The Dallas Mavericks are on a steep upswing to contention. These win-now trades can help facilitate that climb, AND get Giannis Antetokounmpo.
The Dallas Mavericks came out and surprised everybody in the NBA last season, thanks in large part to Luka Doncic‘s transcendent sophomore season. Doncic was an MVP candidate, the Mavs had one of the most potent offenses in NBA history, and the team put a real scare into the LA Clippers in the second round of the playoffs even without Kristaps Porzingis for much of the series. There’s just one piece missing for this team to be a true title contender, and that piece is Giannis Antetokounmpo.
While by all accounts Antetokounmpo has every intention of playing out next season with the Milwaukee Bucks, the bar is set high for that organization to keep him happy and retain him when he enters free agency in the summer of 2021.
The Bucks have been reluctant to spend, but they’ve made a commitment to enter the luxury tax in order to placate him. If they don’t, there will be hell to pay. In addition, the Bucks are coming off back-to-back playoff disappointments largely because his teammates have wilted around him under the tremendous pressure exerted on them by the Toronto Raptors and Miami Heat.
Giannis wants more out of his organization and out of his teammates, and the back-to-back two-time defending MVP deserves nothing less. It’s going to be easier said than delivered for the Bucks and their players, but if he doesn’t get it, he may be on the move to a team that can provide him the kind of top-tier organization and teammates it requires to win an NBA championship.
The long, strong and skilled combination of Giannis, Porzingis and Doncic could immediately become overwhelming title favorites, and the Dallas Mavericks look to have plenty of cap space to sign him in free agency in 2021. With that in mind, there are several trades that can help them win now, all while maintaining or increasing that cap space in order to woo him and other free agents to come win an NBA championship with Luka Doncic.
We’ll break down several of these trades over the following slides, but let’s go over the ground rules for this exercise:
First, it’s no secret that the Mavericks are a dangerous team on the verge of becoming a power in the Western Conference, even if they don’t get Giannis. So we’re going to assume no playoff teams in the West are going to participate in trades that fit the criteria of “win-now, Giannis-later” for the Mavs.
Second, in order to make sure that each deal provides the Mavs with more cap space than before the trade, every returning player will be on an expiring contract. In the cases of the three players we’ll discuss, each of them have player options that, for our purposes, we can comfortably assume they will opt into. For what it’s worth, in each case, the player in question will absolutely opt in.
Without further ado, let’s check out the first win-now trade.