It’s not just which players the Dallas Mavericks have pursued and lost in free agency, but how.
In the past decade or so, they’ve had offseason targets announce they wouldn’t be signing with Dallas on Snapchat, on podcasts, on finalist lists that didn’t include them. They’ve missed out on stars who joined years later, shells of their former selves, as some sick consolation prize. They’ve seen an agent persuade his client to take fractions of the amount they had offered to reach free agency sooner. They’ve broken up the franchise’s only championship roster in 2011 in failed aspirations of super-team glory.
Advertisement
On Monday, Dallas agreed to sign Klay Thompson. A four-time champion, someone who might not be the player he once was, but a statement nevertheless: This franchise is wholly different from before.
The 34-year-old Thompson will join Dallas on a three-year, $50 million contract as part of a sign-and-trade that also involves the Charlotte Hornets receiving 23-year-old Josh Green to facilitate salary space and two second-rounders heading to the Golden State Warriors. The price, both in Thompson’s contract and the very fact he departed from the only franchise he’s ever known, indicate this is not the player who could once turn quarters into personal pop-a-shot challenges. He’s no longer the fearsome defender or the bona fide second scorer he once was.
But Thompson remains a star. Before signing him, Dallas’ most seismic free-agency acquisition, excluding trades, was either Chandler Parsons, Shawn Marion or Monta Ellis. When the franchise toiled through Dirk Nowitzki’s twilight years, it had little to convince players of this magnitude to consider North Texas as a home. This has never been a glamor market. Rather, it’s been a hard-working one that relied on overlooked veterans and on-court advantages from a transformational superstar in Nowitzki.
Luka Dončić began that process of change, and Nico Harrison taking charge of the team’s basketball operations accelerated it. It was Harrison’s prior relationship with Kyrie Irving that gave both parties trust in his decision to re-sign last summer following the team’s February 2023 trade with the Nets. Irving’s mystique on the basketball court sometimes still seems anachronistic to what this franchise once represented. But in signing here last summer even after a catastrophic first two months, he began the process that led Dallas back to the NBA Finals last month for the third time in franchise history.
Advertisement
And, now, to sign someone like Thompson.
Dallas shot just 31 percent on 3s in the finals while scoring 106.2 points per 100 possessions, a distant mark from the high-powered offenses we’ve grown accustomed to in the Dončić era. The team made a calculated move at last season’s trade deadline to trade offensive firepower for physical defending, which served as Dallas’ backbone in its march through the Western Conference. When it reached the final stage, the burdens put upon Dončić and Irving to provide the team’s scoring proved too massive to compete against the Boston Celtics.
Thompson is an attempt to strike a balance between what turned Dallas into a contender and what caused it to fall short. Over the past two seasons, Thompson has averaged a shade under 20 points while converting exactly 40 percent of the nearly 10 attempts from 3 that he takes per game. His 0-of-10 outing for Golden State in this past April’s season-ending Play-In Tournament defeat represented his mortality, but not what he still has left to give to a team like Dallas. Nor does the Dončić and Irving-led offense, known for a heliocentric pick-and-roll approach that looks nothing like the Warriors’ motion-based scheme, indicate anything meaningful about Thompson’s fit.
It was the Tim Hardaway Jr. trade that created this path for Dallas to acquire Thompson, first financially but also with how Dallas imagines Thompson will fit within this team as a souped-up like-for-like replacement. No player has taken more spot-up 3s than Thompson over the past three years; Hardaway was sixth. But Thompson shot better on those shots, not just more prolifically. There’s a reason he has the sixth-most made 3s in the league’s history.
How Thompson will fit on the offensive end contains only curiosities, not questions. Will Dallas install more off-ball movement into its sets than what it already had in place for Hardaway? Can Thompson alleviate some of the workload put onto the team’s two stars as a third option, perhaps sometimes without the ball even being in his hands? Next season, how many offensive records will the Mavericks break?
Advertisement
If there’s another similarity to Hardaway, it’s in Thompson’s declining defense. That poses a risk, particularly if he starts, which was something Thompson desired as he made his free-agency decision, according to one league source granted anonymity to speak freely. If he’s a starter, Thompson would take the role Derrick Jones Jr. held most of last season. It was Jones who served as point-of-attack insulation against opposing guards to shelter Dončić and Irving. While Dallas now has players who can do that off the bench — new acquisitions Naji Marshall and Quentin Grimes — it doesn’t help if they’re not on the floor at crucial junctures. Perhaps this new situation can summon some minor defensive resurgence for Thompson, even if his legs aren’t the same after multiple surgeries. Perhaps Dallas’ scheme, helmed by the improving Dereck Lively II, is enough to mitigate those beat-off-the-drive issues that are sure to arise.
As The Athletic’s Tim Kawakami wrote last week: “Thompson didn’t love his experience last season with the Warriors and said so. Many times. He didn’t love getting moved to the bench for a few games behind rookie Brandin Podziemski. He didn’t love the questions we asked about his future. He didn’t love the national attention on his occasional struggles.”
In choosing Dallas, Thompson signified legitimacy to a franchise that had long chased such stars with only embarrassment to show for it. But what Dallas might represent to him can be seen within Irving’s own renaissance and the joy emanating from his newfound public image. The reason this franchise’s success with major free agents is changing is because the franchise is too. There’s a newfound belief that Dallas offers family and comfort alongside its ascendent basketball success.
That’s what Thompson chose. That’s what this Dallas franchise now is. How precisely it’ll work is something to be found out, but the radical difference can already be seen.
(Top photo: Sam Hodde / Getty Images)
