Very few teams really do that successfully. Our Rockets went through nearly 20 years of mediocrity in that phase. The Bulls weren't much better. Who knows when the Lakers might get back on their feet. The Spurs are really the only current team to have held their own through their aging superstar phase.

But to build their title team, the Mavs were constantly acquiring and trading away players to build their roster. At the time, everyone was laughing at the strategy, but they were slowly but surely upgrading talent by constantly flipping players around. That said, they've certainly been terrible in the draft side of things.

 

Putting aside the subject matter of the article...that's among the most well written articles I've ever read. Very well done. I sent a tweet to its author last week to say that, and discovered I was not alone.

 

The article seems to suggest that Cap Flexibility really is the Rockets' MVP. And here we had people slamming ol' CapFlex every day.

Sorry, CapFlex, we didn't know any better.