Mark Cuban, Daryl Morey and Chandler Parsons have given new meaning to the term Texas Triangle. Illustration by Jason Schneider

Any mention of the Texas Triangle, in NBA circles, has always had a very specific meaning.

Until this past summer.

No longer does the term exclusively reference the most dreaded three-stop road trip that the schedule can serve up, thanks to the Lone Star State love triad that dribbled its way into the basketball lexicon in July.

Cuban. Parsons. Morey.

Yet the season's first face-to-face encounter for Mark Cuban and Daryl Morey, after their tug-of-war over Chandler Parsons and the verbal sparring that inevitably followed, will have to wait. Morey is away this week on team business, meaning he won't be with the Houston Rockets on Tuesday night when they open their 2014-15 exhibition season against Cuban's Dallas Mavericks and their new small forward.

Cuban, mind you, insists that those expecting fisticuffs, or anything close, would have been disappointed anyway.

Says Cuban: "Is it competitive? Yes. Do I hate Daryl? No. I have a lot of respect for Daryl. Daryl's not one to hate at all. That's not his mode. He's very, very logical.

"Daryl Morey is the Spock of the NBA. I didn't originate that; someone else told me that. He's the Spock of the NBA because he's talking about logic all the time."

Fans of trash talk needn't worry, though. If recent history is any guide, as re-traced in depth below, things won't stay conciliatory between the Mavs and Rockets for long.

Parsons' Perspective | Dallas' Drought | Rockets' Dice Roll | The Contract | The Rivalry

THE PARSONS PERSPECTIVE

You've seen the photos and video clips by now. You've surely heard the story of Cuban landing in Orlando, Florida, on one of his private planes on the night of July 9, heading straight to a club called The Attic and then huddling with Parsons to secure the 25-year-old's signature on a three-year, $46.1 million offer sheet in front of hundreds of gawking club-goers.

It was the unforgettable high point of Parsons' lucrative, life-changing summer, yet it must be said that restricted free agency, for the most part, isn't nearly that glamorous. Not even for a player, such as Parsons, who can legitimately claim to have a modeling career on the side.

The first week-plus of July found Parsons and agent Dan Fegan wondering when the phone would ring with a team on the other end of the line that believed it could really get Parsons away from the Rockets. But the phone wouldn't ring with that call. Potential bidders either appeared spooked by Houston's well-chronicled vows to match any offer Parsons got, or they were operating like the Mavericks and, frankly, the Rockets themselves -- which is to say they made it clear they planned to take their time and see if they had any real hope of landing Carmelo Anthony or (gasp) LeBron James before seriously courting anyone else.

"So it was a waiting game in the beginning," Parsons said, "which I was OK with. But it was frustrating, too."

That the call eventually came from Dallas wasn't a huge surprise. Parsons had gotten to know Cuban during All-Star Weekend in Houston in 2013 and then, a few months later, met Dirk Nowitzki in Las Vegas when both he and the Mavericks' face of the franchise bumped into each other on postseason excursions in Sin City. Cuban and a player from another team making a connection was nothing new; bantering with rivals from his familiar seat on the baseline in Dallas has been a staple of an ownership reign that, come January, will have spanned 15 years. But Parsons and the famously low-key Nowitzki hit it off, too, which resulted in Parsons accepting an invitation shortly thereafter to play in Nowitzki's annual charity baseball game that June in Dallas.

"He said he loved baseball and played it in high school," Nowitzki recalled. "I called him a couple weeks later to make sure he still wanted to do it, and he said, 'I'm in.'"

Yet the most serious early interest in Parsons in 2014 free agency actually came from Cleveland. It was widely assumed in Mavericks circles that Dallas would turn its attentions to Parsons once formally eliminated as an option by Melo and LeBron, but sources told ESPN.com that Parsons -- before things really heated up with his eventual new employers -- found himself being recruited by another All-Star peer he regards as a friend: Cavaliers guard Kyrie Irving.

Sources say the Cavs, furthermore, would soon inform Parsons he was "Cleveland's guy" if their ambitious bid to bring LeBron home unraveled.

The Mavs, though, finally buckled on the ninth day of free agency. Anthony hadn't yet officially let his various suitors know he was staying with the New York Knicks. And Dallas was technically still on the fringes of the LeBron pursuit after Cuban had been granted a face-to-face meeting in Cleveland with LeBron's agent, Rich Paul, just a few days earlier. But Cuban decided he could no longer stomach waiting.

So ...

Two days before James announced to the world, in an essay co-written with Sports Illustrated's Lee Jenkins, he was indeed returning to the Cavs after four seasons on South Beach, Parsons and Dallas verbally agreed to a three-year deal that was a virtual three-year max. The Mavericks, sources said, would later learn the Rockets actually offered Parsons a two-year max deal, valued at more than $30 million, on that same day to stay in Houston. But Parsons elected to sign the Dallas offer sheet.

