Next Step in Dallas: Trade Anthony Davis AND Kyrie Irving?! | The Hoop Collective

Next Step in Dallas: Trade Anthony Davis AND Kyrie Irving?! | The Hoop Collective

Bontemps had a take over the summer which was he believed that the Mavericks should seriously consider trading Anthony Davis. Not not seriously consider. They should have traded Anthony Davis this summer. There’s no hedging. They should have traded him this summer and they should trade him now. And here’s the reason it was never going to happen when you said it. I’m not going to say a ridiculous take, but Nico was never trading Anthony Davis. Correct. For obvious reasons, Nico’s gone. So now, let’s just discuss that idea on its merit. And I will tell you this, I do believe pretty firmly, very firmly, that this is going to be a topic of at least discussion with Patrick Dumont and, you know, for the time being, his his interim co-gay and Matt Ricardi, and likely with, you know, whoever he talks about the job with on a on a a permanent basis. I think Dennis Linds will be one of those. You know, we could throw out other names. Monty McNair’s and Messiah Jiri’s Calvin Boos Bob M whatever I’m gonna throw out a name who I’m gonna throw out Trent Redden general manager what I wouldn’t general manager of the LA Clippers who is from Dallas as long as you’re throwing out names. Well Cuban’s throwing out the name of Dennis Lindseay behind the scenes and I think all those other Cuban has a bigger voice than I do. By the way, what is Mark Cuban’s voice? Let let’s focus on Anthony Davis and we’ll get to that. It went from zero to something. Exactly what something is. I’m I I’m not sure he’s no longer the world’s richest mascot only. Um proprietor. You remember that? I’ll say this. He walked off the floor with Patrick Deont after that loss to the Milwaukee Bucks Monday night. I noticed that the idea of trading Anthony Davis your three to fouryear window to contend for a championship that window or that uh that Nico promised. Poof. Forget about it. Cooper flags 18. Do you need to take a step back to hope to build around him? There are worse ideas when you have this year’s first round pick and not your own until 2031. I think there’s some merit to that. More than some merit. It’s the only logical and frankly prudent path this team should take. Like they have to they have to prioritize Cooper flag. That frankly means they have to prioritize being as bad as they possibly can be this season and continue to just let Cooper have the ball, continue to develop his game like we saw in this Bucks Mavs game on Monday, one of several incredible games I had the pleasure of sitting on my couch and watching Monday night. Uh he’s going to be a special player. They need to keep building around him. They need this that the top of this draft has several potentially special players in it. They need to maximize their chances of getting one of those players and getting lucky in the draft again, which they can. And by the way, every day that goes by, you get closer to the end of Anthony Davis’s contract. He’s got a player option in the 27 28 season. He’s already in his mid in his early to mid-30s. He already has a bunch of injury issues. He’s already making a lot of money. So they’re he is a very good player still. They they’re not gonna get Luca Donuch back for him, but they can get a bunch of stuff for him when they don’t have their draft picks for the next several years. And here’s something else. They should trade Kyrie Irving too this season. Kyrie Irving gets back Well, hold on. If Kyrie especially if Kyrie Irving gets back on the court now, if you want to tell me that Kyrie doesn’t play and you don’t you can’t see where No, don’t don’t do that. Kyrie Irving is in his early again early to mid-30s. He’s got two years left on his deal. He’s a small guard. He is not anywhere near Cooper Flag’s timeline. Now, again, if he hasn’t played yet and you’re not getting anything for him in a trade, okay, fine. You could trade him potentially this summer. But the Mavericks have those two guys that they can use to get assets that are forward-looking, that can set them up to get a high draft pick this year and then pivot going forward. And frankly, a lot of the rest of the guys on the team, whether it’s Daniel Gaffford, PJ Washington, Derek Lively, Max Christie, like down the list, they’re all pretty young guys that are either in their prime or before it. And I think all those guys can fit pretty decently with Cooper going forward. So, I don’t think you need to sell the whole team off. But AD and Kyrie are both late in their primes or beyond it, make a ton of money, and I think their value is just going to go down by the day. So, I think if you’re if you’re Dennis Lindsay or Trent Redden or Matt Ricardi and Michael Finley, whoever’s running the Mavs between now and the trade deadline after they make a decision on what they’re going to do, that’s the the only question you should be asking is what’s the future with Anthony Davis? What’s the future with