Eleven instant reactions to a true, true blockbuster that sends the Nets’ No. 11 to the Western Conference for the first time:
No one in Dallas will come out and say it in these terms, obviously, but Irving is potentially just a rental. And potentially a very pricy one. League sources say that Irving has not been promised a new contract by the Mavericks, who clearly want to see how the rest of the season goes for their new Luka Dončić/Irving backcourt before making a long-term commitment to a player who missed almost as many games as he played in three-and-a-half seasons as a Net. The problem for the Mavericks, if they ultimately decide against re-signing Irving to a multi-year deal, is that they just surrendered Spencer Dinwiddie and Dorian Finney-Smith — two of their three most sought-after players not named Dončić — along with an unprotected 2029 first-round pick and two future second-rounders to essentially create salary-cap space in the offseason. For a team with a well-chronicled history of faring far better with their trade gambles than their attempts to make a splash in free agency, that's a daunting ledge to step out onto. This has to work from the Mavericks' perspective ... or else they have to truly hit in free agency for the first time in franchise history should the Luka-and-Kyrie partnership last only a few months.
The flip side: Dallas has as strong an infrastructure as a team possibly could to bring Irving on board in the middle of a season with Nico Harrison as its GM and Jason Kidd as its coach. Harrison is close with both Irving and his agent (and stepmother) Shetellia Riley Irving from their days working together with Nike. Kidd, meanwhile, was among Irving's favorite players as a young Nets fan. I'm told that when Kidd was enshrined in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2018, Irving reached out to Kidd's camp personally to make sure he secured an invitation to attend the induction ceremony.
How much does all that mean, though, given what the Nets just went through? Irving was so close to Kevin Durant that he actually convinced Durant to choose the Nets over the Knicks in free agency … which didn’t prevent the Nets from tasting far more turmoil than success after they signed as a package deal in Brooklyn entering the 2019-20 season.
Harrison is halfway through his second season as an NBA executive. He has now traded away Kristaps Porziņģis and traded for Irving at his first two trade deadlines. The Mavericks were undoubtedly spurred into this dice roll by their monumental errors last season: Spurning multiple in-season opportunities to sign Jalen Brunson to a four-year, $56 million contract extension and ultimately losing Brunson to the Knicks without compensation. At the very least, though, they have just shown Dončić that they are serious about putting a better team around him as soon as possible. In Year 1 of Dončić’s new five-year, $215 million contract, this move just nearly doubled Mark Cuban's luxury tax bill for the season from $31.7 million to $60.5 million. Porziņģis himself couldn't help but weigh in on the magnitude of his old team's latest trade business.
The Nets, rather than trading with Phoenix or the Lakers, ultimately came away with the two Mavericks they wanted most and a better win-now duo than L.A. could offer: Dinwiddie and Finney-Smith. The Nets also succeeded, as one source close to the process put it, in meeting one of the presumed objectives held by team owner Joe Tsai by sending Irving somewhere other than the Lakers — his preferred destination. Durant, for the record, is known to be a Finney-Smith fan. And Dinwiddie returns to Brooklyn shooting 3s better (40.5%) and more frequently than ever before. The Nets also aren't done. Let's see if they can flip the Dallas picks they just acquired or a first-rounder forthcoming this June from Philadelphia into more win-now players.
The Nets’ refused Dallas' attempts to ship them Christian Wood's expiring contract or one of its less palatable long-term deals held by Tim Hardaway Jr. and Dāvis Bertāns. Don’t be surprised, though, if Wood still gets dealt before Thursday’s 3 PM ET trade buzzer. As I first reported Saturday, Wood is attracting trade interest from the LA Clippers, who want to upgrade both their frontcourt and backcourt. Wood and Minnesota's D'Angelo Russell, sources say, are among the Clippers’ prime trade targets heading into the last few days of NBA trade season.
As I also first reported Sunday afternoon, Dallas indeed ran the trade past Dončić before making it. And as one source close to the situation put it, if the Mavericks’ face of the franchise did not want the Irving deal to happen, he very much possesses the juice to tell the Mavericks exactly that and put a stop to the talks. Dallas is 28-19 this season with Dončić in uniform and 0-7 when he's sidelined ... while No. 77 has racked up the league’s No. 2 usage rate (38.5). The 23-year-old understands as well as anyone that carrying such a big load, even at his youthful age, isn't sustainable. For all the justified skepticism in circulation already about how two such ball-dominant players will mesh, Dončić was sufficiently enticed by the potential here to sign off and return to a life in which he doesn’t have to carry the entire offense. It seems safe to suggest that Dallas’ theoretical playoff ceiling, in a Western Conference marked by unforeseen mediocrity from No. 3 through No. 13 in the standings, is suddenly far closer to last season’s conference finals standard with Irving on the roster compared to how it looked before Sunday.
What we don't immediately have in the wake of this megatrade (and surely all wish we did) are the unvarnished reactions of Kevin Durant and LeBron James to the deal. Will Durant ask for a trade in coming days, weeks or months in response to Irving’s exit … or give the Nets an opportunity to replenish the roster around him? Will LeBron view the Lakers' inability to acquire Irving as a last straw that leads him to push for his exit from Lakerland … or did he hold back on unreservedly vouching for Irving because the soon-to-be leading scorer in NBA history knew deep down that no one really can? I did expect the Lakers to win out and assemble a three-team deal with San Antonio and Brooklyn to make Irving a Laker and furnish the Nets with a combination of handy vets (like San Antonio's Jakob Poeltl) and future draft picks to try to acquire even more handy vets. We don’t yet have clarity on whether the Lakers were hesitant to try to outbid Dallas or simply couldn’t match the Dinwiddie/Finney-Smith combo … but any measure of hesitancy would be understandable. For all of his mesmerizing talent, Irving has been largely unreliable — for multiple franchises — since the 2016 NBA Finals.
We have much more to learn and dissect about how far the Lakers went in their Irving pursuit and how close they came before Brooklyn decided to take Dallas’ offer. If Irving manages to hush the skeptics and winds up signing a two-year deal with the Mavericks that would have matched Anthony Davis’ and LeBron’s contractual timelines, it is bound to sting way more. Yet also true: The Lakers traded an absolute haul to pair Davis with LeBron, heeded the two stars' push to burn more assets by prioritizing a trade for Russell Westbrook over moves for the likes of DeMar DeRozan or Buddy Hield and, most recently, signed James to a two-year extension worth nearly $100 million that affords him the ability to become a free agent in June 2024 right when his eldest son Bronny James becomes NBA draft-eligible. The Lakers, in other words, have done a lot LeBron’s way. Do they owe him an at-all-costs trade for Irving after all that?
Stop it breh and you still ignored adding another wing and potential trade within the week
you sounding like a bytch too, acting as if KD didn't ruin the NBA going to a 73-9 team