"I was just very comfortable with those guys," Parsons said. "I know Mark will never let the Mavericks be bad. He's one of those owners that, if you get the chance to play for him, you gotta take it."

"I told Chandler from the start [of free agency]: 'Do you want me to be brutally honest with you?'" Cuban says now. "And he said yes. So I told him with as much granularity as I could that I think it's a 10 percent chance at best that we could get Melo, but we had to try. Then, we started hearing our percentage was getting higher, and I told Chandler that, too.

"But then, when we weren't hearing a whole lot from the Melo camp, we knew we were pretty much out. So I told Chandler [on July 9]: 'I could end up being the dumbest idiot in NBA history, but even if LeBron comes back to us and says he's choosing us, I'm committing to you.'"

And that's how they wound up in The Attic not long after July 9 had bled into July 10.

" To be perfectly honest, I would have accepted a lot less money early in the process to stay in Houston. But they told me they wanted to wait for the whole LeBron and Melo situation [to play out], which I understood. " -- Mavericks forward Chandler Parsons

Cuban hopped on a plane soon after Parsons gave his "yes" to the Mavs. Parsons proceeded to a big dinner with family and friends to celebrate while Cuban was in the air, then led his group on foot to the nearby lounge shortly after midnight.

"It wasn't planned to go and sign this contract at some bar," Parsons said. "Cuban's flight was delayed, so he hit me when he landed and asked where I was. Twenty minutes later, he just showed up with the contract.

"Next thing you know the DJ kind of turned off the music [and] I was signing. It turned into a lot bigger deal than it was supposed to be."

You could say the same about the whole experience for Parsons, who had been told repeatedly by the Rockets -- as far back as his exit interview in May -- that he wasn't going anywhere. The Rockets, Parsons recounts, informed him they planned to match any offer he got, even if they did go ahead and allow him to become a restricted free agent.

Sources say Parsons' camp was hoping to secure a four-year, $48 million deal before it even got that far. But Houston, hoping to give itself every chance of making a splashy July signing and then matching on Parsons to form its very own Fab Four of sorts, stunned many league observers by consenting in June to decline Parsons' $964,750 option for the 2014-15 season and make him a restricted free agent.

"Daryl told me this process is going to be frustrating and you're going to read a lot of stuff you're not going to like, but at the end of the day, you've worked hard for this and you've earned this," Parsons said. "He warned me it could get ugly at times once the media gets involved and that you're gonna see people say you're not worth this or you're not worth that. [Morey] just sat me down and said, 'Go out and sign the best contract you can. Just know in the back of your head that we're gonna match the contract.'

"Dan was trying to negotiate something with them early, and, to be perfectly honest, I would have accepted a lot less money early in the process to stay in Houston. But they told me they wanted to wait for the whole LeBron and Melo situation [to play out], which I understood. I just listened to them. I signed the best deal I could for my own career.

"I have nothing but respect for those guys and nothing but great memories there. That was home for three years, and I'm gonna miss Houston. I did think they were gonna match, but they had to do what they thought was best for their organization, and I had to do what I thought was best for my career."

THE DALLAS DROUGHT

The Mavs have been searching for a starry young sidekick to Dirk. Will Chandler Parsons fill the bill? Bill Baptist/NBAE/Getty Images

Summertime skeptics were prone to say the Mavericks targeted Parsons so aggressively in free agency as much because they wanted to hurt their I-45 rivals as they hoped to help themselves.

"We were not trying to stick it to the Rockets," Cuban counters. "We wanted Chandler."

The Mavs had quietly made the decision at season's end that they would likely not be re-signing the versatile and dependable Shawn Marion, so they knew they needed a new small forward.

They also badly wanted to get younger.

They wanted to add an indisputably on-the-rise player in his 20s.

And, most of all, they wanted to finally make a free-agent splash after their high-profile strikeouts in the summers of 2012 and 2013, when they pursued the likes of Deron Williams and Howard but came up empty.

So how did they laser in on Parsons?

"Because I had a relationship with him, but more importantly because he's a multifaceted player, and we thought that's what we needed," Cuban said.

"Chandler is somebody who can be a glue guy. He's somebody who can score. He's somebody who can pass. He's somebody who can pass or create. He also throws the lob, and he's got a great floater. And he's somebody who can learn from Dirk. He just brought a lot of things to the table.

"No matter how you look at it -- eye test, Synergy [Sports Technology], analytics -- I think he's the type of player who's going to add value to our team and make other players better."

The trouble for the Mavericks is that Parsons, like two of the other top-five targets on Dallas' list, was a dreaded restricted free agent, which put them at great risk to strike out again. But they went into July anyway with the plan to chase Melo and LeBron for as long as it made sense ... and then to zero in on the most gettable of the three restricteds they coveted.

