Each NBA team’s best trade in franchise history

Dallas Mavericks

Tyson Chandler and Alexis Anjinca for Matt Carroll, Eric Dampier, Eduardo Najera, and cash considerations to CHA (2010)

Once Dirk Nowitzki metamorphosed into one of the NBA’s elite big men in the early 2000s, the Dallas Mavericks effortlessly tossed aside the laughingstock label they carried around in the mid-90s and ascended to the top of the Western Conference.

However, their unprecedented (for them) run of success, unfortunately, came with a new moniker: perpetual bridesmaids. Between 2000-01 and 2009-10, the Mavs made 10 consecutive trips to the postseason, but they only made the Western Conference Finals twice and the NBA Finals once.

Obviously, those shortcomings reflected the Western Conference’s strength as much as it did the Mavs’ defects, but in this sports media landscape that distills a team’s and/or a player’s success down to a championship, Dallas was always judged by what they didn’t do rather than what they did.

The 2010-11 season felt like it would be more of the same. Personnel-wise, it almost exactly mirrored the outfit that went 55-27 the year prior and lost in the first round. But there was one noticeable change: the acquisition of defense-first center Tyson Chandler from the then-Charlotte Bobcats for three benchwarmers and cash.

With Chandler stonewalling the paint and plucking rebounds out of the air, the Mavs ranked in the top ten in defensive rating and defensive rebounding rate — they ranked 12th and 15 in those categories the year prior — won 57 games and tore through the West en route to a Finals meeting with LeBron James and the Miami Heat, where Nowitzki, Chandler, and Jason Terry led Dallas to the upset and the franchise’s first title.