Quote:
Originally Posted by Thespiralgoeson
If you owned the Mavs, after what season would you have fired Donnie Nelson and/or Rick Carlisle?
We can complain all we want about having not won a playoff series since 2011, and I find it frustrating as anyone else.
But the dirty secret that nobody ever seems to acknowledge, it was loyalty to Dirk that kept the franchise in the doldrums for several years. From a purely basketball standpoint, the Mavs should have blown it up and tanked like 3 or 4 years before they actually did. But they felt obligated out of loyalty to Dirk- understandably- to keep the team as competitive as they could while he was still playing. I'm not even saying it was the wrong decision. I might have done the same thing. But it DID set the franchise back years. He just got older and older, and the Mavs kept trying to put patchwork teams together to get playoff seeds rather than tear it all down and start over. Eventually even that was unsustainable and they had to tank while Dirk was still playing- precisely what they were trying to avoid.
This is why it irks me when people complain about the lack of playoff success over the previous decade- because everyone just acts like it was bad management and/or coaching and completely removes the context of them being loyal to Dirk to a fault. Maybe they could have done it better and won a series or two over the decade, but there's no way sustained playoff success was possible without a total rebuild. So if people are going to argue about how bad the post 2011 Mavs were, I wish they would just follow it through to its logical conclusion and say that they should have traded Dirk when he still had value- Danny Ainge style.
And people also don't seem to give any leeway when it comes to the Luka era being a whole new era. It's just lumped in together with everything that happened in the previous decade. Yes, we haven't won a playoff series in a decade. But Luka is only in year 3. As far as I'm concerned, we are either right on schedule or ahead of schedule with him.
The fact is, building an NBA playoff team is hard. Building a title contender is really, really, really, really f*cking hard.
The MBT has been far from perfect, but I maintain that they've been far better than most, and I do not at all see this complacency or satisfaction with mediocrity that you seem to see.
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So when MBT couldn't put legit talent around Dirk for yeearrrs, through Dust chip, Nash, and the various other failures along the way as he was taking pay cuts because MBT was convinced we were a FA destination and minimal weak ass pitches would get deals done. Those failures are somehow because the organization was too loyal to Dirk. Brother, Your version is not how I remember it. That take is borderline blasphemous. Dirk was too loyal to Dallas.
We botched so many opportunities in FA, failing to provide a successful pitch to the guys who were available, or flat out reading the talent incorrectly. Hell, fans actually believe that FA players have something against Dallas in general. In reality, we just haven't sealed the deal and it needs to change this offseason.