June 12th, 2011: Standing in a long line within the depths of American Airlines Arena in Miami, you wait along with the rest of the media horde for the Mavericks' locker room to open. You can hear the party going on within as a group of veterans had just won the Dallas Mavericks' first title. It is a franchise-changing moment for everyone involved, from Jason Terry to Shawn Marion to Rick Carlisle to Mark Cuban.
And especially Dirk Nowitzki.
Standing there, surrounded by camera crews and reveling family members, awaiting the crush of people into a very small room, suddenly Nowitzki walks by, being ushered to a television interview. He's holding the Finals MVP trophy in his hand, and bounding -- that's the only word for it, really -- as he seems like a teenager, completely high on the freedom and joy of his life at that moment. You will never see a professional athlete happier than this.
This, of all nights, is the night when everything changes for the Dallas Mavericks.
The Dallas Mavericks are currently screwed.
DeAndre Jordan's defection was an anomaly. It was, in essence, a black swan event. What are the odds of the Mavericks a. landing the second-biggest available free agent to them, b. having him agree to a deal with them, c. change his mind and d. reach a new agreement with his old team within the span of 48 hours, including a prolonged sleepover/tower defense of Jordan's home?
To be a black swan event, it has to be something that can be rationalized as predictable given the historical context provided. There was no way for anyone to have seen this particular instance happening. A free agent changing his mind and going back on a verbal agreement during the moratorium, sure. That it would happen to the Mavericks, or that the event would have the specific damage that Jordan's backflip created? No, that was something else entirely.
It is the damage, however, the ruins left of the Mavericks in the post-apocalyptic wasteland of the Western Conference, that has been developing for such a long time, simply waiting for the right anomaly to crash the system.
To say that Mark Cuban is a smart man is a considerable understatement. Plenty of not-so-smart people have become billionaires, but just look at where and how he's invested himself since rising up through real estate and tech investment in the late 90's and 00's.
Look no further than Cyber Dust, the traceless application he helped develop, before consumer fears of omnipresent surveillance and data collection became mainstream. Cuban is an innovator, or at the very least a shrewd predictor of where technology and the market is headed. The key to that is, of course, getting ahead, and staying ahead of the game.
In regards to the NBA, Cuban has spoken before about tanking not as some sort of morally-compromised endeavor against the spirit of competition, but simply something that has been so over-relied-upon it makes no sense for the Mavericks to indulge in. There's no margin to exploit.
That kind of concept is what led Cuban to adopt the approach he did to life in the new CBA that was agreed to months after that night in Miami when Dallas won the title. After the lockout ended, the Mavericks let Tyson Chandler head to New York, not wanting to commit the money for an aging center for that many years in the new collective bargaining agreement. Dallas would watch Jason Terry and Jason Kidd depart the year after, under angst-filled circumstances. By the time the 2012-13 season came around, only three members of the title team remained.
This, in and of itself, wasn't a problem. That Mavericks squad was already old when it won the title. Their veteran knowledge base and savvy was a big part of the run they went on. Everyone peaked at the right time in 2011, and the result was a title. It makes sense that they would need to find pathways to the future. It makes sense that in short order the team would look different. What's notable is that it didn't coincide with the retirement or departure of their franchise icon, the centerpiece of their team, Dirk Nowitzki. Usually a team breaks up after the best player retires, and it's time for everyone to move on. Instead, the best player remained and the Mavericks got way ahead of themselves trying to make room for another run, without actually ever committing any assets for fear of locking themselves in.
That last part is particularly salient here. After the new CBA put in harsher cap penalties for teams and restricted exceptions to the cap significantly compared to the old CBA, Cuban and the Mavericks' brain trust saw a new world where flexibility was king, and lack thereof could be crippling. Cuban's comments in the wake of the new agreement:
"This was the plan the minute we agreed to the new CBA," Cuban said. "This is 100 percent about the CBA and understanding the impact it will have on the market."
"If this were the old CBA rules, we probably would have kept everyone together. But, the rules changed," he said. "If we were able to sign everyone to two-year deals that would have possibly changed things as well, but that wasn't in the cards either."
Source: Mark Cuban says Dallas Mavericks' strategy molded by new CBA.
The Mavericks weren't panicking about the new CBA. Instead, they were just trying to get ahead of it. Cuban saw the potential for other teams to lock themselves into restrictive cap situations, which would open the door for the Mavericks to swoop in, having won a title in recent years, and land top free agents. They swung for the fences. They couldn't sell Dwight Howard on interest in Dallas, despite Cuban's friendly relationship with his agent. They were never really in the Deron Williams sweepstakes, to the point where Cuban decided not to attend the meeting in favor of filming his reality television show. By all accounts, he wasn't wrong on that count.
