Plan Powder, a lesson from the Mavs on how NOT to team build

Not Pelicans but it shows us what's important for the Pels to try and do to land the next star, and reading a post mortem on the Mavs is fun too.

TL;DR The Mavs placed a premium on available cap space which lead to mediocre teams and no FAs willing to sign with them because all the best FAs have the same money on the table from all teams they're considering and usually end up choosing the best team on the list. You don't want to get stuck with unmovable contracts, but becoming the best team you can be should be prioritized over having available cap space.

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Let me tell you about something that was euphemistically called “plan powder”, but which was always, from minute one, non-euphemistically a complete trainwreck.

Oh, I heard the stories, and some I even knew about as they were happening. Dwight and CP3 almost teamed up and came here. Andre Iguodala changed his mind at the last minute. It was failures all the way down, but fairplay to the Mavericks, there were a lot of almost not failures. Doesn’t seem to be any good reason for it, but it is a historical fact: that they were on the list of every big name free agent of the last four years.

...Or maybe… the fatal flaws of the damn thing was always there for anyone who wanted to see them. Here’s the breakdown:

* “Plan powder” comes from the phrase “keep your powder dry.” In this case it means “have as much cap space as possible at all times.”
* The way to get cap space that involves just HAVING money on hand means a lot of one year rentals, few impact players, no continuity, and ultimately mediocrity.
* No top free agent wants to play for a mediocre team.
* Every top free agent gets the same offer, dollar figure wise, from every team that’s interested in them.

You follow? What the Mavs did was basically to say “we’re going to follow a strategy that makes us mediocre for the sake of having money until we score big, even though scoring big is based on what you can offer to free agents besides money.”

Just how bad this strategy was can be seen in two observations, both of which could have been made well before the Mavericks put us all through four terrible offseasons in a row:

Apparently, signing big name FAs is pretty simple. Name one, name any of them–Dwight Howard, Andre Iguodala, LaMarcus Aldridge, now DeAndre Jordan—every single one of them ended up on the best team on their original list. Even Deron Williams probably did this, though it’s hard to believe in retrospect. You don’t have your decision swayed by a panic trade for Joe Johnson just because, oh man, I’ve ALWAYS wanted to hang out with Deron Williams.

No one else thinks the only way to get cap space is to already have it. Remember 2013? Mavs were targeting Dwight Howard, than Andre Iguodala? While the Mavs had been carefully hoarding cap space like Gollum and the ring, the Rockets swung a couple of trades and made it magically appear. Then the Golden State Warriors did. Rockets got Howard, Warriors got Iggy, and last year they were #1 and #2 in the West. Meanwhile, the Mavs, gnawing on raw fish in their cavern…

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