Can you imagine how good the Mavs would be if Cuban hadn't been so pompous and cocky and slept through the first two weeks of free agency?
"Don't worry, nobody big or worthwhile is going to sign on day 1."
He legitimately FORGOT to call Patrick Beverley despite telling him they would. It's not a rumor. They even admitted it.
Once again, Cuban and his smug arrogance overplayed his hand and mis-read the landscape of the NBA, and the Mavs were left out as losers. They had more cap space than almost every other team... enough for 1 Max player or 2 really good ones, and they came away with nobody of any value. Then, once they realized their miscalculation and that the rest of the basketball world was laughing at their inactivity, they doubled down on their stupidity by blowing a chunk of their cap space on Seth Curry and Boban Marjanovic. Curry sees limited minutes and hasn't been a big contributor at all, and Marjanovic frequently gets DNP's. Now imagine instead of those two spares we had usable rotation pieces like Beverley or Danny Green (just to name a few who could have been had).
I swear, Mark Cuban stumbles ass-backwards into the most fortuitous situations that not even James Dolan could mess up, and yet somehow ol' Cubes does just that. He was GIFTED Dirk by the Nelsons and proceeded to waste his entire career by: a) saying Nash was washed up and letting him walk, b) failing to put together any kind of legit core around Dirk for almost his entire career, c) always trying to sign the pie-in-the-sky free agents like Howard and DWill instead of focusing on acquiring multiple realistic next tier targets, and d) breaking up the championship team because he just "knew" how the NBA works (at least he finally admitted he was full of it on that one).
Now, he somehow lucked into a sweet draft pick during the perfect draft year, and Donnie suckered Atlanta into giving up a generational talent in Doncic for a high scorer/chucker in Young. Then Donnie took advantage of the dumpster fire that is the New York Knicks and got the unicorn Porzingis for a soggy bologna sandwich. So Cuban is sitting there with two of the best players in the NBA at the relative beginning of their careers and the cap space to actually add a THIRD elite star to the mix or at least two very good role players, and what does he do? He does nothing at all while all other teams take action, then he acts genuinely surprised that he missed out on all of the good players. It's unreal.
They're a pretty decent team as constructed... not elite, but decent. But I just get so upset at the thought of how good they could have been had they even remotely tried in free agency. I've truly never seen a team just completely forget what they were doing like that. Even their biggest fanboy/ lapdog Mike Fisher criticized them for having literally no plan whatsoever for free agency.