We know about Brunson, but there are other examples. The Mavs, on the other hand, haven’t been the best steward of their assets.
They had players other teams wanted (Hassan Whiteside, Josh Richardson, Maurice Harkless) and first-round draft picks available to them to use for sweetener to shed salary. Butler wanted to go there, and while the cap gymnastics required to orchestrate such a move were extensive, the Heat front office made it work. Heading into the 2019 offseason, the Heat were the most capped-out team in the league.
The difference in Miami was how they got their guy. The Mavs have that sort of north star, too. Jimmy Butler’s 56-point performance in Game 4 was one of the best playoff performances of all time, and for an encore, he sent Game 5 into overtime with an acrobatic last-second shot. Let’s look at what made the Heat victorious and see if we can’t glean some wisdom from it.
But careful examination of how Miami won can serve as a guide for the decisions the Mavs front office makes this summer. Multiple changes are already occurring, and more could be coming, which is testament to their own awareness of that. No, this year’s Mavs probably weren’t going to be giant-killers if they had made the playoffs. Guess what? There is a lesson the Mavericks can learn from Miami. It isn’t surprising, then, to see an undercurrent of chatter about how if the Mavericks just hadn’t tanked their way out of the play-in round, maybe, possibly, this could be them pulling upsets behind one of the strongest one-two scoring punches in the NBA. They followed it up by stealing home-court advantage from Jalen Brunson’s fourth-seeded Knicks by winning Sunday’s Game 1 in their second-round series. They became just the fourth eighth-seed to beat a one-seed in a best-of-seven series and the first to do so in 11 years, when they beat the Milwaukee Bucks in five games in their first-round matchup. As I watch, I am constantly looking at how other teams are faring and how it relates to the task ahead for the Mavs. I feel the same way now, watching the NBA playoffs and knowing the Mavericks should have been a part of this spring fun. I was relegated to staying on “my side” and watching the fun: not able to participate, but desperately wanting to.
Ted, my older brother, would purposefully play touch football with friends in the neighbor’s yard across the street, just to taunt me. When I was seven, my mom wouldn’t let me cross the street when I was playing in front of our house.
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