“Dallas can’t contend with Dirk and Chandler making max money, it doesn’t leave them with enough cap space to sign anyone else, at least not with the new CBA” they said. The one and only year Tyson Chandler was in Dallas, the Mavs went on to win their one and only franchise championship. At the end of that season, Chandler was an unrestricted free agent and rather than ponying up the money to resign him, the Mavs let him walk. And walk he did, all the way to the Big Apple, where he got a 4 year, $55 million deal with the Knickerbockers. In order to understand the rationale the Mavs used to justify letting him go, you need to understand a bit about the CBA (collective bargaining agreement) the teams were working under, both before Chandler became a free agent and after.
Now I’m no CBA expert, but I know enough to have an idea of what the Mavs were thinking. The off season after the Mavs’ championship, the league and the players’ association had a nasty, drawn out disagreement of what their new multi-year deal, or CBA, should be. Once they reached a decision, some things changed, and some stayed the same; but the most important details for our purposes are the changes in penalties for going over the cap limit. The NBA has what is called a soft salary cap, which means that teams have a certain amount of money they can spend to put together their roster, and if they go over that number, they are charged penalties. In contrast, there are leagues with hard salary caps, like the NFL, meaning you can’t go past a certain payroll number at all, and leagues with no salary cap, like MLB, where teams can spend as little or as much as they want.
Under the previous CBA, teams who were over the salary cap would pay a dollar to the league for every dollar they were over. So if the league imposed a $100M cap, and a team had a $125M roster, the team would cut the league a check for $25M in penalties. With the new CBA, the 1 to 1 ratio remained, but only up to a certain point, and then it would be $2 for every $1 over (2:1), and 3:1, 4:1, and so forth. It made it a lot more expensive for teams to be over the cap, especially if they were significantly over the cap, like the Mavs had been for years. Mark Cuban was never afraid to spend money, even if it included cap penalties, in order to put together what he felt like was a competitive team. But the new agreement brought stiffer penalties, and Mark wasn’t as ready to venture into the waters of cap overages as he had been. Also, the new CBA removed or limited roster perks, like the mid-level exception, for teams who are over the cap. The mid-level exception is basically a roster spot, up to a certain amount, that doesn’t count against the salary cap. The new rules made it much more difficult to be and stay competitive, never mind profitable, if you were over the cap.
So with these new rules in place, the Dallas front office felt it was the better decision for the team, long term, to not bring back a number of the players who had brought the first NBA championship to Dallas and stay “financially flexible” for the future. Specifically, they wanted to have enough money to go after one of the 3 free agents who were about to be on the market around that time, in hopes that they would become the next cornerstone for the franchise: namely Dwight Howard, Chris Paul, and Deron Williams. On the surface, it sounded like a good plan, and you can’t blame Cuban for not wanting to tie up all his money in a few players, but the problem is that in the NBA, generally speaking, you have to have an above average center in order to contend for a title–and those guys come at a premium. Chandler was arguably the best center the Mavs had ever had, and after spending years and years handing out bad contracts trying to find a franchise center, it seemed they had found one in him. A concern about Tyson, which has been the case for most of his career, is that he’s injury prone; although he managed to stay healthy for the year he was in Dallas. It was a big risk for a guy who had a history of injuries and gave you around 10 pts/10 rebs a night.
So Dallas opted for this “financial flexibility”, and after swinging an missing on all 3 of those big free agents we mentioned before (Howard opted in for the last year of his contract with Orlando and eventually signed a multi-year deal with Houston, Paul re-upped with the Clippers, and Williams, a Dallas native, chose to stay with the New Jersey/Brooklyn Nets over coming to the Mavs), the team had to settle for lesser free agents in order to fill out their roster. The post-Chandler years have gone like this: 2012 regular season 36-30 (shortened season due to lockout), eliminated in the first round of the playoffs in a sweep by OKC, 2013 regular season 41-41, missed playoffs for the first time in 13 years, and in this 2014 season, they sit at 32-23, 3rd in the Southwest division, and 8th overall in the West. With all that in mind, do we as fans feel that the team has made the best use of the money they saved by not signing Chandler? Was the financial freedom to make moves worth avoiding the risk they would have faced in resigning a proved, albeit oft-injured big man? Let’s see what the numbers say.
Let’s compare Tyson’s numbers since he left the Mavs against the guys the team signed with the money they would have spent on him. We’ll compare games, minutes, points, and rebounds using a weighed average of the new players. What I mean by this is, if Player A scored 20 pts per game in a season and was paid 60% of the available money, making his weighed points per game 20 x 60% = 12, and Player B scored 15 pts a game and collected the other 40%, making his weighed pts/game 15 x 40%= 6, their weighed average points per game would be 12 + 6= 18. This will show us if the Mavs got a good bang for their buck with their new players.
