The six-team trade is official, and Dallas quietly attacked its biggest weakness without touching its young core or its largest trade exception.<\/p>\n
Santi Aldama is a Maverick. Marcus Sasser is a Maverick. Tarik Biberovic, the Turkish league sharpshooter whose draft rights sat in a Memphis drawer for three years, is signing a two-year deal to finally cross the ocean. Ten players and a small mountain of picks changed hands across six franchises, and Dallas walked away from the table with exactly what it came for.<\/p>\n
I understand if you didn\u2019t feel the dopamine hit. That\u2019s kind of the point.<\/p>\n
A few days ago, I wrote that the relief of this offseason was in what Dallas had not done. Fans carrying decades of scar tissue, from the DeAndre Jordan saga to the worst trade in franchise history, watched the Sasser and Aldama reports sit unfinalized for days and started bracing for the other shoe. It never dropped. The deal didn\u2019t fall apart. It got better. Now that the full architecture is public, we can see what the front office was doing instead of chasing splashes.<\/p>\n
Start with the problem. Last season\u2019s Mavericks were one of the worst three-point shooting teams in the league<\/a>. When defenses know they can sag off your role players, the lane clogs, rotations cheat, and your star wears multiple defenders for 40 minutes a night.<\/p>\n Max Christie was the best catch-and-shoot option on the roster early, and he started the year scorching. Then he faded, the way young players sometimes do. Strong starts, strong middles, strong finishes; most young careers only get one of the three in a given season. As Christie\u2019s shooting slid and the injuries piled up, the offense tilted more and more toward the Cooper Flagg Show. Some of that was Flagg\u2019s maturation, and the box scores down the stretch were spectacular. But some of it was that the Mavericks simply didn\u2019t have anything else. That\u2019s not a sustainable formula, and this front office clearly knew it.<\/p>\n Now look at the bets they placed. Brandon Williams remains unsigned, and Dallas may yet bring him back. But Sasser represents a different offensive wager: less paint pressure, more willingness to fire. In an injury-shortened season he shot 41.5 percent from three, and 60 percent of his field goal attempts came from behind the line. It\u2019s a small sample, but it\u2019s a clear signal of the shot profile Dallas is buying. \u201cWilling shooter\u201d is not a vibe in his case. It\u2019s a shot chart. He spent his Detroit years buried in a crowded backcourt behind Cade Cunningham and a surging Daniss Jenkins, on a team that never quite figured out how to use him. Dallas has a role and a green light waiting.<\/p>\n In comes Aldama, a 25-year-old combo forward who shot 35 percent from three on real volume last season and can play the four or the five.<\/p>\n And in comes Biberovic, who might be the jewel of the entire offseason alongside Morez Johnson Jr.<\/p>\n Let me paint you a picture. A 6\u20197\u201d wing, 25 years old, coming off a EuroLeague season where he shot 41.9 percent from three on more than five attempts a game and 95.2 percent from the free throw line. That free throw number is not a typo. He shot nearly 49 percent from deep in Turkish league play. And this is not a one-season heater: across eight professional seasons in Europe, his career EuroLeague three-point mark is 42.3 percent. He won a EuroLeague title with Fenerbahce in 2025 and starred on the Turkish stage for years. Memphis drafted him 56th overall in 2023 and let his rights gather dust for three seasons.<\/p>\n His stroke is a thing of beauty. He leans away into the release like a man settling into a recliner, creating separation without ever speeding up the mechanics.<\/p>\n Now imagine that exact player as a 27-year-old NBA free agent with two seasons of elite shooting on an NBA roster. What does that contract look like? Go find the comparable shooters from the last few free agency cycles and check the price tags. It\u2019s a bidding war, and it ends in eight figures a year.<\/p>\n Dallas is getting him for two years and $6 million with a team option.<\/a><\/p>\n Is there translation risk? Of course. The NBA is faster and longer than the EuroLeague, and not every great European shooter survives the jump. But when you don\u2019t control your own first-round picks and you\u2019re rebuilding without a net, these are precisely the asymmetrical bets you have to find. The downside is a modest flyer you can walk away from in a year. The upside is a starting-caliber floor spacer at a fraction of his potential open-market cost.<\/p>\n And here\u2019s the question that hangs over the whole acquisition: would the previous front office have even known who Memphis held draft rights to? A regime that shed its European connective tissue and never once went looking for more, that treated the international scouting trail like it was optional? Biberovic would have retired in Istanbul before that front office learned to spell his name.<\/p>\n Adding a Class, Not a Player<\/p>\n Zoom out and count. Four draft picks in June: Morez Johnson Jr., Sergio de Larrea, Tobi Lawal, Vsevolod Ishchenko. Three more players 25 or younger inbound on this trade: Aldama, Sasser, Biberovic. That\u2019s seven new additions to the under-26 talent pool in a span of three weeks, stacked on top of Flagg, Lively, Christie, and Nembhard.<\/p>\n They didn\u2019t add a player. They added a class.<\/p>\n A word on Lively, because it matters here. He\u2019s roughly seven months removed from foot surgery, out of the boot, walking and lifting, but as of his late-June update not yet cleared to run or jump. He says the foot will decide the timeline, not the calendar, and he\u2019s taking more time than he needs to make sure he never deals with this again. That\u2019s the right approach and I\u2019m rooting for him. He\u2019s also apparently a serious Lego guy, and so is Morez Johnson Jr., which means the Mavericks frontcourt room may soon feature two large men comparing Millennium Falcon builds. The vibes, at least, are structurally sound.<\/a><\/p>\n But this is why the Morez pick made sense at nine, whatever the draft-night grumbling said. Lively has not yet reached 100 regular-season games through three seasons. You cannot pencil him in. You plan for the roster you might actually have.<\/p>\n Building for the Star You Have, Not the One You Had<\/p>\n Here\u2019s the part of this offseason I find most encouraging, and it\u2019s about theory, not transactions.<\/p>\n When this franchise built around Luka, the blueprint was 3-and-D wings and rim-runners. PJ Washington and Derrick Jones Jr. spacing the corners, Lively and Gafford protecting the paint and catching lobs. That construction fit that star: a supernova distributor who drew doubles no matter what, needed vertical finishers, and needed defensive cover behind him.<\/p>\n