The list of available free agents from 2023-2025 is pretty bleak. Mostly guys who are going to be mid-to-late 30s.
TheDeadman95
The greatest trick the devil ever played was convincing the media that Mark Cuban is a great owner willing to spend anything and everything to make the team better.
bagfka
Why does that explain everything? We haven’t had a team worthy to spend on. What was there to spend on from like 2019 and earlier.
Notice how when we started getting good our spending has gone up. This year we are I believe 8th in spending
ShassaFrassa
It is but it comes with the added caveat that it includes the 2018 and 2019 and 2020 seasons. 2018 was the very much tail end of Dirk’s storied career and 2019 was Luka’s first season. 2020 we had KP and THJ on the salary sheet, but didn’t really look to assemble a “championship ready roster” because no one foresaw the rapid acceleration of Luka’s career trajectory (and Luka was still on his rookie contract). It was after the 2020 playoffs that we started to look at this team more critically and decide we’re going to bet big and signed Luka to his monster supermax deal. This year (2022-23), our cap spending is at $164M, much higher than the prior years. As of now, with the Wood and Powell contracts rolling off in the offseason, we’re still at $143M for 2023-24. You can expect Dallas to be firmly in luxury tax territory for the next 3 years at the very least and the redeeming quality about Mark Cuban is that he’s willing to spend the money (besides missing out on signing Brunson to the DFS deal). After all, this is the same man who gave our entire MLE to JaVale McGee… like he’s either cheap and doesn’t spend any money or he overpays… you can make one point or the other. You can’t make both. And overpaying is kind of the only chip he can play to attract free agents because (let’s face it) Dallas is *not* an attractive city for free agents. I don’t know why. There’s no state income tax and like others have noted, Cuban is a very popular NBA owner (outside of Dallas). But big time free agents would rather choose San Antonio or Houston over Dallas because they just don’t like the city.
Active_Page_3886
Worst owner and GM combo in the entire league.
Moe4ver
This is an uninformed post that states half truth solely to bash Cuban.
Please list someone the Mavs should have signed in those years.
Only person Warriors signed of significance in those years is KD. The paid their own drafted players to have such a huge cap.
Conveniently ignores this year that Mavs are $40 mil over the cap and top 10 in salaries.
trapHerm
The real issue is we lost our only good young player in Brunson , and we got good TOO FAST , so not enough young talent to grow with luka , and free agents don’t wanna come play with a ball dominate white European , just my opinion
EmrysMyrdin
The problem is the we didn’t use Luka’s rookie contract years to build a strong young core that can develop together. Foolish trade for KP completely destroyed the rebuild. And now we ended up with an aging roster that isn’t good enough to compete. Building through the draft is by far the best way unless you are a free agent destination and Cuban wanted to avoid it.
dmr196one
I’m curious. What do you think this explains?
Swordsteel
This might be payroll, but I don’t think it includes luxury taxes
StormTheTrooper
“This explains everything”, the bottom 5 has two conference finals and one Finals appearance in the last 3 seasons, how do you exactly correlate things here? The bottom 2 has a better playoff record then the 2nd-4th top spenders.
The current East 1st seed and reigning EC Champ is in the bottom half, two of the other 5 top East seeds are not in the top 10. In the West *none* of the top 5 seeds are in the top 10 spending. I’m extremely curious to understand what the hell was your rationale here other than “muh spend money cheap Cuban”.
ILikeTujtels
Fire Cuban !
nisaaru
The numbers are imho wrong for GSW and similar spenders as this doesn’t seem to include the penalty tax.
The problem with the rest of the numbers is that you can only get really high if you have the bird rights with long term players and you would only try to pay that much if these players are worth it. Dallas only has one exceptional player and pays him the max.
GSW had multiple players.
As far as I recall the tax GSW has to spend is completely insane. Afair it was about 2x of the 170M number last year or the year before.
You can only expect that to happen with Billionaires with too much money to waste and no brain whatsoever.
