Mark Cuban finally gets his big free agent in DeAndre Jordan
— -- DeAndre Jordan has chosen the Dallas Mavericks, according to reports Friday afternoon. Now what?
His departure from the Los Angeles Clippers ( Note: Players can't sign contracts until July 9, after the league reviews the revenue from the previous season and officially sets the salary cap) could set in motion a series of events with major ramifications around the league.
This is the marquee acquisition Mark Cuban & Co. have been waiting for since breaking up the Mavericks team that won the 2011 championship.
Make no mistake: Jordan is a good value at the maximum salary. My free agent rankings projected him as the second most valuable player available over the next three seasons.
Jordan trails only LeBron James, with a value of more than $100 million over the next three seasons.
Big D perfect in Big D
Despite his third-place finish in Defensive Player of the Year voting, Jordan isn't a defensive upgrade on departed incumbent Tyson Chandler. In fact, he might even be a slight downgrade next season. ESPN's real plus-minus has Chandler plus-3.5 points better defensively per 100 possessions than an average player, with Jordan a plus-2.4. But Jordan will improve Dallas at the other end, where his ability to finish and create putbacks is underrated. RPM also rated Jordan the league's best offensive center, 2.0 points per 100 possessions better than an average player.
What makes this pairing so ideal is that Jordan is basically a younger, more athletic, more durable version of Chandler, who thrived playing alongside power forward Dirk Nowitzki. Jordan slots perfectly as a roll man into Rick Carlisle's spread pick-and-roll offense, and probably will be even more involved than Chandler was. Reports have indicated that the desire to play a larger offensive role was one factor in Jordan's decision to leave L.A.
Dallas got some idea of Jordan's offensive potential when he ran rampant through the Mavericks' frontcourt after Chandler was injured early in a matchup on Feb. 9. Jordan had 22 points and 27 rebounds, 11 of them offensive, as the Clippers won 115-98 on the road without injured Blake Griffin. After the game, Carlisle told reporters Jordan "looked like Wilt Chamberlain playing in 1963."
During the 15 games Griffin missed due to an elbow infection, Jordan averaged 14.9 points and 18.5 rebounds per game on 67.5 percent shooting. With Spencer Hawes spacing the floor at power forward, Jordan ramped up his usage rate to 16.4 percent (for the season, he used 13.6 percent of the Clippers' plays) while maintaining his efficiency as a scorer. Jordan won't have Chris Paul as a pick-and-roll partner in Dallas, but Nowitzki's ability to keep his defender from helping has made the Mavericks a dangerous pick-and-roll team with lesser point guards. Per Synergy Sports tracking available on NBA.com/Stats, Dallas' roll men averaged a league-high 1.17 points per play on pick-and-rolls last season.
Who else for Mavs?
With Jordan and newly signed shooting guard Wesley Matthews joining holdovers Chandler Parsons and Dirk Nowitzki, four-fifths of the Mavericks' starting lineup is finished. To complete the group, Dallas will have to get creative. Signing Jordan and Matthews outright would take up essentially all of the Mavericks' cap space. To add more talent, they'll have to hope to complete a sign-and-trade. Fortunately, the Clippers also have huge incentive to complete a series of transactions that would allow Dallas to spend an additional $7-9 million dollars, depending where the cap falls.
The ideal scenario for both teams would probably work like this: The Mavericks would sign Matthews and other free agents while maintaining Monta Ellis' $10.9 million cap hold on the books. Then Dallas could sign and trade Ellis to the Indiana Pacers, who agreed to sign him for $44 million over four years Thursday, in exchange for center Roy Hibbert. The Mavericks would then in turn send Hibbert to the Clippers in a sign-and-trade deal for Jordan.
While there are some complicated cap gymnastics involved because of the base-year contract provision of the CBA -- the Mavericks would have to be under the cap with Ellis' first-year salary to swap him to Indiana without including another player, and the Clippers would likely have to renounce the rights to their own free agents (notably Austin Rivers) and waive non-guaranteed players to be under the tax line when they added Hibbert because of salary-matching restrictions on taxpaying teams -- such a deal looks like a win-win-win. Dallas gets more spending power in free agency, Indiana sheds Hibbert's salary in order to add more frontcourt depth, and the Clippers get a replacement for Jordan, which would be impossible for them to find in free agency.
It's hard to overstate how devastating Jordan's loss is for the Clippers, in large part because of the difficulty of replacing him. They could clear a tiny amount of cap space without Jordan's cap hold, but not enough for going under the cap to make sense. And they've already committed $3.4 million of their mid-level exception to signing Paul Pierce. So the only way to replace Jordan would be a sign-and-trade returning either a player or a trade exception the Clippers could use to acquire a center. Given their limited assets, they'd be hard pressed to find a replacement better than Hibbert, who would still be a major offensive downgrade and a huge adjustment from Jordan's skill set.
Losing Jordan probably knocks the Clippers out of the ranks of serious NBA championship contenders. Whether it boosts the Mavericks into that group remains to be seen, depending on whether they can pull off a sign-and-trade and how they would use the additional cap space to fill out their roster. Right now, penciling in Devin Harris as the starter at point guard, Dallas' bench consists of Raymond Felton, rookie Justin Anderson and Dwight Powell. That obviously won't cut it for a contender, especially one with two starters (Matthews and Parsons) coming off surgeries.
The Mavericks could look to add another point guard, with Jeremy Lin (who started his career with Dallas' summer league team) a sensible option at the position. Or perhaps the position could be covered with Harris and a re-signed J.J. Barea, leaving the Mavericks to spend more money on backups at other spots.
Few teams have done a better job of putting together rosters on the cheap than Dallas, which got minutes from several players on the veteran's minimum (Barea, Al-Farouq Aminu, Richard Jefferson, Charlie Villanueva and post-buyout Amar'e Stoudemire) in 2014-15. Alas, such bargains might no longer be available in a market in which Aminu now merits $30 million over four years. How far the Mavericks can stretch their money, along with the recoveries of Matthews and Parsons, will determine Dallas' ceiling with Jordan in 2015-16.