I posted this in the "Mavs get Porzingis" thread, but I figured it's worth posting here too.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Thespiralgoeson
For all the talk about firing Carlisle and how utterly horrible and incompetent Cuban and Donnie are, and we're going to lose Luka because of their incompetence... I honestly think almost everything negative about the Mavs' prospects can be traced back to Porzingis.
A few weeks ago, the Mavs seemed like they were in freefall, and it seemed like Carlisle has lost the team. I said then that if things didn't improve soon, it might be time to move on. But guess what? Things improved. The Mavs have won 7 of their last 9 games, and morale seems to be infinitely better. You can't tell me coaching has nothing to do with this. Yes, Luka carries the team on his back, but Carlisle must be doing something right also.
As for the roster problems and the team being lousy outside of Luka... well, again, I feel like it comes back to Porzingis not being the guy we need him to be. We can complain about how horrible it was for the Mavs to have made the trade for KP in the first place, but that's totally revisionist. Everyone on this forum and in the entire basketball world thought at the time that it was a genius move for the Mavs and yet another idiotic disaster for the Knicks. We gave up two draft picks, and a guy who didn't fit with Luka, wasn't part of our long terms plans, and has pretty much washed out of the NBA entirely. The KP trade was NOT seen as some high-risk, swing-for-the-fences, all-in type of deal. Quite the opposite. It seemed incredibly low risk at the time. Signing KP to the max in retrospect seems like a disaster, but again, not so at the time.
I'm not saying the MBT has done some kind of amazing job- the Josh Green pick looks like a waste- but they've hardly been terrible either. The truth is, building an NBA title contender is really frigging hard, and requires a LOT of good luck. The Mavs, sadly, ran into some really bad luck with Porzingis.
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The nadir of the season was arguably on Feb. 4 when the Mavs lost to Golden State by an embarrassing 31, after only just coming off of a six game losing streak. The season seemed to be a complete disaster and the entire organization outside of Luka looked like it needed to be on the chopping block. Since then, the Mavs have won 8 of their last 10 games. The Mavs are still nowhere near title contenders, but at least they're not embarrassing themselves either. I do think they'll end up making the playoffs at least.
This is bad news for anyone hoping for Carlisle to get fired. He aint going nowhere.