The Mavericks referred to this as "keeping the powder dry." From GM Donnie Nelson after the team changed dramatically in 2012:
"Keeping the powder dry is a term that you’re going to hear a lot with a lot of teams in the NBA since the landscape is drastically changing and the future of the league is really changing before our very eyes on a daily basis," Mavs president of basketball operations Donnie Nelson told us on ESPN Dallas 103.3 FM Monday morning. "Our position is we want to be players when it comes to getting star-quality talent."
Source: Mavs' rally cry: Keep the powder dry - Dallas Mavericks Blog - ESPN.
The Mavericks instead tried to split the middle. They went for above-average-not-great players on short-term deals instead of finding value players and locking them in on contract long-term. Here's where the whole Mavs experiment becomes fascinating. You can argue that going all out and committing too many years and too much money for free agents who don't deserve it would have been better than the alternative, but that has the benefit of hindsight.
The Mavs signed Darren Collison, who -- and I mean this -- was coming off a really strong run with the Indiana Pacers who would go on to become an Eastern Conference powerhouse, and not because they gave George Hill the reins. There was a legitimate debate about who should start for the Pacers, Hill or Collison. He struggled under Rick Carlisle, completely lost his confidence, wound up in the doghouse and was benched for Mike James. (Collison went on to be a solid backup for Chris Paul in LA and had a great start with the upstart-before-everything-went-insane Kings last year.)
They signed O.J. Mayo, who had been a big part of the early Grizzlies success, including a great run in the 2011 playoffs. He had upside and talent. He also struggled, clashed with Carlisle and eventually departed (and then became a key contributor off the bench for Milwaukee last season on its way to a playoff spot). The lesson: Sometimes good ideas just don't work out.
There are a couple of problems here, though, as outlayed very well in this piece from thesportsacademy:
Or maybe … the fatal flaws of the damn thing was always there for anyone who wanted to see them. Here’s the breakdown:
- "Plan powder" comes from the phrase “keep your powder dry.” In this case it means "have as much cap space as possible at all times."
- The way to get cap space that involves just HAVING money on hand means a lot of one year rentals, few impact players, no continuity, and ultimately mediocrity.
- No top free agent wants to play for a mediocre team.
- Every top free agent gets the same offer, dollar figure wise, from every team that’s interested in them.
- No one else thinks the only way to get cap space is to already have it. Remember 2013? Mavs were targeting Dwight Howard, then Andre Iguodala? While the Mavs had been carefully hoarding cap space like Gollum and the ring, the Rockets swung a couple of trades and made it magically appear. Then the Golden State Warriors did. Rockets got Howard, Warriors got Iggy, and last year they were #1 and #2 in the West.
Source: DeAndre Jordan and the No Good, Very Bad Plan | thesportsacademy.
There's a diminishing returns effect here that The Sports Academy touches on. The Mavericks wanted flexibility so they took on lesser players on shorter deals to keep their cap space open to sign free agents, only to have their team not be very good and unattractive to free agents, which led to them signing lesser players on shorter deals to keep their cap space open ...
And deeper and deeper into the mud they go. Now, that doesn't mean that's how the actual signings have translated in terms of wins and losses. The Mavs ran into an out-for-revenge-like-it-was-Kill Bill Thunder team in 2012. They missed the postseason entirely in 2013 prompting huge changes. They came back with a strong veteran squad in 2014 with defensive issues that still managed to push the Spurs, prompting optimism on a run last year. And on paper, Dallas should have been very good last season. However, Chandler was never able to compensate for the team's defensive woes, Monta Ellis slid more and more into what he's always been in this league, the Rondo trade destroyed their depth and was a disaster in terms of what they got, the rare double-whammy. By the end of the year, Dallas was never a threat in the West.
(Side-note: There are two recurring trends that occur outside the context of plan powder to note: One, unless you're Jason Kidd, if you're point guard for the Mavericks, you and Rick Carlisle are probably not going to get along. Two, the Mavericks have had a lot of opportunistic trades blow up in their face since 2011. Derek Fisher, Lamar Odom, Rajon Rondo. Good grief. I don't know how you predict those kinds of things.)
The bigger problem is that the Mavericks have moved further and further from having a core, which means there's more of a reliance on Dirk Nowitzki being amazing, right as Nowitzki has really started to tail off. Chandler's biggest problem defensively last year was that he couldn't cover for Nowitzki in the pick and roll, and the Mavericks' offense could never go to the tried and true "give it to Dirk and let him school fools" play that has worked for 17 seasons.
