Justin Verrier

He showed up, he got hurt and they almost immediately lucked into Cooper flag and became a Cooper flag team.

So the timeline shifted whether they were willing to acknowledge it or not.

And this to me at minimum feels like an acknowledgement of that fact.

But I mean, right now, Kyle, they have the seventh best odds and maybe with a little more massaging of their rotation, like maybe they can get into the top five odds.

For sure.

And they were just so log jammed because of the expense of the roster, especially staring down Anthony Davis' next deal, which is going to be like $60 million a season over however long he wants to pursue it.

Between that and not having their own picks, they were just kind of stuck.

And it was going to be really difficult to actually reshuffle this group in any meaningful way without making these kinds of hard choices.

And this is where...

As we're talking about that potential 30th, 29th pick that they're going to get from OKC and the other bad, very protected Warriors pick that Justin talked about, those are not meaningful picks to the Wizards.

Those don't mean anything to them.

I think they do mean something to Dallas because of the dearth of trade assets and draft assets otherwise.

It's like if you don't have any of your own picks...

Just having a couple, whether you use them or not, can like grease the wheels of trade negotiations, can kind of get you into different conversations than you'd be able to otherwise.

They get you some measure of flexibility.

And so it's like, if you're going to build a Cooper flag team, you got to have the means to at least make some kinds of moves.

And they just didn't have that before.

I mean, they're going to feel bad for... I'm sorry to say this to Mavs fans, the rest of their sporting lives.

Like, Luka is always going to be the one who got away or really was given away.

That's never going to change.