Welcome to this free episode of Dunk Don. If you want to get all the Western conference

re-grades, you can subscribe to DunkDon.supportingcast.fm. That's DunkDon.supportingcast.fm. Here's Nate

and Danny with the first few. Well guys, this is a big pod. You're probably getting used to it

every year now. So last time we're going to talk to Danny for a little bit here as we're going to

get into our season outlooks after this. Danny, I'm sure you're just crestfallen to not be able to

talk to me about basketball for a little while. Well, we'll be fine. I have a lot more to do this

year. I'm going to put it that way. But yeah, of course, I'll miss it. But we have a lot to discuss

here as well. And we're going to start, we're going to go from the start of the outfits to the end

in part because we wanted to shift it around, but the order makes more sense this way because of

some of the trades that happened between these teams are interactions that happened between these

teams. So we're going to begin with the Dallas Mavericks and you and I both criticize the Mavericks

a year ago. This is a re-grade for the Jalen Brunson series of decisions, many of the mistakes of

which happened before the window that we're grading. However, they also happened in the window

that we were grading because Jalen Brunson ended up with the nicks and it doesn't seem like the

Mavericks ever came with a truly competitive offer. And even if they should have engaged earlier

and they should have done an extension before this, it is still a pretty big mistake. And that's

the place we start. You know, I gave this a D-minus last year. It already was a complete disaster,

even at that point that they had lost Brunson. And also we should know completely failed to replace

him in any meaningful way. They didn't bring in anybody who could handle the ball. It was just

Dean Woody and Luca and that's it. And of course, they really struggled when Luca was off the floor

I mean in the season. And there's nothing providing them other than just money and Mark Cuban

pocketbook and just a general feeling that Jalen Brunson obviously wasn't that good, which they had

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