The day dawned without a single word of disgust on Mark Cuban’s Twitter account. No even an emoji … even a simple one, like a frowning face.
Today is the day after DeAndre Jordan reneged on his verbal commitment to the Dallas Mavericks and instead decided to return to the Los Angeles Clippers, keeping Lob City intact and making the Mavs’ decision-makers go back to the drawing board and their analytics tables to debate the relative merits of JaVale McGee and Kevin Seraphin and Sim Bhullar and Satnam Singh Bhamara.
The Mavs got screwed in the past 24 hours, and Jordan can expect to be sent to the free throw line 60 or 70 times in his first appearance in Dallas when the Clippers and Mavs meet next season. He will not be warmly received, that is for certain.
But is what Jordan did the mortal sin that it is being made out to be?
What is worse: Leaving a prospective bride at the altar? Or pledging lifelong love through good times and bad, for better or worse, and then ditching the marriage and the kids when whimsy strikes? (See Larry Sanders, Milwaukee Bucks). There is a right time and a wrong time to change one’s mind, and going back on your word is never truly defensible.
Jordan’s about-face may certainly lead to changes in the NBA free agency landscape. The idea that was thrown out yesterday that makes the most sense is to ditch the seven-day moratorium that happens at the beginning of each July, set the salary cap first and then allow teams to negotiate with free agents. That way, if you make a commitment, you sign your contract right then and there.
From Eddie Sefko of the Dallas Morning-News: “It was a crazy day and evening of unprecedented covert moves by the Clippers, who stayed holed up at Jordan’s Houston house as the moratorium wound down to ensure he would not get a chance to meet with the Mavericks again, even though owner Mark Cuban traveled to Houston to try to usher Jordan to a Dallas-bound finish line. The Clippers sent a posse of representatives including All-Stars Blake Griffin and Chris Paul along with coach Doc Rivers to Jordan’s home. They apparently did not go through Jordan’s representative and circled back to reopen their recruiting pitch despite commentaries from many corners that doing so was a breach of the spirit of free-agent law, if not the letter of the law, after he first committed to the Mavericks on Friday. Whatever, it worked for the Clippers. The Mavericks are left to wonder what the heck happened and how they can recover from the franchise-shaking blow of losing a 26-year-old rising star center who was one of the most sought-after free agents this summer. This could be an event that will rank with Roy Tarpley’s drug suspension as the darkest days in franchise history.”
There would be no more DeAndre Jordans or Hedo Turkoglus or Elton Brands or Jason Kidds — a list of free-agency mind-changers that was cobbled together by the esteemed Steve Aschburner of NBA.com, a guy who once had second thoughts of his own when he took a buyout from the Minneapolis Star-Tribune and then changed his mind, only to be told it was too late … he had already signed.
Asch made it back on his feet, and so will the Mavericks. For all the hubbub about what a great pickup Jordan was, the guy still can’t make a foul shot or a five-footer, and he gets upset when plays are not called for him. He is good at dunking and blocking shots and altering shots. He is not good at holding 3-1 leads or making it to the conference finals.
The venom that was spewed overnight – and will continue to be spewed by Mavs fans throughout the next several hours, days and months – will leave many of us cackling. We tend to revel in the vilification of this person or that person, and next person to call Jordan by the nickname Beelzebub will not be the first.
But Jordan is not the devil. He is a 26-year-old basketball player who made a decision, gave his word and then changed his mind. Yes, he violated an unwritten rule, and perhaps the rules will change so that unwritten rules can no longer be broken. But there will always be levels of treachery and deceit in the NBA and in life, and the trick to overcoming them is getting past them.
The Mavs are a donut team now with a hole in the middle. They are not as good on paper as they were a year ago, but they have $16 million in cap space to go get something done, and they have the rest of July, plus all of August and September to figure out what that might be. It wasn’t all that long ago that the Knicks brought in an undrafted center named Timofey Mozgov who was an enigma at the start of training camp and the starting center on opening night.
The Mavs have two choices: Stay bitter and angry, or move on. My advice is to take the latter route. Forget about Jordan, forget about all the time and energy that was invested in Jordan, maybe make a suggestion to Adam Silver so that this type of thing does not happen again, and then see what the future brings.
Jordan is now part of the Mavericks’ past.
And as smart folks like to say: The past is the past, the future will be whatever it will be, and the only thing we can control is the present. Life will go on, and dwelling on the man who gave you his word and then spurned you will drive you crazy if you allow it to.
As I wrote earlier, if you want to get even with DeAndre Jordan, go with a Hack-a-DJ strategy in Game 1 that would make even Kevin McHale blush. Do it once, then let it go for good — unless Jordan ends up being a playoff opponent. Then you do it again, and let Jordan determine the extent of his own suffering. At the end of the day, the Mavs will emerge as better people for moving along and turning the page.
In the meantime, job No. 1 will be finding the next Mozgov. Cuban, Donnie Nelson and Rick Carlisle are smart enough to find him.
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Chris Sheridan is publisher and editor-in-chief of SheridanHoops.com. Follow him on Twitter.