Let’s be honest with each other on this fine Friday lunch hour: sports are pretty dumb sometimes.
They’re so many other things, too—inspiring, exhilarating, unifying, transformative. But hoo boy can they be dumb, and that dumbness is baked into why I enjoy working as a professional sports degenerate for this here magazine, because we all need more dumb fun in our lives.
So shout out to your NBA Finalist Dallas Mavericks for delivering us some yesterday in the form of trading a 36-year-old assistant coach who works for their archrivals in exchange for what otherwise amounts to a milquetoast deal involving second-round draft picks.
If you, like me, are debased enough to know the name Petteri Koponen, it may be in the context of his upcoming job as an assistant coach for the San Antonio Spurs’ Summer League team. But it’s more likely because the Mavericks acquired his draft rights all the way back in 2011, four years after the Finn was selected 30th overall by the Philadelphia 76ers. Koponen never made his way stateside, instead plying his trade in Europe, where he became a seven-time Finnish Player of the Year and lived in places like Barcelona, Munich, and Italy. Good for Petteri! But because he never made his NBA debut, and because the league’s accounting rules apparently amount to a hoarder’s desk drawer full of uncashed casino markers, Dallas still holds Kopponen’s draft rights.
And said draft rights are apparently useful in the context of transactions like Dallas moving up from 58th to 51st in yesterday’s draft to select French wing Melvin Ajinca. Why this deal with the Knicks couldn’t be made strictly for cash considerations (the other, more relevant makeweight in the deal), I have no idea. But Petteri Koponen, a former member of the incredibly named and now defunct Honka Playboys (someone DM resident Finnish hockey expert Sean Shapiro to find out if it’s related in any way to former Stars bust Julius Honka), is a former Mavericks draft asset 13 years after he became one in the first place.
Kudos to the man himself for grasping how ridiculous the whole situation is:
Why am I leading with this? Because there ain’t much else to discuss deep in the second day of the NBA Draft aside from how forced and ill-considered splitting a one-night event into two was in the first place. Ajinca, the player Dallas made these moves for, will win you a game of Mavs Bar Trivia if you point out his familial ties to Alexis Ajinca, the deepest cut on the 2011 championship roster. Otherwise he’s a long wing in the 3-and-D mold who may spend next year overseas and may not make the Mavs’ roster if he doesn’t.
The more interesting stuff went down this morning, when Dallas finally shipped out Tim Hardaway Jr. along with three second-round picks to Detroit in exchange for 24-year-old swingman Quentin Grimes. This concerns what Jake Kemp wrote about Wednesday: moving Hardaway’s money frees up cap space for Dallas to make an offer worth the full mid-level exception for Derrick Jones Jr., whose re-signing is the team’s top priority. But Grimes could be a serious find as a 3-and-D wing in the mold of what people want Josh Green to be as Green’s profile continues to skew more drive-and-dish secondary creator. Jake will have more about him on Monday, by which point Dallas may have made even more moves after free agency begins on Sunday. Maybe even more dumb, fun ones, too.
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