Mavericks Unlikely To Let Lakers Trade Targets Reunite With Luka Doncic
Mavericks Unlikely To Let Lakers Trade Targets Reunite With Luka Doncic originally appeared on Fadeaway World.
One of the main reasons why the Mavericks went to the NBA Finals last season was that the team was perfectly built around Luka Doncic to erase his shortcomings as well as provide support in his strengths, like playing pick-and-roll offense. Daniel Gafford and PJ Washington Jr. were both Trade Deadline additions to the Mavericks in the 2023-24 season that propelled them to a championship-contending team.
Advertisement
According to NBA Insider Marc Stein, the Dallas Mavericks are unlikely to let Daniel Gafford and PJ Washington become a part of any trade talks. While he didn't concretely say they are unwilling to trade them, he predicts their intention to try and avoid including them in any trade packages in the off-season this summer.
'I'm not sitting here saying they won't be traded… I just think their preference is they would love to find a way to not have to surrender either one. I just don't know if that's practical.'
Luka Doncic's first postseason appearance with the Lakers came to an end after the Lakers lost their first-round series 1-4 to the Timberwolves.
Following the Lakers' exit, GM Rob Pelinka announced that they plan to build their future around Luka Doncic. Two key areas he identified to target in the offseason were an athletic lob threat and a defensive wing to play alongside Doncic.
Advertisement
Among the best available names to make that fit with Doncic, several reports identified his former teammates Daniel Gafford and PJ Washington to be perfect fits alongside Doncic on the Lakers. Especially considering they went to the NBA Finals together last season.
Therefore, the Lakers were aiming to follow that blueprint to repeat that with Doncic. However, Stein predicts that they will not be able to do that with the same pieces that the Mavericks used, i.e, Gafford and Washington.
Washington averaged 13.0 points, 6.6 rebounds, and 1.4 assists in 22 games played in the 2023-24 playoffs. He averaged 14.7 points, 7.8 rebounds, and 2.3 assists in 57 games for the Mavericks this season.
Meanwhile, Gafford averaged 9.0 points, 5.5 rebounds, and 1.5 blocks in the same Playoff stretch last season and averaged 12.3 points, 6.8 rebounds, and 1.8 blocks in 57 games this season.
What's Next For The Lakers?
Limping into the offseason after taking a beating in the Playoffs from Anthony Edwards and the Timberwolves, the Lakers have a lot to look forward to in the offseason. Two major contract decisions will decide the team's potential to attract more talent to LA. LeBron James' player option and Luka Doncic's contract extension will largely decide the near future of the Lakers.
Advertisement
James is not expected to take a pay cut this season as he already took one when he signed the two-year extension last season. He will be owed $52,627,153 in the 2025-26 season. This puts Doncic in a tough position as he has already taken a severe hit to his potential income when he was traded to the Lakers. He lost nearly $116 million in potential revenue after the Mavericks traded him.
He was eligible for a $345.3 million supermax extension in the summer if he stayed with the Mavericks. Subsequently, he is only eligible for a $229 million extension with the Lakers now. Moreover, NBA insider Bobby Marks predicted that Doncic may accept a contract in the range of a three-year $165 million deal to give the Lakers some flexibility, another $64 million hit on his potential income. It will be interesting to see how things turn out for the Lakers this offseason.
Related: Jazz Could Offer Walker Kessler On The Trade Market; Good News For The Lakers
This story was originally reported by Fadeaway World on Jun 10, 2025, where it first appeared.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
New York Times
40 minutes ago
- New York Times
The Pacers are showing who they really are — and that they're for real
INDIANAPOLIS — Their superstar has a crooked jump shot and disappears too often, stirring nonsensical chatter on the debate shows about whether he's even a superstar in the first place. 'I couldn't care less' was Tyrese Haliburton's response late Wednesday night, fresh off another sterling playoff performance that will quiet his critics for at least another 48 hours. Advertisement Their biggest spark stands 6-foot-1 but plays like he's 5-10. Speaking of jump shots, T.J. McConnell owns one that's even uglier. The 10-year veteran has probably lasted nine years longer in the league than anyone ever thought he would. He also happens to embody everything the Indiana Pacers are about. 'The great White hope,' Haliburton calls him. Their O.G. has been fighting a cold for days, couldn't buy a bucket for stretches Wednesday night and probably won't be able to practice with the team Thursday. No matter. Myles Turner made no mention of it. There wasn't a chance the longest-tenured Pacer was going to miss the first NBA Finals game the franchise has hosted in a quarter-century. This team can be both electrifying and exasperating, an endless fastbreak that's been known to fall asleep on defense a little too often (see: a 140-110 loss to the Spurs in January). They're stubborn about their style, refusing to slow the speed and find the perfect shot and protect possessions at all costs. The rotation isn't going to shrink — this team goes 10 deep whether it's a five-day road trip in February or the championship round in June. They're going to wear you down, with their pace and their depth and their grit. They're going to share the ball and stretch your defense. 