Comfortable-Junket97
Well if it helps this years team is over $163 million and it’s probably the worst of the last 4
SvarogRod
Also I saw that signing Brunson to 30 mil/year would cost Cuban just this season 130 mil.
Is Cuban secretly leting Wood leave this summer because he is in financial problems?
sathan1
Hawks fan there, neither of our owners will ever dip into the luxury tax to win:) shitty owners unite!
SvarogRod
Remember Dirk took paycuts.
AgentInCommand
And yet, it feels like we’re in perpetual cap hell…
torodonn
What does it explain though?
The Suns were finalists last year and beat us. They’re in the bottom 5. Chicago, Memphis, Pelicans, Celtics all in the bottom half.
Are the Rockets, Raptors, Wolves, Nuggets, Lakers winning a lot more than us because they’ve spent more?
This also ignores that we have the 8th highest payroll this season.
This ‘Cuban is cheap’ narrative is tiresome.
LogicisGone
I don’t know if this is what you were implying, but I don’t think this is a symbol of Cuban being cheap. in general, you can pay people you draft a bit more. if anything this speaks to how awful we have drafted since … forever?
naked_avenger
I don’t get it. Mark definitely does not have a problem spending money. Those teams are pretty much all over the cap. To say that Cuban hasn’t tried to spend money on big names is not true. We literally cleared out space to make a go at Giannis.
We simply haven’t had the players to spend it on. No home grown talent worth going over the cap for (and you can certainly blame Nelson for that, and possibly Cuban). Going AFTER big name free agents is what Cuban has absolutely done, it just hasn’t worked out. We spent big on Parsons, who’s career derailed due to injuries. We had DeAndre Jordan until we didn’t. He’s gone after Deron Williams and Kyle Lowry. He made the trade for KP, and while that didn’t turn out as well as we had hoped (largely due to injury), he showed he wasn’t afraid to make a move.
The reality is that stars RARELY ever leave their team in free agency. It just doesn’t happen often. They’re almost always traded to teams that have sucked ass and have assets to part with, or a team that got lucky with a later rookie pick that turn out well.
23 Comments
If it’s spotrac, it’s probably correct.
The list of available free agents from 2023-2025 is pretty bleak. Mostly guys who are going to be mid-to-late 30s.
The greatest trick the devil ever played was convincing the media that Mark Cuban is a great owner willing to spend anything and everything to make the team better.
Why does that explain everything? We haven’t had a team worthy to spend on. What was there to spend on from like 2019 and earlier.
Notice how when we started getting good our spending has gone up. This year we are I believe 8th in spending
It is but it comes with the added caveat that it includes the 2018 and 2019 and 2020 seasons. 2018 was the very much tail end of Dirk’s storied career and 2019 was Luka’s first season. 2020 we had KP and THJ on the salary sheet, but didn’t really look to assemble a “championship ready roster” because no one foresaw the rapid acceleration of Luka’s career trajectory (and Luka was still on his rookie contract). It was after the 2020 playoffs that we started to look at this team more critically and decide we’re going to bet big and signed Luka to his monster supermax deal. This year (2022-23), our cap spending is at $164M, much higher than the prior years. As of now, with the Wood and Powell contracts rolling off in the offseason, we’re still at $143M for 2023-24. You can expect Dallas to be firmly in luxury tax territory for the next 3 years at the very least and the redeeming quality about Mark Cuban is that he’s willing to spend the money (besides missing out on signing Brunson to the DFS deal). After all, this is the same man who gave our entire MLE to JaVale McGee… like he’s either cheap and doesn’t spend any money or he overpays… you can make one point or the other. You can’t make both. And overpaying is kind of the only chip he can play to attract free agents because (let’s face it) Dallas is *not* an attractive city for free agents. I don’t know why. There’s no state income tax and like others have noted, Cuban is a very popular NBA owner (outside of Dallas). But big time free agents would rather choose San Antonio or Houston over Dallas because they just don’t like the city.
