The Assassination Of Devean George By The Coward Donnie Nelson

February 13th, 2008. Wednesday. Raining.

The Dallas Mavericks are tootling along with a 34-17 record. They're pretty good, and perhaps they know it, because they're suddenly overwhelmed with the urge to do something stupid.

A veteran team with only one good young player decides on a plan to get older and worse. The Mavericks decide that Jason Kidd is a significant upgrade over Devin Harris, and work out a variety of scenarios that see them trade Devin and two future first round draft picks for Kidd. They're wrong, but they work hard at it anyway, determined to obtain a player that puts them further away from the hump that they're already sliding away from. Two years ago, it would have been a steal. But not now.

Eventually, they stumble upon a scenario that both they and the Nets can agree upon. Dallas agrees to trade Harris, the picks, cash, DeSagana Diop, Maurice Ager, Jerry Stackhouse and Devean George to the Nets in exchange for Kidd and Malik Allen. The fillers are largely meaningless; outside of Harris, only Diop is a significant player for the Mavericks, and even then he sucks more ass than most people care to acknowledge. The core of the deal is Harris for Kidd, and both teams seem pretty happy with that. The fundamental pieces are together, peripherals of the long-awaited deal are finally in place, and everyone's a winner. (Except Dallas.)

Things then get a bit weird. Through a hitherto little-known technicality, one of the least important components of the deal - backup forward George - has the power to veto the trade. George re-signed with the Mavericks in the previous offseason to a one year contract, and Dallas will have early Bird rights on him when his contract expires. However, if George gets traded, the recipient team will lose his Bird rights if they trade for him, which reduces George's chances of getting handily paid next season. [Let's pretend for a minute that such chances existed.] I don't really understand the purpose of the rule, but it exists, and it applies to Devean. As a result, players on one year contracts who will have early or full Bird rights at the season's end are given the right to veto any trades that they may be in, so that they aren't powerless to prevent having their Bird rights taken away from them. And that's the power George wields.

The rule wasn't really written for situations like this. I'm not really sure who it does apply to, really, but it definitely wasn't for this reason. Yet it applies anyway, and therefore, to a chorus of anger and giggles, George exercises his right to veto the trade and emphatically pisses on Mark Cuban's strawberries for at least 72 hours.

Vetoing the trade doesn't endear George to the Mavericks fans. They boo him lustily, already aggrieved by his crapness and his club's weird affection for him. It also doesn't help that he plays 33 minutes later that same night, and scores 0 points on 11 shots. But technically and morally, he did no wrong. He did what he had to do, and looked for himself. He merely made some people look bad while doing it.

(It also doesn't really hold up the Mavericks, who rework the trade later in the week anyway, substituting Stackhouse and George for Keith Van Horn and Trenton Hassell. With Antoine Wright also coming back in the reworked version, it's a better deal anyway. But I digress.)

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Fast forward to this month.

George saw out the season with the Mavericks, sucked horribly, yet re-signed with the team for two more guaranteed years anyway. The inexplicable love that Donnie Nelson and Devean George feel for each other can never be topped, or properly understood. But it's about to change when Nelson tries to trade George again. And this time, he succeeds.

Two weeks ago, George was traded to the Raptors as a peripheral part of the Shawn Marion deal. Along with Antoine Wright, he went to Toronto as the afterthought backups to the also-acquired Hidayet Turkoglu, a move which showed the Raptors putting on a fine demonstration of creative financing, if not a good idea of how to build a team. (And if you don't think there's not an I-TOLD-YOU-SO post coming on that subject, then you're very much mistaken.) However, as far as Devean George was concerned, there was another caveat.

Now, it's possible that they are not vengeance-driven horrible bastards. It's possible that they just did this without considering the possible side effects down the road. But here's the thing; when re-signing George this past summer to a two year $3.2 million contract that paid $1.6 million in both seasons, Nelson and Cuban added a somewhat rare clause to the contract that called for George to get a $200,000 bonus if the Mavericks win a certain number of games this season. I don't know what the threshold was, but I'm guessing it was 50 wins, since that's what they won last season (such predictions are calculated during the moratorium using the team's record from the previous season as the basis). Since the Mavericks can be realistically expected to achieve that next year, George had himself a $200,000 bonus.

But then he was traded to the Raptors. They didn't win 50 games last year, and thus the CBA cannot consider them likely to do it this year either. As a result, George loses $200,000. And though he's subsequently been traded to the Golden State Warriors in a shameful deal for Marco Belinelli, the same applies; George has lost his bonus.

Revenge.

Of course, the fact that the Mavericks had given George a combined $5,943,370 to play with them over the last three seasons means the last laugh is still firmly on them. Their inability to realise that they were paying to retain a man with scoring the scoring efficiency of Willie Green, the rebounding of Jason Collins and the oft-misrepresented defense of Andres Nocioni means that they're the real victims here, the victims of their own silliness. But, still. Vengeance is sweet.