'That's one of the things that attracted me to this place,' Pascal Siakam said. 'And since I got here, that's who we've been.' They're going to cripple your spirit, no matter the odds, whether it's a seven-point deficit to the Bucks with 35 seconds left in Round 1, a seven-point deficit to the Cavs with 44 seconds left in Round 2, a 14-point deficit to the Knicks with 2:41 left in the Eastern Conference finals or a 15-point deficit in the fourth quarter of Game 1 against the Thunder in the NBA Finals. This is who the Pacers are. Advertisement And this is where the Pacers are, 12 days into June: two wins from the franchise's first NBA championship. If their stunning Game 1 comeback last week spoke to this team's late-game guile — a recurring theme amid this magical playoff run — Wednesday's 116-107 victory in Game 3 revealed what the Pacers look like at their best. Dogged. Determined. And dominant when it matters most. 'This is how we gotta do it,' coach Rick Carlisle offered after his team jumped to a 2-1 lead in the series. 'We gotta do it as a team. And we gotta make it as hard as possible on them.' Carlisle's team is now 14-0 when they score 110 points or more in the postseason. They're 14-0 when the shoot 46 percent or better from the field. They're 14-0 when they make 40 field goals or more. They have a formula. It works. 'Hard things are hard' is a phrase Carlisle likes to lean on with his players. Over the last two years, he convinced his team this was how they had to play: full throttle, no brakes. It was difficult and demanding and maddening at times. But it's also changed the trajectory of a franchise that's on the doorstep of a title. 'Things that make sense aren't a hard sell for our guys,' the coach added. 'It's a difficult system, and it just requires a lot of sacrifice. But when you execute it the right way, whether it's two years ago in some game that doesn't seem very meaningful in mid-January or Game 3 of the finals, these guys see where important things are important. 'Our guys have made the investment. It's like a Greek marriage. It's a lot work.' That was the Pacers Wednesday night. They absorbed the Thunder's early punch, then kept swinging for three full quarters. OKC never had enough to respond and never found an answer. McConnell (10 points, five assists, five steals) was too much of a menace. Turner (five blocks) was too resilient. Haliburton (one rebound shy of a triple-double) was too damn good. Advertisement There was more, as there always is with this team. Siakam's 21 points. Obi Toppin's juice off the bench. (Indiana's reserves outscored Oklahoma City's 49-18.) Andrew Nembhard's stingy defense. Aaron Nesmith's big 3 late in the fourth. And Bennedict Mathurin — who spent last year's playoff run sidelined with a labrum injury, counting the days until he could return to the court— erupting for a game-high 27 off the bench. All night long, the Pacers met the moment. And for a city and state that's craved a championship run like this for years — decades, even — this team's arrived at the perfect time. Mathurin, the lone top-1o pick by the Pacers on this roster, said he's never heard the Fieldhouse as loud as it was Wednesday. The fans are hungry. The team keeps delivering. 'The state of Indiana is about basketball, and that was the first time I really felt it,' Mathurin said. 'As much as this is a dream right now, I'm not trying to (soak) in the present. I'm trying to make sure the dream ends well.' Reggie Miller sat courtside, next to another Indiana icon, Oscar Robertson. Edgerrin James was on hand. So was Caitlin Clark. And same as he did in the Knicks series, Pat McAfee revved the crowd into a frenzy late in the contest — his trademark profanity included. At that moment, it felt like the arena was about to explode. It wasn't just loud on Wednesday night; it was RCA Dome-loud. Hoosiers old enough to remember those days know what I'm talking about. 'They were everything we hoped for,' Carlisle said, a few days after challenging Pacers fans to be as boisterous as the Thunder fans had been in Oklahoma City. 'Especially in the fourth quarter. They just went up a few decibels.' This isn't your typical championship contender, led by an all-world talent picked at the top of the draft or lured to town via free agency. The small-market knocks have dogged the Pacers for years. This team was built the old-fashioned way, then made the climb from perennial also-ran into powerhouse. Indiana was 25th in the league in payroll last season. This year, they're 22nd. Advertisement More than anyone else on the roster, Haliburton hears it. The critics. The doubts. The nonbelievers. He's become somewhat of a lightning rod of late, praised one minute for his late-game heroics, then criticized the next when he has an off night. It comes with the territory. He's the face of the franchise, one that's worked its way into the spotlight. 'The commentary is what it is at this point,' he said late Wednesday, putting a bow on the nonsense before reminding the room what's really at stake. 'It doesn't matter,' he added. 'We're two wins from an NBA championship.' (Photo of Tyrese Haliburton and Reggie Miller:)
Indianapolis Star
42 minutes ago
- Indianapolis Star
How Pacers' Tyrese Haliburton shut out the noise and found a way to beat the Thunder
