The season, compressed to begin with, is supposed to tip off in 14 days, and the league is just nowhere near ready to go. The Hornets don’t even have half a team, and their front office can’t fill the roster without approval from commissioner David Stern. Boston watched as the Pacers stepped into the chaos void with their cap space and snagged David West. The Rockets had plans A, B, C and (knowing general manager Daryl Morey) D linked to the three-team Chris Paul trade that fell apart Thursday and again late Saturday for reasons no one really understands even now. Nene waits, and his team, the Nuggets, waits to fill several empty roster spots. The Lakers could be an entirely different operation in 24 hours.
This is madness, and the idea of starting games actual NBA games that count in the standings and the championship race feels increasingly ludicrous. But here we are, and there appear to have been no discussions about changing plans at this late stage.In any case, the Lakers are already an entirely different operation, having stunned the almost numb NBA world late Saturday by pulling out of the Paul talks and sending Lamar Odom, their third- or fourth-best player depending on Andrew Bynum’s health, to Dallas for a late first-round pick they’ll see sometime this century. The Lakers have built a two-time champion on Kobe Bryant, the triangle offense and the league’s longest front line, and they just took one-third of the last part of that equation and gave him to the defending champions. The Mavericks can fit Odom’s $8.9 million salary into the trade exception they opened in the sign-and-trade that sent Tyson Chandler to New York.
Everyone is assuming Los Angeles has a Plan B locked and loaded because a contender just doesn’t decimate its own front line in a salary dump not after years of paying the luxury tax, and not after signing a new TV deal that will pay it perhaps as much as $200 million annually. The new tax rates that kick in for the 2013-14 season are harsh, and the clock on the extra penalties for repeat payers starts now, but I just don’t buy this as a money-saving move. Odom’s contract was by far the best value on the Lakers’ entire roster.
The ideal Plan B would obviously be a deal for Magic center Dwight Howard, who admitted on Saturday that he has requested a trade. But it’s essentially impossible to find a two-team trade that works for both clubs and doesn’t involve the Lakers sending both Bynum and Pau Gasol to Orlando a very steep price, but probably a fair one. The trade exception the Lakers acquired in the Odom deal is not big enough to absorb Hedo Turkoglu’s contract, which the Magic would love to dump on any Howard suitor. It can fit Jameer Nelson, but he’s one of Orlando’s helpful players, on an affordable deal that expires with a $7.8 million player option for next season. Howard is the league’s second-best player, and the Magic would obviously need more than “just” Bynum or Gasol straight-up to deal him; the Lakers just don’t have any other assets, having dealt Odom to Dallas.
But the Lakers’ Mitch Kupchak is one of the league’s best GMs, and you can bet he has something figured out here. If he doesn’t, a thin team just got a lot thinner at a key position. And if Kupchak lands Howard, the NBA will have quashed an initial trade for a franchise-level player, only to see the Lakers turn around and get a younger, healthier franchise-level player. Still, you can see how the league can extricate itself from this and claim some bogus public victory: The Lakers get Howard, the Hornets deal Paul to another team for the kind of under-26 blue-chipper they didn’t get in the (pretty fair) aborted trade, and the NBA claims to have prevented a possible Paul/Howard double for the Lakers. What a mess.
As for the Mavericks, you have to give it to owner Mark Cuban, who has admitted lobbying against the initial Paul trade: He lost Chandler, the on-court glue to a top-shelf defense, and that loss turned Dallas from one of the title favorites into a fringe contender. With Odom on board, the Mavs are probably still behind the Thunder and Heat in the championship pecking order, but they are closer, and Odom is an affordable one-year stopgap who has very little impact on the Mavs’ cap sheet going forward. Only $2.4 million of his deal for 2012-13 is guaranteed, and the Mavs could work their way to about $11 million in cap space by buying out Odom and declining all their team options. They could also exercise some of those team options, use the amnesty clause on Brendan Haywood and approach about $15 million in cap space.
For now, Odom represents another funky positional piece on a team full of them. But Rick Carlisle has proved more than perhaps any coach in the league that he can take a roster of positional misfits and find the right lineup combinations. The Mavs’ comfort with zone defenses also might make it possible to give Odom some minutes at small forward, a position he basically never played in his last couple of seasons as a Laker.
Odom mostly plays power forward, the same position as Dirk Nowitzki, so it’s easy to wonder about why he’s so useful in Dallas. Nowitzki will have to play some center so that he, Odom and Shawn Marion can play together. Nowitzki barely played center last season, and while it’s easy to say he can manage in a league lacking true centers, reality is more complicated. There are still true centers out there, and even the undersized ones (such as New Orleans’ Emeka Okafor) bang under the glass in a way that troubles Nowitzki as he enters his twilight. And a smaller Mavs team won’t be as solid on the glass, where it thrived on all the second chances Chandler created. Asking Nowitzki to bang with the big men in a compacted 66-game season is dicey, which is why Haywood will play more when matchups demand it.
The Mavs, by my count, have about $72 million committed so far to 13 players, and that number will rise if they go through with the Vince Carter signing. That would leave them with only the mini mid-level exception, starting at $3 million per season, to attract a true big man for that final roster spot.
But the Odom move makes more sense when you think about how fragile Dallas was last season despite its depth. Marion was its only reliable backup power forward, and he had to become a starter when the now-departed Caron Butler went down with injury. And so when Nowitzki needed rest, Marion had to stay on the floor and shift to power forward, forcing Carlisle to flail about with Peja Stojakovic, Brian Cardinal and other wing combinations that struggled to hold things together until Dirk returned. Those combinations mostly failed; the Mavs were dramatically worse with Marion at power forward, both in the regular season and the playoffs.
The fact that Dallas’ best wing scorer (Jason Terry) can’t really defend wing players especially the sort in Miami only forced Carlisle into more lineup-bending gymnastics. Odom eases things a bit. He can back up Nowitzki, sparing Marion from those power forward minutes and freeing him to play more small forward if the young wings Dallas is counting on this season (Corey Brewer and Rudy Fernandez) struggle. Odom can also guard some of the league’s lesser centers, something he did for Team USA during the 2010 FIBA World Championships.
He has the range Dallas needs to keep its precious floor-spacing intact, and he’s a very good rebounder, even if he can’t touch Chandler in that regard. Odom is another ball-handler comfortable outside, and it’s easy to see him and Jason Kidd flinging smart passes around the perimeter as defenses try to find all the shooters.
Odom isn’t a perfect solution, but he’s a potentially elegant one, especially for a coach like Carlisle. The loss of Chandler still stings; Odom cannot replace all the defense that left for New York. The Mavs are a lesser team now than they were in June, but the combination of Odom and development of the youngsters could put them back into the title mix if some key variables fall their way.
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