Those three: Gordon Hayward, Eric Bledsoe and the kid from Casselberry, Florida, who says he used to "wear Dirk jerseys to Orlando games" as a kid whenever the Mavs were in town.

"LeBron and Melo, those are long shots," Cuban concedes. "But you do 'em because you have to run things out. People give you a hard time when you don't get this person or that person, but you never win any games you don't play. And in the worst case you develop a relationship for the next time something comes up. It's as much about trying to develop relationships as it is about trying to hit the home run.

"When it comes to restricted free agency, you look at what it takes to get the player away and you can't pay less than that. We went through and looked at all the numbers and all the permutations, and we realized that the pricing for free agents in this market was going to be far more than anybody expected, just because of how cap room was playing out and who the free agents were."

" "We were not trying to stick it to the Rockets. We wanted Chandler. " -- Mavericks owner Mark Cuban

And that, Cuban revealed, led to a series of internal meetings to let various key members of the Mavericks know that Parsons -- if Dallas could get him -- would likely make more money in the coming season than anyone except Tyson Chandler, who is playing out the final season of a four-year, $55.4 million contract he got from the Knicks when the Mavs initially decided they wouldn't be keeping their title team together after the 2011 lockout and the new labor agreement it spawned.

"First I had to tell our coaches that all the value propositions we calculated and planned for [going into the summer] were wrong," Cuban said. "Then I had the same conversation with Dirk. Then I had the same conversation with Monta [Ellis]. Then I had somewhat of the same conversation with Vince [Carter] ... and, obviously, that didn't help [because Carter would later sign with the Memphis Grizzlies].

"I didn't want any of them to think that valuations and prices reflected how we felt about new players versus how we felt about them. It was important for me to be inclusive with all of our guys so they knew what was going on. I explained to Monta that this is not how we value you relative to [Parsons]; it was just the price of poker. And he said: 'I got you, Mark. I trust you. I understand what you're saying.'"

Ellis' arrival, after Houston beat Dallas and the Los Angeles Lakers in the Howard sweepstakes, had saved Dallas' summer in 2013 when he clicked instantly with Nowitzki as Dirk's new pick-and-roll partner. The huge pay cut Nowitzki then authorized this past summer, dropping his salary from nearly $23 million last season to $8 million this season, means he and Ellis are sporting twin three-year, $25 million deals that left enough salary-cap space for the Mavericks to construct the offer sheet to Parsons that Houston found unpalatable.

No surprise, then, that Mavs coach Rick Carlisle has been pushing Parsons for weeks, not waiting for training camp to challenge the new guy. According to Parsons, Carlisle made a habit in recent weeks of texting pictures of the Mavericks' empty locker room at nights, jokingly challenging Parsons -- before he had even moved to Dallas -- to explain himself as to why he wasn't there. The message: We expect you to put in overtime to live up to what we have planned for you.

"He's a sponge, and he wants to be coached hard," Carlisle said. "We love him, and he's going to be a terrific player for us."

Said Nowitzki: "I like him a lot. For a big guy, he's really, really versatile. He doesn't just shoot it. He's a 6-9 guy who can run a pick-and-roll and is a great passer for his size. He's better at ballhandling and passing than I've ever been. Offensive rebounding -- he sneaks in there and gets a few. He makes plays on the ball, off the ball. He's a really, really smart player. He can do a little bit of everything."

THE ROCKETS' DICE ROLL

When Chris Bosh chose to remain a rival instead of a teammate of D12, Houston's big gamble failed. Bob Levey/Getty Images

Legend has it that Morey, not long after assuming control of Houston's front office after the 2006-07 season, commissioned an in-house study of the makeup of championship teams, which concluded that winning it all in the NBA almost always requires three elite players.

"We study everything," Morey said when asked to verify the story.

"So, yes."

The reality, of course, is the way the Rockets have gone about roster building throughout Morey's tenure would have essentially confirmed the tale even if he hadn't been so willing. After the headline-grabbing acquisitions of James Harden and Howard leading into the past two seasons, Houston has been openly hunting for elite No. 3 to complete the triumvirate.

In countless interviews since Parsons' departure, Morey has tried repeatedly to let it be known that, as he put it to ESPN.com, there's "no doubt in my mind that Chandler can become one of the top players in this league." Houston, however, came to another key conclusion along the way, deciding it would exhaust every avenue to acquire a player this summer who had already reached that level -- or keep open as many options as they could to continue the hunt if they swung and missed -- even if it meant having to sacrifice Parsons and one of the league's most favorable contracts.

Chances are you know by now what happened next. After launching into free agency by romancing former Rockets point guard Kyle Lowry and then hosting Anthony on a visit to Houston, Morey & Co. went all out to steal Chris Bosh away from Miami once they started to sniff the possibility that LeBron was actually leaving the Heat.