INDIANAPOLIS -- Pacers point guard Tyrese Haliburton knows what to expect from the online and television discourse every time he has a performance like he had in Game 2 of the NBA Finals -- when his scoring and field goal attempt numbers take a dip and he doesn't make the impact he wants to. During the regular season it's more of a local phenomenon, but once the postseason hit, the discourse became more national with every round. How is it possible someone capable of so much magic in a historically improbable late-game comeback such as Game 1 of this series when Haliburton hit a game-winning jumper with 0.3 seconds to go to be so quiet in games the Pacers lose. They say he's not aggressive enough or too inconsistent to be considered a superstar and wonder why the 2023-24 NBA assist leader hasn't figured out that he should just shoot more. The narratives are overly simplistic, but Haliburton knows at this point there's only so much he can do to change that. He admits that he is "chronically online" and has a better sense of the NBA and how it's covered than just about any other active player, but at this stage he's actively trying to avoid the social media that he usually drinks in. "I think the commentary is always going to be what it is, you know?" Haliburton said. "Most of the time, the talking heads on the major platforms, I couldn't care less. Honestly, like what do they really know about basketball?" Re-live the Pacers unbelievable run to the NBA Finals in IndyStar's commemorative book Haliburton is aware there's a correlation between his scoring and the Pacers' success. He averaged 21.2 points in wins in the regular season on 14.6 field goal attempts per game and 14.3 points per game on 12.4 field goal attempts in defeats. But he views his scoring less as a cause of the Pacers' wins and more of a connected effect. He scores more and the Pacers win more when he's getting two feet in the paint, and that happens when he's orchestrating the Pacers whirling, ball-movement oriented offense the way that he wants to. The wispy 6-5, 185-pounder who was raised on Magic Johnson highlight videos is neither physically nor mentally built to doggedly drive into the lane to pile up shots and draw fouls in an effort to score 30 or 40 points every night. But when he gets the offense spinning, he can put up big scoring and assist numbers by letting the game come to him. Usually when he doesn't score much, that's a sign of a deeper dysfunction in execution, and Haliburton looks to find that issue rather than focus on his field goal attempts. And in Game 3 he made the adjustments he needed to make. After scoring 17 points in Sunday's Game 2 with 12 of them coming in the fourth quarter after the Pacers had faded too far to come back, Haliburton dazzled in Game 3 with 22 points, 11 assists and nine rebounds to help lead the Pacers to a 116-107 win over the Thunder on Wednesday in their first NBA Finals home game since 2000. Twenty-five years to the day after the Pacers' Game 3 win over the Lakers in the 2000 Finals, they took a 2-1 lead in this NBA Finals with Game 4 coming up Friday at Gainbridge Fieldhouse. Haliburton didn't view the performance as a triumph of aggression or will but of an adjustment in mindset and strategy against a Thunder defense that he told ESPN he considers to be the best he's played against. In Game 2, Haliburton believed he allowed the Pacers' system of randomized movement to become too predictable and too predicated on high ball screens -- usually Haliburton's bread and butter, but an action that plays right into the hands of a swarming Thunder defense. In Game 3, he mixed up actions well enough to create space which was beneficial not only for him but everyone else on the Pacers' roster. Their 116 points were the most they've scored in a game this series, they shot a series-best 51.8% from the floor and scored 50 points in the paint after scoring just 34 in each of the first two games. "We did a great job of just playing off the pitch, off handoffs, screening, all those things," Haliburton said. "I thought we did a great job of -- this is a defense that you can't consistently give them the same look. If you try to hold the ball and call for screens, they crawl into you and pack the paint. It's not easy. It's really tough. That's why they are such a historical defense. You just have to continue to give them different looks as much as you can. I thought we did a great job of just playing and continuing to play random basketball. Against a team like this, there's not really play calls. You've just got to play." That's what Haliburton did and he let his own offense come to him as the game went along. He didn't take a shot for nearly six minutes to start the game and he missed his first field goal attempt, a 20-foot step-back pull-up jumper with 6:10 to go in the first quarter. But he followed that by driving past Thunder All-NBA second team defender Jalen Williams to the right side of the foul line and hitting a 16-foot floater over Thunder center Isaiah Hartenstein with 5:10 to play in the first quarter. Then he hit his first 3-pointer in first-team All-Defensive Team pick Luguentz Dort's face with 3:00 to go in the period and suddenly he had his rhythm established early. Haliburton put faith in his floater -- a weapon he's admittedly sometimes too reluctant to use -- hitting three mid-range shots in that fashion over top of charging big men. He scored two buckets at the rim -- one an impressive finish on a drive through contact and the other an easy two-handed fast-break dunk off a steal. He was 4 of 8 from 3-point range, hitting his most 3s since he made five in his 32-point, 15-assist, 12-rebound triple-double in the Pacers' win over the Knicks in Game 4 of the Eastern Conference Finals. But he didn't just look for his own offense. He helped get fellow All-Star