As of Friday, there are seven job openings across the league: Boston Celtics, Indiana Pacers, Portland Trail Blazers, Washington Wizards, New Orleans Pelicans, Dallas Mavericks and Orlando Magic.
Dallas and Portland give you the best player in Luka Doncic and Damian Lillard, but the Jayson Tatum/Jaylen Brown wing combination, from both a talent and age perspective, is something you can’t replicate in any of these other openings.
The new coach gets a blank canvas to build an offense and overall philosophy tailored specifically to Doncic’s desires.
Also, the Mavericks will have over $25 million in cap space this offseason and can get to max space pretty easily by trading, say, Josh Richardson with a pick attached, or perhaps Richardson opts out of his deal and Dallas gets to max space that way.
For all the bad vibes around this team after its first-round loss to the shorthanded Nuggets, we’re talking about a starting five of Damian Lillard, CJ McCollum, Norman Powell , Robert Covington and Jusuf Nurkic.
The problem with the Blazers job is Olshey expects the defense to improve significantly with, for the most part, the same roster that Terry Stotts just led to the 29th overall defensive rating.
So the word is Zion Williamson has some family members who prefer he not play for the Pelicans.
The Pelicans also have a trove of draft picks to put into potential deals, thus giving them the ability, in theory, to potentially make a Phoenix Suns-type leap from talented postseason outsider to a legit contender in short order.
If they let Mo Bamba and Wendell Carter walk they can reach upwards of $50 million in space by 2023, which could be used to absorb bad salaries and add to their draft chest or to bring in meaningful talent if the timeline is sped up by surprise development.
The good news is short-term contention probably isn’t an expectation, or at least it shouldn’t be, so maybe you get some time to get something going as long as you don’t run the whole locker room the wrong way.
If he stays, you’ve at least got a star in the bag, but what else? We know any team with Russell Westbrook as a lead player has a pretty low ceiling these days, the Wizards can’t create meaningful short-term cap space, and honestly, Beal’s loyalty feels tenuous at best.