The Mavericks have a fascinating offseason ahead of them, but first, some housekeeping on cap-related news from last night. The NBA sent a memo to all teams on Wednesday informing them that the 2017-18 salary cap projection has fallen once again, this time by $2 million to $99 million. The original projection was for $108 million and is at least the third time the league has lowered their projection. The luxury tax threshold and apron will also fall by the same $2 million to $119 million and $125 million, respectively. We’ve covered many teams that will be constrained by the luxury tax this summer and this news just makes things more difficult for those teams.
Dallas is not expected to be one of those teams, unless they were to pick up Dirk Nowitzki’s team option for $25 million. It’s anticipated that they’ll opt-out, renounce his $37.5 million cap hold and re-sign him for a much lower salary — perhaps even the league minimum — in order to fill out the best team around him in the waning years of his career. Outside of Nowitzki, the Mavericks don’t have any unrestricted free agents: Nerlens Noel is a restricted free agent and the Mavericks still have the draft rights to Petteri Koponen on their books, a 29-year-old drafted in 2007.
Noel is the Mavericks’ priority in free agency after the team traded for him during the final season of his rookie contract. He’s expected to receive a near-max contract, though the restricted free agent market can sometimes defy expectations, especially when the incumbent team is willing to match any offer sheet the player receives. There’s a scenario in which his market falls off as teams with cap space chase other free agents and the Mavericks are able to drive his price down.
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Penciling in Noel for a four-year, $100 million contract and Nowitzki on a minimum contract would leave the Mavericks with about $12.1 million to spread around to other free agents.
The Mavericks also have a host of team options and partially- and non-guaranteed contracts littered across their roster. All of Devin Harris, DeAndre Liggins, Salah Mejri, Dorian Finney-Smith, Jarrod Uthoff and Yogi Ferrell will need decisions at various dates — of these, only Ferrell and Finney-Smith are locks to remain with the team into next season. The Mavericks will have to do as much due diligence as they can before free agency actually opens in order to have the information they need to make the decisions in front of them. Although each guy’s contract is relatively small, moving on from everybody but Ferrell and Finney-Smith would net the Mavericks another $10.1 million in cap space this summer, which could mean the difference between scraping the bottom of the point guard barrel and being able to get into conversations with Jrue Holiday and George Hill.
Their most realistic scenario is to move on from Harris, Liggins, Mejri and Uthoff in order to maximize their cap space this summer to go Holiday or Hill, both of whom would fit very nicely with the rest of the Mavericks roster — both guys can slide up to the 2 when Seth Curry or Ferrell enters the game and still defend the opposing point guard. Their summer plans could be complicated by their 9th overall draft pick in Thursday’s NBA Draft. If they take Frank Ntilikina, they might not want to put as many years or dollars on an offer for Holiday or Hill and lose them to other suitors. Spending that pick on a big man would be the more flexible move for the Mavericks, as anybody they pick up in that spot would be able to play both big man positions with or without Noel in the post-Dirk era.
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Dallas has a lot of options this summer and a lot of moving parts to put one final competitive team around Nowitzki before he retires. Their draft pick will inform their free agency pursuits and any information they can gather about those free agency pursuits will inform that draft pick as the Mavericks dance back and forth between the present and the future (and perhaps dance across the line of tampering with other team’s incumbent free agents before July 1). Mark Cuban, Donnie Nelson and their staff have their work cut out for them but the path is there for the Mavericks to contend one last time with Nowitzki.