Kyrie Irving? And what should we do? Geez, Wendy, how many times did you crank up that thing in in Bond’s back? Million miles an hour there. Holy moly. He’s fired up about this one. I am fired up about it. I’m just I’m just going to say that there are going to be people who are going to say and I think rationally how can you possibly do that without seeing Anthony Davis and Kyrie Irving and just giving it at least a look because you know you if you rebuild well if you begin a rebuild you don’t know where it ends and so those are two guys you have on the roster and it’s not like you may not see those guys for a year you could see those guys in a couple of months And wouldn’t you couldn’t you wait until the summer before making that decision before you actually see what those guys have? You know, there’s a number of teams that are going to tank. I don’t know. I mean, you have to really hard tank if you want one of those top picks. Well, first of all, you don’t actually because if you get anywhere in the top eight to 10, you have a really good chance of jumping up in the lottery. The Mavs just jumped up from 11. We’ve seen teams jump up from anywhere from eight on every year. I didn’t say it was a strategy, but it’s it’s proven to be the case. Like the the lottery, if you’re in the top 10, 11 spots, is extraordinarily wide open now. It’s not like you used to be where it was basically you had to be in the top five. Also, news flash, Dallas isn’t good. The Western Conference is very difficult. It’s not going to be that hard for the Mavs to be somewhere down there in the top eight in the draft lottery. I I think frankly that’s where they’re headed. seeing what you’ve got. Look, what they’re doing is they’re they’re down here and they’re looking up in this deep hole before they can even see what they’ve got. If that happens now, facts, Kyrie Irving is not on the verge of returning. He’s making great progress. He’s going to continue working to get healthy. Once Kyrie Irving gets healthy, there will be and perhaps leading up to it, but there will be discussions. There will be discussions with Kyrie, you know, with his stepmom, uh, agent Chhatel Riley Irving, uh, you know, with his medical staff, the Maverick’s medical staff, the front office, Patrick Deont, what is in everybody’s best interest, and they might be aligned. The best interest for Kyrie and the franchise might be, hey, let’s rest the rest of the season and make sure when you’re back next year, it’s truly 100%. Maybe maybe that’s not what Kevin Durant when when Durant was coming back from the Achilles, you know, it was like, “Okay, we’re going to take a hard reset to the Nets and they they didn’t I mean, you know, they had the pandemic, but they were like, “Nope, we’re going to give you the full time.” That would be like that kind of move. Maybe maybe that’s you know, we’ll see. But those are discussions that will be had the appropriate times, right? And obviously part of him sitting the rest of the season would be this is one swing they’re going to have to pair another potentially high lottery pick with Cooper Flag and it’s the only swing they’re going to have to be able to do that barring getting another one via trade. Now the other thing you’ve got to factor in here you’re trying to rebuild a relationship with a fan base that feels backstabbed and betrayed. Now, the love for Kyrie is not quite the same as homegrown. You thought you’d have him from start to end, Luca, but man, Kyrie is beloved in Dallas as well. If you’re going to trade Kyrie, it has to be I think you’ve got to work with him and put him somewhere where he’s happy. And I’m not saying you just blindside AD. This is a high bar for a mid-season trade when the guys come. I don’t think Kyrie I don’t think I think I don’t think midse I think AD’s the mid-season discussion. I think Kyrie the mid-season discussion with him is whether he’s coming back this year not whether he’ll be in a trade. I guess that’s my point here. And I’m not saying you just screw AD forget it’s November 11th. I’m I’m not disagreeing with anything you’re saying. I mean it’s just it’s November 11th. I mean and they fired their general manager, you know. I know. I know. And I get it. I understand why they drastic changes have happened and are ahead, man. Well, here here’s what I would say about um here’s what I would say about your initial question, Brian. If you are going to hang on to Kyrie Irving and Anthony Davis, it’s because you have to believe the Mavericks have a real chance to be a championship contending team in the window na Harrison was talking about. There’s absolutely no chance that’s happening. There’s none. They’re not they’re nowhere near the Thunder. They’re nowhere near the Nuggets. They’re nowhere near the Rockets. They’re nowhere near the Spurs just to begin with. They’re nowhere near the Lakers. That’s immediately five team. They’re nowhere near the Wolves there. So there’s not a path to them being good enough to justify hanging on to those guys. And again, every