So let's review and see where we're at:
1. The Mavericks tried to get ahead of the CBA by plotting to acquire superstars.
2. They couldn't.
3. They doubled down on that plan by signing non-stars to short-term deals, and keeping cap space open for the future.
4. That led to mediocre seasons which made it harder to ... you guessed it, land a top free agent.
5. That made signing DeAndre Jordan, who is a pick-and-roll-finishing, non-team-carrying, can't-hit-free-throws defensive monster, an absolute imperative once they couldn't get LaMarcus Aldridge.
6. They got him!
7. And then they didn't.
8. And now they're in big trouble.
Dallas has an aging Nowitzki next to two players in Chandler Parsons (3-years, $46 million) and Wesley Matthews (4-years, $70 million) who are both making huge money and yet aren't really star players. Parsons is an X-factor here: He struggled for most of his first year in Dallas, but started to turn it on late before getting injured, and with another year in the Mavs' system, could be great. Even then, though, he's making big money under the current cap and will need to help carry the team. That's a tough situation. They landed Deron Williams on the cheap, but who knows how that works out when you factor his age, injury history, and a new situation.
So yeah, the plan didn't work out great.
But that's obvious, and is once again predicated on the black swan with Jordan occurring. What's more interesting is whether the plan was really flawed. This is a situation where you can examine the big picture and think that this was a good plan with a moderate probability of success (a coin flip) that just didn't work out.
Consider this: The biggest problem Dallas really had was that there weren't really any big free agents out there. Most of the superstars were locked in on big, long-term deals. Chris Paul never hit free agency, not really. Carmelo Anthony did the tour, but wasn't ever really going to leave New York. Deron Williams was never going to leave Brooklyn.
Timing was also part of this. Remember how earlier we talked about how Cuban said that he would have kept those guys from the title team if he could have gotten them on short-term contracts? In the past three years, a lot of guys have taken deals just like those, in order to take advantage of the new TV media deal. That's the crazy part: The market eventually shifted in the direction that Cuban predicted it needed to, but it just didn't line up with the Mavericks' timeline.
Additionally, what if this free agency class had been available the summer of 2012, with the Mavericks having won the title a year before? Dallas would have been a much more attractive free agency location. You can't argue with the idea of needing stars; that one's pretty obvious at this point. You can argue the value of free agency, though. Pat Riley used it to win two titles, but he only got a four-year window out of it.
You can look to the opposite, that Dallas should have tried to rebuild through the draft, but that's a long-term move. You can't force Dirk Nowitzki to sit through a tanking year coming off a title, and the odds of hitting stars when drafting in the high teens and early 20's like the Mavericks have been doing is not a viable option. (Even if those players could be found there, it's nearly random.) The Warriors have a young, sustainable core of stars because they were awful year after year and got great pick after great pick and drafted guys like Draymond Green in the second round.
In many ways, Cuban and the Mavericks overestimated the restrictions the CBA created. You can still invent cap space if necessary. You can still put together a good team and have the ability to swing for the fences later. Their approach was a bit ahead of its time, though, and couldn't forecast the new TV media streams coming in that would open up future flexibility, even if they had committed money to guys in the past two years.
Dallas' plan wasn't sustainable ... in the event that it failed. You don't build plans to fail. The Mavericks could have built a team that mitigated the risks of missing out on free agents, but that would have had a lower ceiling. Dallas wanted to contend for championships, and that meant bigger risks for bigger rewards.
Maybe this means that free agents are too unstable an entity to really be chased after as plan No. 1. The Knicks and Lakers could probably tell you that. Maybe it means that if you're going to mortgage assets, you should do it for high draft picks and hope they develop faster. Maybe this means you're better off building a good team and trying to parlay that into a great team instead of having a not-bad one and trying to do the same with big money. The results, honestly, are unclear. That's what makes winning a championship so difficult. Everything came together for that 2011 Mavericks team; nothing has come together for them since.
Whether Jordan would have been the home run they imagined him to be is uncertain. There were just as many concerns over making him the No. 1 or No. 2 option as there was optimism about him transforming their team. Jordan's black swan move to go back and blow up an agreement in place reveals a key liability in the Mavericks' plan, but it doesn't necessarily scuttle their entire process over these last four years. It presents an opportunity for the organization to learn that sometimes, trying to get ahead of the system only results in you outsmarting yourself.
Oh, and that you should make sure a guy isn't going to have second thoughts before you build your whole offseason around him is important, too, it turns out.
