DeAndre Jordan, Mavs-Clippers Love Triangle Embarrassing For NBA
By Randy Renner
From the outside looking in last night's 3-ring circus at DeAndre Jordan's house in Houston was wildly entertaining to follow on Twitter.
The photoshopped photos of Jordan tied to a chair while Blake Griffin and Chris Paul guarded him was pretty funny and so was the one depicting Mavs owner Mark Cuban and forward Chandler Parsons on a SWAT vehicle about to ram through the front door.
Griffin even tweeted a photo of a chair propped against the door to Jordan's house presumably to keep Cuban and Parsons and Rick Carlisle and Tony Romo and whoever else from Dallas that might have wanted to barge in and spoil the Clippers reunion party.
Yep pretty funny stuff.
Unless you're a Mavericks fan because Dallas is about to become a bottom feeder. A team that has had 15 straight winning seasons could lose 50 games next season because of some other moves they made and didn't make when Jordan said he would become a Maverick.
The NBA can't be very happy about this either because the frat party at Jordan's house makes a mockery of the entire free agent business and points out the pit falls of starting free agency on July 1st before all the salary cap numbers come out a week later.
That's why there's a moratorium, why teams can only discuss wide ranging parameters of a deal rather than just put a contract in front of guy and see if he'll sign it.
League GMs are already suggesting free agency should be moved back to the same date all the financial figures are finalized. And why it takes so long to add up the money in the first place is a bit mind boggling in this day and age.
It is kind of interesting and maybe funny too that both the Clippers and Mavs would be freaking out over a guy who is a career 42 percent free throw shooter. He's a darn good defender and rebounder, a game changer at times, but he's an offensive liability at the end of close games because he can't hit free throws becoming a game changer then too but in a bad way.
Jordan has every right to waffle around about whether he'd rather work back home in Texas or out in LaLa Land, I'm sure the beaches at Venice and Malibu are better than the ones at Lake Ray Hubbard.
And Jordan wasn't the one who told the public he'd be playing for the Mavs next season. His agent, Don Fegan, let that leak out. Jordan though did shake hands with his buddy Parsons and with Cuban letting them know he'd be playing home games in downtown Dallas rather than Los Angeles.
With that information the Mavericks didn't really try to stop center Tyson Chandler from bolting for Phoenix and didn't pursue a possible trade for Roy Hibbert but they did reach an agreement with Wesley Matthews for $57 million because Jordan indicated he thought Matthews would be a good fit on the Mavs. Matthews of course still hasn't recovered from a ruptured Achilles.
If Jordan wanted to back out of his hand shake agreement with Cuban he should have, as one Dallas writer suggested, "put on his big boy pants, call Cuban and tell him."
The Mavs owner confirmed this morning in a statement that Jordan "never responded to me at all yesterday. Not once. To this minute I have not heard anything from him since Tuesday night."
Instead it was all left to the TwitterSphere and instead of being a dignified change of heart it became a joke.
So now there's talk of tanking by Mavericks and trying to start over. They traded away their first round pick in next year's draft though, so if they tank they better REALLY tank because that pick is top 8 protected, losing 55 or 60 games should do the trick.
So yes, following this circus on Twitter was almost like being right there under the big top watching the clown show in person.
And while we can laugh about it right now here in Oklahoma City there is this sobering thought that should stop your chuckles, if the Mavs decide not to tank next season they could make a run at Thunder center Enes Kanter who is still out there somewhere in the wind. They could offer Kanter the same full max deal they offered Jordan. The Thunder would almost surely match the offer but they'd have to pay about $1.5 million more per season than they wanted to and as far over the luxury tax line as they would be then, it would end up costing them much more than just that $1.5 million.
And then there's this...next summer's clown show could play out inside a luxury condo in Bricktown.