During the 2011-12 season, Chandler made $13.1M, and Dallas was able to sign Lamar Odom at $8.9M, Vince Carter at $3M, and Delonte West at $1.1M, leaving a surplus of $61,500. Here’s how they performed.
| 2011-12 | Chandler | Players |
| Games | 62 | 51.9 |
| Minutes | 33.2 | 30.0 |
| Points | 11.3 | 7.6 |
| Rebounds | 9.9 | 3.3 |
Chandler went on to have a strong season that year, winning the Defensive Player of the Year award. He also outperformed the collection of players the Mavs brought in to replace his production handedly. He played 10 more games than them that year, gave his team 3 more minutes, scored almost 4 more pts a game, and most significantly, grabbed over 6 boards more per game.
The following season, TC raked in $13.6M, and Dallas upped Vince to $3.1M, and signed a trio of big men in Chris Kaman for $8M, Elton Brand at $2.1, and Bernard James for $470K. They also paid West almost $1M although he didn’t play a single game that season, figures and stats which I will not use in the weighed average for simplicity and benevolence’s sake.
| 2012-13 | Chandler | Players |
| Games | 66 | 66.3 |
| Minutes | 32.8 | 21.7 |
| Points | 10.4 | 10.4 |
| Rebounds | 10.7 | 5.2 |
Chandler had just a strong a year his second season with the Knicks, although he didn’t repeat as DPOY. Dallas’ players did a better job at earning their pay by increasing their games played, but were collectively on the court 10 mins less a game than Chandler. That is in large part due to Chris Kaman’s inability to rebound well enough to stay on the court. They did manage to match Tyson’s point output; but came up short in boards, averaging less than half of his rebounding stats. At least they’re getting closer!
This season, 2013-14, Tyson is collecting $14.1M, while the Mavs are finishing VC’s contract with $3.2, giving James an additional $788K, and adding Monte Ellis for $8M, and Samuel Dalembert at $3.7M. Now these additions total around $15.7M and exceed Chandler’s contract by about 11%, so I’m going to decrease the Mavs’ numbers by that percentage to give us a more accurate picture.
| 2013-14 | Chandler | Players |
| Games | 30 | 52.1 |
| Minutes | 28.9 | 28.2 |
| Points | 8.5 | 13.5 |
| Rebounds | 8.8 | 4.0 |
Fifty four games into the season, Tyson is having a hard time staying healthy; but when he does play, he’s averaging about 29 mins/9 pts/9 rebs, which is right at his career averages. The Mavs’ big off season acquisition of Monte Ellis has bolstered the team’s offense, evidence by the pts numbers above; but rebounding by the replacement players is down from last season, in spite of adding, theoretically, the best defensive center they’ve had since Chandler in Dalembert. Due to a compromised Tyson Chandler and a healthy set of Mavs players, the team has gotten the best return out of their investments this year over the last three.
Let’s look at one last chart, a standard average of the three we have above:
| Average | Chandler | Players |
| Games | 52.7 | 54.9 |
| Minutes | 31.6 | 25.9 |
| Points | 10.1 | 10.2 |
| Rebounds | 9.8 | 3.6 |
Over the last 2.5 seasons, the Mavs have gotten 2 more games a season, 6 less minutes a game, basically the same points, and a gawdy 6 rebounds less a game out of their players than they would have for the same money with Tyson Chandler. Thus far, letting the defensive anchor of the 2010-11 has proven to be a bad decision by the numbers. And the numbers weren’t even what Chandler was most lauded for on the team; it was intangibles like toughness, energy, and heart, which are also gone. Winning is the great deodorant, and if the Mavs can get in the post season pull off an epic run in the playoffs, then the stink of this snafu will be all but forgotten. But if they don’t, which is the more likely scenario, considering they’re hanging on the the last playoff spot in the West as I write this, they will have one more shot to make this right this off-season. If, with the cap space they create by this summer, they can sign the next superstar of the franchise, a proven player that the team and the fans can rally around, then it may all be worth it. However, if the season opener comes and goes, and the Dallas Mavericks look pretty much like they do now, with Dirk Nowitzki as the best player on the team, needing to carry the team on his back in order for them to have a hope at title contention, this may go down as the greatest mistake by the Mavs’ front office in the Cuban era. Once that ball tips on opening night of the 2014-15 season, Tyson Chandler is on the last year of his contract, making him a financial asset for the Knicks leading up to the trade deadline. An asset that could have been Dallas’ if they had chosen to take the gamble and bring Chandler back. Looking back over the last 3 years of Mavericks basketball, as yourself, would this team have had a better chance at a title with the guys they’ve brought in with their financial flexibility, or with a true franchise center? I think we all know the answer to that question.
DFW Sports Hub 