Part One: The Wreckage

“You don’t understand. Willy was a salesman.” –Charley, Death of a Salesman

The Dallas Mavericks are dead.

This probably doesn’t matter to you. If they’re not your team, you’re either sympathetic or you’re not. Maybe you found it all entertaining—I know some did.

But if they are your team, it bites pretty bad. I would even say real bad.

It’s not the biggest deal in the world. The words are dramatic but an accurate statement of the prospects of the franchise in the immediate future, but it’s not…

Well. Luckily, there never has been a moment when I wouldn’t trade every good moment the Mavericks and I have had together for the health and happiness of those I love. Sports occupies an outsized emotional role in my life for its absolute importance, but not so outsized.

Still, something has happened here. A lot of somethings. My favorite player will probably retire a year early, my favorite coach will probably leave the team after next year, and a fifteen year span in which the Dallas Mavericks missed the playoffs only one time, and by just a little bit, will now meet a period in which they miss it by a lot, for a while, for who knows how long.

Not all because. But in the short term all because an enormous, twenty-six year old human being destroyed the franchise so thoroughly he might as well have been a Trojan Horse sent to knock the Clippers’ competition out of the playoffs race. It’s the Mavericks fault that we got here, and that’s what we’ll talk about plenty, a repetitive series of errors which placed themselves in DeAndre Jordan’s enormous hands. But, for the moment, let’s call it like it is. By being the first big impact FA in the history of modern free agency to go back on a verbal commitment, DeAndre Jordan not only cost the Mavs their future, he cost them a fighting chance at it.

And then he ordered pizza, and had a sleepover.

He took something I love. He took a lot of things I love.

Him and the silly, silly plan that brought him into my life.

Part Two: The Plan

“There was never much hope. Just a fool’s hope.” —Gandalf the White.

Let me tell you about how the Mavs drowned themselves.

Let me tell you, first of all, that earlier this week, when the Mavs supposedly had Jordan locked up, my plan was to write a column about what it’s like to root for a team that succeeds despite a horrible plan.

Let me tell you about something that was euphemistically called “plan powder”, but which was always, from minute one, non-euphemistically a complete trainwreck.

Oh, I heard the stories, and some I even knew about as they were happening. Dwight and CP3 almost teamed up and came here. Andre Iguodala changed his mind at the last minute. It was failures all the way down, but fairplay to the Mavericks, there were a lot of almost not failures. Doesn’t seem to be any good reason for it, but it is a historical fact: that they were on the list of every big name free agent of the last four years.

And yet… there was never one minute. Never one second or moment. When I experienced any kind of optimism about plan powder. Maybe that says something about me. Maybe that I am a divine oracle, capable of withstanding even the immense and terrifying winds of the future to open the door that shall not be open. Maybe I’m just a grump.

Or maybe… the fatal flaws of the damn thing was always there for anyone who wanted to see them. Here’s the breakdown:

“Plan powder” comes from the phrase “keep your powder dry.” In this case it means “have as much cap space as possible at all times.”

The way to get cap space that involves just HAVING money on hand means a lot of one year rentals, few impact players, no continuity, and ultimately mediocrity.

No top free agent wants to play for a mediocre team.

Every top free agent gets the same offer, dollar figure wise, from every team that’s interested in them.

You follow? What the Mavs did was basically to say “we’re going to follow a strategy that makes us mediocre for the sake of having money until we score big, even though scoring big is based on what you can offer to free agents besides money.”

Just how bad this strategy was can be seen in two observations, both of which could have been made well before the Mavericks put us all through four terrible offseasons in a row:

Apparently, signing big name FAs is pretty simple. Name one, name any of them–Dwight Howard, Andre Iguodala, LaMarcus Aldridge, now DeAndre Jordan—every single one of them ended up on the best team on their original list. Even Deron Williams probably did this, though it’s hard to believe in retrospect. You don’t have your decision swayed by a panic trade for Joe Johnson just because, oh man, I’ve ALWAYS wanted to hang out with Deron Williams.

No one else thinks the only way to get cap space is to already have it. Remember 2013? Mavs were targeting Dwight Howard, than Andre Iguodala? While the Mavs had been carefully hoarding cap space like Gollum and the ring, the Rockets swung a couple of trades and made it magically appear. Then the Golden State Warriors did. Rockets got Howard, Warriors got Iggy, and last year they were #1 and #2 in the West. Meanwhile, the Mavs, gnawing on raw fish in their cavern…

Well. The Mavs claimed it was so impossible to find other ways to get cap space that they spent years trading down from the decent draft positions they’d get because they were so consistently mediocre. Do you know how crazy that is? Here’s a plan based on being as good as possible, low-rent–and the absolute best way, maybe the only way to do that, is to have a lot of young players, the only guys making less than their market value. If you have a plan that involves trying to be good, cheaply, and you can’t include good draft picks in that, don’t have that plan.

What the hell did the Mavericks think they could say in those meetings that was superior to “our team was pretty good last year, with you we’d be a finals contender”? Why didn’t the fact that whatever the other thing was that they were saying clearly wasn’t working ever bother them?

