[KillerLeft]

Good topic.

The short version of my take: not bringing the championship team back in 2011 to chase free agents was a monumental error. I didn’t agree with that decision at all.

At THIS time, I’m fully on board with building the team in a smart way. The worst possible thing they could do is hamstring themselves with mediocre players on bad contracts the way they did when Nash/Dirk were young.

It’s worth noting that when we get the final numbers for Burke, WCS and Terry, they will be within $5 million-$6 million of the luxury tax, so they are definitely spending more for this team than they have in quite a while. They used the MLE, and I would argue that they used it in a better way like this (multiple players, and locking up Terry at a team-friendly cost for TWO ADDITIONAL YEARS) than spending it all on one player. Nothing against Crowder, but it seems like the goal was to get younger and more athletic this off-season. While I didn’t expect that, I certainly welcome it.

In general, I feel that they have put themselves in a really good situation moving forward. They have improved the roster significantly while simultaneously increasing their cap flexibility. It’s not all about Giannis. The cap space can be used earlier by building a trade around one of their expiring contracts (they have several at a variety of useful sizes) at the deadline, for example. There are other doors this approach leaves open, too.

Clearly, the plan is to put the best, YOUNG roster together possible before Luka signs his rookie max extension in 2022. Once that happens, they’ll be relegated to an over-the-cap approach like the Dirk era Mavs were. I, personally, am super thrilled that they learned from the mistakes they made back then and are playing a smarter game this time around.

Now, once the roster is in place and Luka signs his extension, will Cuban once again be a tax payer? That’s an interesting question, and I don’t think we know the answer, but I don’t blame him a bit for avoiding the tax these past several years. With the repeater tax penalties and the way you get hamstrung after a while (see the Warriors) avoiding the tax until it makes sense is actually much better for the on-court product in the long run.