(EDIT: It's been brought to my attention that they above is too confusing. Fair enough. Here's the gist of it, reworded; based on last year's win total, the Mavericks were expected to win 50 games. As a result, George's cap number was raised to $1.8 million. Now that he's a Warriors, it's been knocked down to $1.6 million again. But George was only going to be paid $1.6 million UNTIL the 50 wins happened, at which point he'd get the bonus. The basic point remains, though; by not now being a Mav, George loses $200,000. That is all.)

30 teams in as many days as it takes: Dallas

Players acquired via free agency or trade:

Brandon Bass (two year minimum)
Trenton Hassell (acquired from Minnesota)
Eddie Jones (two year, full BAE)



Players acquired via draft:

First round: None
Second round: Nick Fazekas (34th overall), Reyshawn Terry (44th overall, unsigned), Reinaldas Seibutis (50th overall, unsigned)



Players retained:

Jerry Stackhouse (re-signed, 3 years, $22,376,250, I think)
Devean George (opted out, re-signed, 1 year, $2,369,111)
Devin Harris (signed a wildly oversized 5 year extension)
DeSagana Diop (exercised team option)



Players departed:

Greg Buckner (traded to Minnesota)
Austin Croshere (signed with Golden State)
Kevin Willis (unsigned)
Pops Mensah-Bonsu (waived, signed in Italy)



Bobbins:

The Mavericks have one of the worst young cores in the NBA. With only Devin Harris, Juan Jose Barea and Maurice Ager as the only returning players under the age of 26, and with only one of those playes able to crack any NBA team's rotation, Dallas enjoys (if that's the word) almost nothing in the way of prospects. There's Josh Howard of course, but he's 27 now, and while DeSagana Diop is still only 25, you're an optimist and an idiot if you think there's some skills in there that he's merely kept hidden for 6 years.

(Incidentally, did you know that Mavericks training camp signee Jamal Sampson is only 24 years old, despite being around for what feels like a million years, and that commonly accepted youngster Diduer Ilunga Mbenga is about to turn 27? Me neither. These things are worth noting. That is, they are worth nothing if you're really bitterly pathetic like me. If you are, hooray! We should hang out.)

Dallas tried to add to this somewhat this summer. Without a first round draft pick, they picked Nick Fazekas high in the second, thus once again insuring that they have a tall white forward who takes 85% outside jumpshots and who doesn't move well on defense. It's a recent trend that began with Keith Van Horn, was last year handled marvellously by Austin Croshere, who now passes the mantle onto Fazekas.

Fazekas figures not to play much, though, after the unheralded signing of Brandon Bass seems to have given the Mavericks a backup power forward worth a damn. After two years of bland nothingness with the Hornets, Bass was allowed to leave unchallenged when Dallas picked him up. Since then, despite it only being preseason, Bass has shown signs of being a capable player, and being only 22 he can join (or rather, "be") Dallas young core.

But then, who gives a shit about a young core when you've just won 67 games the season before? To add young talent is nice, but all Dallas really needed to do was to keep the core that they had, maybe add one or two pieces, and try all over again. They did this, adding some perimeter defense in Eddie Jones and Trenton Hassell, while bringing back Devean George and Jerry Stackhouse for some more depth. The Mavericks can boast now one of the NBA's deeper teams, and they still rock the core that resulted in the 5th best record in NBA history last year (it was something like that, at least. I forgot what it was exactly).

They didn't blow it up, and under no circumstances should they have done. Watch as they now decimate the roster in a trade for Kobe.



Next year:

Much has been made of the Mavericks historic capitulation to the Warriors in round one of the playoffs last year, which set all kinds of trends that I can't rememeber. But what a lot of people tend to overlook was the sheer bad luck of it all. If any other team claims that eighth seed, Dallas polishes them off with no problem at all. Yet Golden State offered up by far and away the biggest matchup problem of them all, and it's them who Dallas drew.

The Mavericks did not help themselves by somewhat wilting under pressure, and Avery Johnson by his own admission did not make the correct adjustments.

None of this, however, means that the right way for the Mavericks to go is to start thinking "yes, what we need right now is the sub-30% clutch shooting of Kobe Bryant", or "we can never with win Dirk, let's trade him".

They have a formula, and it's one that works. It worked last year to the tune of 67 wins, and while regular seasons don't account for anything in the playoffs (as Golden State showed), it does serve to prove that this Mavericks team can beat all comers. All, that is, but one.

To solve Golden State (and believe me when I tell you that I realise how stupid it is to imply that a team's season rests on one matchup versus one solitary mediocre opponent), Dallas doesn't need to revamp their roster, but make some adjustments and not get rattled. They didn't, and so they lost. But were that situation to happen again, that's all it takes to avoid that drama again.

Dallas is arguably the best team in the league. The Spurs have the title and claim that crown, but Dallas is up there. They should once again finish with the best regular season record and win the Western Conference.

This year, they just need a better stroke of luck, and a dose of fortitude. If that happens, they may win the title. They're one of very few teams that are good enough.