day Anthony Davis is on the team, his value goes down. Now, doesn’t mean you trade him today. You can sound the market out and see, but the NBA is currently wide open outside of the Thunder. The Eastern Conference, there’s a cavernous hole at top the conference right now. You got all kinds of issues with all sorts of teams. We talked about Detroit having a chance the other day. If you have a player like Anthony Davis, there is an opportunity to cash him in and get a bunch of stuff back and pivot this thing forward around Cooper flag. And as for the Kyrie discussion, I understand where you’re coming from, McMahon, and I respect it. However, whoever takes over this team, whether it’s Dennis Lindsay or Trent Redden or name the imaginary GM who steps in to run the team once they decide what they’re going to do, you cannot worry about the perception of the fans with the team going forward. What you have to do is say what’s been done has been done. We have to move on from the Luca Donich trade. We have Cooper flag. He’s going to be a foundational franchise level player and we have to maximize Cooper Flag’s career. And the way to do that is to m get what you can for those two guys between now and this summer and go into next season with this team fully oriented around Cooper Flag, whoever they draft in this year’s draft and what the roster looks like to maximize those two guys next year and moving forward. And that has to be the way you sell it. Like man, how do you think the fan base, which is, you know, wiping the blood off of its fangs right now, uh, how do you think this fan base would react to being sold, even if it’s an artful sale? Wouldn’t be hard to be a more artful than Nico. How do you think they’d react to being sold that we’re going to kick off a full-scale rebuild and we’re going to trade the two franchise cornerstones? That they’re not the franchise cornerstones. No, they’re not. But they are. But they are they’re they’re both signed to a gigantic contract. They just signed Kyrie 15 minutes ago. There is one franchise cornerstone in Dallas. That’s that’s the 18year-old guy who went at Giannis at the end of I’m asking him I’m asking McMahon what he thinks the fans would do if they were immediately tried to be sold on a full-scale rebuild. Montimps is loud. He’s obnoxious. He’s irritating. He’s not wrong. He’s not wrong. the priority has to be Cooper flag. Now, I disagree with him about the need for Kyrie Irving because I think there’s a way for Kyrie to sit out and you don’t have your pick in 27, 28, 29, 30 anyway. But I think they’ve got to restock some of those picks. I think you’ve got to at least explore the market for AD. And here’s the thing, you guys have been around this league a long time. I wrote a whole book about like the Luca thing and the pressure on a franchise when you get a prodigy and they ended up surprise ending with that. They traded him because Nico wanted to, not because he forced his way out. But dude, if you fumble this thing with Cooper, there’s already franchises thinking, hm, seven years from now, I wonder if he if he’d like to come play here. And so, you got to build it around him. You got to put him in a situation to succeed long term. There’s a lot of work to do and some handcuffs in place. Well, I’ll tell you what. If you’re going to interview for the job, which I’m sure they will have interviews in the near future, the answer to that question is going to be extremely important. And I will say this, uh, a topic that I think is going to be featured regularly on this podcast as the season goes along is whether there’s going to be I don’t know how big the group will be. Maybe it’s five teams, maybe it’s seven teams, but there’s going to be some teams that get into December and January and realize that the prospects of them going in positioning for this draft are better than the prospects of finishing this season. That’s going to be a tipping point. I don’t know if three teams will plunge or five teams will plunge or whatever. But there is something to be said. While I think this is going to be a tough sale, there’s something to be said for being a first mover. And maybe that’s something that they have to consider. It’s going to be something that more teams are going to consider. The Mavericks just seem like they might have it on their plate a little earlier than anybody expected. Um, but they were in the 2024 finals and you’re telling your fans, get ready for a multi-year rebuild. You told your fans that when you made the Luca Donich trade. That’s the That’s the original sin here. The This is all collateral damage from That’s not what they told him. They told him championship within three years. And that’s why And that’s And that’s And that’s why Nico Harrison was fired.

Brian Windhorst is joined by Tim Bontemps and Tim MacMahon to talk the direction of the Mavericks franchise, including if they should trade Anthony Davis and Kyrie Irving to best setup the future for Cooper Flagg.

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