The Dallas Mavericks turned heads Tuesday night when they were part of a four-team trade that gave them the rights to Sergio de Larrea, the 25th overall pick.<\/p>\n
De Larrea currently plays for ACB Valencia in Spain and his team just won the Liga ACBC title on Wednesday with a 108-84 victory in the deciding Game 4 against Barcelona for just the second league title in team history.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s unclear if De Larrea will play in Summer League early next month after having contributed to a championship so recently, and there\u2019s been speculation over whether Dallas will bring him over to the States this year or use a strategy often used on foreign prospects: draft and stash.<\/p>\n
In these scenarios, teams draft players and retain their playing rights but allow them to continue to play in their home countries. This can happen because the team has no roster spots or simply because they see potential in a player but they don\u2019t think they\u2019re ready to compete at the NBA level just yet.<\/p>\n
Marc Stein reported Wednesday that all options are \u201cbeing worked through\u201d regarding De Larrea\u2019s future.<\/p>\n
*Insert Future voice* whatever that f*cking means.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t think it\u2019s always wrong to draft and stash a player, and I think there are even situations \u2014 like Oklahoma City \u2014 where draft and stashing makes sense. You don\u2019t want to mess with what you have now but you know you\u2019ll need young players to add to your talent as your core gets older.<\/p>\n
But in Dallas\u2019 situation, I see no upside to keeping him overseas and only a downside by not bringing him on board immediately.<\/p>\n
We have one of the league\u2019s best young players in recent history in Cooper Flagg, and we need to start building the team that\u2019s going to be around him for the next decade. Do I think de Larrea is going to be an All-Star on day 1? Probably not, but I have no idea, but if you\u2019re going to draft a guy with a first-round pick, I argue you should get him on the court with the future of your franchise as soon as possible.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s like Jalen Brunson with Luka Don\u010di\u0107 after the 2018 draft. Did we know Brunson was going to be a star one day after we drafted him in the second round? Of course not, but we brought him to the team immediately and he and Don\u010di\u0107 built chemistry together that led them to the conference finals just four years later.<\/p>\n
(Small side note: ouch, that sucked writing that paragraph knowing what we know now.)<\/p>\n
The point is this: de Larrea may not be Jalen Brunson, de Larrea could end up being an MVP. Regardless, we need to see who he is (or who he isn\u2019t) immediately. His lighting up the Euroleague next season does nothing for the Mavericks, and if he comes to the NBA and sucks, he\u2019s another late first-round pick that didn\u2019t pan out \u2014 AKA most of them.<\/p>\n
Bring the kid over, and let\u2019s see what he can do with the team. He may just be the start of something special in Dallas.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Dallas Mavericks turned heads Tuesday night when they were part of a four-team trade that gave them…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":349583,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[102,104,103,4943,83929],"class_list":["post-349582","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-dallas","tag-dallas","tag-dallas-headlines","tag-dallas-news","tag-mavericks-analysis","tag-mavericks-draft"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349582","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=349582"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349582\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/349583"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=349582"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=349582"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=349582"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}