Worst owner and GM combo in the entire league.
This is an uninformed post that states half truth solely to bash Cuban.
Please list someone the Mavs should have signed in those years.
Only person Warriors signed of significance in those years is KD. The paid their own drafted players to have such a huge cap.
Conveniently ignores this year that Mavs are $40 mil over the cap and top 10 in salaries.
The real issue is we lost our only good young player in Brunson , and we got good TOO FAST , so not enough young talent to grow with luka , and free agents don’t wanna come play with a ball dominate white European , just my opinion
The problem is the we didn’t use Luka’s rookie contract years to build a strong young core that can develop together. Foolish trade for KP completely destroyed the rebuild. And now we ended up with an aging roster that isn’t good enough to compete. Building through the draft is by far the best way unless you are a free agent destination and Cuban wanted to avoid it.
I’m curious. What do you think this explains?
This might be payroll, but I don’t think it includes luxury taxes
“This explains everything”, the bottom 5 has two conference finals and one Finals appearance in the last 3 seasons, how do you exactly correlate things here? The bottom 2 has a better playoff record then the 2nd-4th top spenders.
The current East 1st seed and reigning EC Champ is in the bottom half, two of the other 5 top East seeds are not in the top 10. In the West *none* of the top 5 seeds are in the top 10 spending. I’m extremely curious to understand what the hell was your rationale here other than “muh spend money cheap Cuban”.
Fire Cuban !
The numbers are imho wrong for GSW and similar spenders as this doesn’t seem to include the penalty tax.
The problem with the rest of the numbers is that you can only get really high if you have the bird rights with long term players and you would only try to pay that much if these players are worth it. Dallas only has one exceptional player and pays him the max.
GSW had multiple players.
As far as I recall the tax GSW has to spend is completely insane. Afair it was about 2x of the 170M number last year or the year before.
You can only expect that to happen with Billionaires with too much money to waste and no brain whatsoever.
Well if it helps this years team is over $163 million and it’s probably the worst of the last 4
Also I saw that signing Brunson to 30 mil/year would cost Cuban just this season 130 mil.
Is Cuban secretly leting Wood leave this summer because he is in financial problems?
Hawks fan there, neither of our owners will ever dip into the luxury tax to win:) shitty owners unite!
Remember Dirk took paycuts.
And yet, it feels like we’re in perpetual cap hell…
What does it explain though?
The Suns were finalists last year and beat us. They’re in the bottom 5. Chicago, Memphis, Pelicans, Celtics all in the bottom half.
Are the Rockets, Raptors, Wolves, Nuggets, Lakers winning a lot more than us because they’ve spent more?
This also ignores that we have the 8th highest payroll this season.
This ‘Cuban is cheap’ narrative is tiresome.
I don’t know if this is what you were implying, but I don’t think this is a symbol of Cuban being cheap. in general, you can pay people you draft a bit more. if anything this speaks to how awful we have drafted since … forever?
I don’t get it. Mark definitely does not have a problem spending money. Those teams are pretty much all over the cap. To say that Cuban hasn’t tried to spend money on big names is not true. We literally cleared out space to make a go at Giannis.
We simply haven’t had the players to spend it on. No home grown talent worth going over the cap for (and you can certainly blame Nelson for that, and possibly Cuban). Going AFTER big name free agents is what Cuban has absolutely done, it just hasn’t worked out. We spent big on Parsons, who’s career derailed due to injuries. We had DeAndre Jordan until we didn’t. He’s gone after Deron Williams and Kyle Lowry. He made the trade for KP, and while that didn’t turn out as well as we had hoped (largely due to injury), he showed he wasn’t afraid to make a move.
The reality is that stars RARELY ever leave their team in free agency. It just doesn’t happen often. They’re almost always traded to teams that have sucked ass and have assets to part with, or a team that got lucky with a later rookie pick that turn out well.
This is a bad take. Boo to you.
He put too much into crypto. Cuban down bad?