We have more than enough evidence, have had it for years, to say this: you don’t sell free agents on your franchise. Your franchise sells itself, and as near as I can tell, only the on-court product. By deliberately being worse than they could be for four straight years, the Mavericks did the exact opposite of what works.

Their belief that they, and they alone, could talk guys into suboptimal situations was based on, you know, nothing. And their continued belief that they could do this no matter how many times they did not do this in a row was based on…hubris. Their fatal flaw.

Since the Mavs won the Finals they’ve failed to get past the first round four times, wasting more than half of Rick Carlisle’s tenure as coach. They followed up on Dirk’s brilliant 2011 season by making him finish out his career with the likes of Darren Collison and Rajon Rondo. This didn’t happen because they made a bad assessment–something that happens all the time because the future is complex. They did it because they kept making the same bad assessment every year for four years.

And what a deal with the devil. Of late, even the one year guys they could sign weren’t enough to seem attractive, so they cannibalized their drafts for better ones, the ’14 draft for Chandler, the ’16 draft for Rondo. Now that the shopping trips have finally come up empty, there’s not even anything left to eat.

In the final analysis, and this, for better and worst, is absolutely the final one, “plan powder” can only be called, what it always could have been called: an Icarian plan, even if for one glorious week it looked like it might actually work out. The problem here is not that the Mavs flew too close to the sun, it’s that for years they’ve been trying to make it across the ocean on shitty wings.

Part Three: The Aftermath

“Do you not see the path of the wind and the rain? Do you not see the oak trees in turmoil? Cold my heart in a fearful breast, for the king, the oaken door of Aberffraw…” —Elegy for Llewelyn Fawr by Gruffudd ab yr Ynad Coch

The Magnolia Building downtown, now the Magnolia Hotel, has had a neon red Pegasus sitting on top of it for over 80 years. Used to be you could see it from pretty darn far away. In fact, it’s two pegasi and the urban legend says that’s so everyone would know that Dallas isn’t a one-horse town.

Mavericks fans know better. Dirk Nowitzki has long been the Mavericks’ lone horse. I don’t doubt the sincerity of the Mavericks’ front-office in their attempts to change that reality, but since 2011 they’ve come up empty, and for the most of the time before that as well. Kobe’s career, Duncan’s career, these are not defined but always spoken of in concert with, with the story of the guys they played with. Even Kevin Garnett eventually got to be part of a Big Three. Dirk’s loneliness sets him apart, a 19th century vision of heroism, the lonely genius, the titanic struggle. I think he’d be happy to have given that up.

They wasted it. The last half-decade of it anyway. They wasted it because they thought they had a problem they could solve, a championship won by an old team. They’d sell the championship to somebody young while it was a hot property, and in so doing change the future.

It was, kind of, a real problem, and it was, almost, a reasonable way to solve it. I think I hated the plan most that offseason because of its brutal efficiency, because it gave the fans so little of what fans deserve, but there’s no doubt that that is when it came the closest to working. You could say it was this year, when they almost sold DeAndre, but that’s not right. Something unlikely happening doesn’t make it more likely than something likely that didn’t happen.

But: it didn’t work. Apparently, four years later it’s on the verge of working, but that’s another column. When it didn’t work that should have been the end of it, because if you can probably sell a championship team to a free agent five, maybe six times out of ten, how often can you sell a team that just got swept out of the first round, as in 2012? A team that missed the playoffs in 2013? You can’t. They didn’t. It’s not rocket science. The NBA runs on an iron law, not on magical realism.

And still we can probably all face this truth: even if the plan had worked it wouldn’t have stopped Dirk Nowitzki getting old. As we all said a thousand times, getting DeAndre Jordan wouldn’t have made the Mavericks contenders, it would have just allowed them to keep dreaming that they could be contenders. And maybe, down that path, they could have been. Now that path is closed, but for all we know it was already closed.

Maybe you need a Dirk Nowitzki. I’m not ready to eulogize his career, and I’m not going to now. But the Mavs set on fire his last few years with a match made from a poor assessment of how to improve and he’s the reason it still hurts. He deserves better and I don’t want him to have better because I can’t handle him in another uniform. And the Mavericks need to get worse, but I don’t want them to get worse because he’s still here and he shouldn’t have to sit through that. And so he’s our sole remaining problem. He deserves what he hasn’t been getting, and we deserve to keep watching him in uniform on a good team.

I’m sorry your career is ending this way, Dirk. I’m sorry your time as a Mavericks coach is ending this way, Rick. I’m sorry the long, proud run which started just after my bar mitzvah is over like this, and because of this. But that’s just how it happened to all of us.

Tomorrow, or someday, we’ll remember how lucky we got to have all of this for so long. There are ghosts out there, Brandon Roy, Tracy McGrady, Brandon Jennings, who will whisper to us that in a world where not even tomorrow is guaranteed, we got off pretty easy with 15 years and one of the greatest careers the game has seen. None of that changes the fact that the Mavs took four years making a knife they handed to DeAndre Jordan. But in the long arc of time, it’ll make it easier.