Pascal Siakam started early as Siakam scored the Pacers first six points en route to a 21-point night. Haliburton still got center Myles Turner involved with pick-and-roll and pick and pop actions even though the Pacers tried not to live off those as much. He made plays "off the pitch," using give-and-go actions with bigs operating near the top of the key with their back to the basket catching his passes and tossing them right back to him and that got Haliburton downhill momentum that he could use to either go to the rim or pass and it helped keep the Thunder from loading up their defense quickly. The Pacers managed 41 field goal attempts in the paint after taking just 27 in Game 2. "Terrific," Pacers coach Rick Carlisle said of Haliburton. "Look, every game you're going to have to make adjustments against this defense. There's just going to be different looks. You're going to have different high-level defenders on you. You're going to see some different coverage stuff. It's going to be constantly changing. So I thought his approach tonight was exactly what it needed to be, a combination of spatial awareness and aggression, and you know, a real good feel for aggression to score along with getting his teammates involved at the right times." Haliburton moves forward knowing that solving the Thunder defense for a game isn't the same as solving it for a series. Oklahoma City led the NBA in defensive rating and allowed the fewest paint points, and they'll find more ways to keep the ball away from the rim in Game 4. He also knows that there will be games when he's successfully bottled up or scores fewer points because he's more focused on creating for others. "I think there's going to be ebbs and flows," Haliburton said. "I'm never going to be, you know, super great and shoot so many shots every game consistently. There's going to be games where I don't and I've got to be able to find the right balance between the two. But I mean, I think experience is the best way I can learn from it. So seeing where I can be better is important through the first two games and just trying to be better today. You know, taking what the defense gives me, trying to play the right way and watch film and see where I can get better and be ready to go for Game 4." Haliburton has a lot of voices telling him he needs to shoot more. His personal trainer, Drew Hanlen, is particularly explicit about it, and Haliburton acknowledges that he sees plenty of examples of himself passing out on shots he should take and make in the course of a game. But part of that is a product of focus on making the textbook right play and keeping in mind the importance of involving his teammates. In turn, they trust his judgment. "Ty's got to do him," Siakam said. "That's what he's got to do, he's got to be himself every time he's out on the floor. He can impact the game in so many ways. So I'm really not worried about his scoring. I just know that he's going to make the right play. But when he's intentional about doing that every single play, I know something good is going to happen. So as long as he keeps doing that, we're going to be all right."
Fox Sports
an hour ago
- Fox Sports
McConnell, Mathurin lead Pacers' bench charge in Game 3, fueling 2-1 NBA Finals lead over Thunder
Associated Press INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — TJ McConnell stole inbounds passes not once, not twice, but three times in Game 3 of the NBA Finals. He waved his arms, pumped his fists and shouted at an already delirious crowd to make more noise. Bennedict Mathurin made just about every shot, calm and cool, always coming up with the bucket that Indiana needed. Separately, they couldn't seem more different. Together, they were a two-man bench wrecking crew for the Pacers in Game 3 of the NBA Finals — two of the biggest reasons why Indiana has a 2-1 lead over the Oklahoma City Thunder in the title series. McConnell became the first reserve in finals history to have five assists and five steals in a game. Mathurin — who couldn't play in Indiana's playoff run last year because of a shoulder injury — scored 27 points, the most by a reserve in a finals game in 14 years. Sure, Tyrese Haliburton nearly had a triple-double and Pascal Siakam scored 21 points and Myles Turner battled through illness to have a pair of huge blocks late in Indiana's 116-107 victory Wednesday night, but McConnell and Mathurin were the story. 'Just getting a win in general in the playoffs and in the finals, it's really hard," McConnell said. 'So, obviously, happy about this one, but have to move on. Have to still correct some stuff and make some adjustments.' Game 4 is Friday night. And McConnell was looking ahead to Friday almost immediately after Wednesday night's game ended. Haliburton says McConnell is like a big brother to him, always knowing what needs to be done, always knowing what needs to be said. He delivered on both counts in Game 3. 'He does a great job of giving us energy plays consistently and getting downhill and operating. I mean, nobody operates on the baseline like that guy,' Haliburton said. 'I thought did he a great job of consistently getting there and making hustle play after hustle play, and sticking with it, and I thought we did a great job of just feeding off of what he was doing.' McConnell was the scrappy energy. Mathurin, he was just smooth. Before Mathurin did it in Game 3, the last player who scored 27 points off the bench in a finals game was Jason Terry for Dallas in 2011 — doing so in the Game 6 title-clinching win over Miami. The coach of that Mavs team: Rick Carlisle. The coach of this Pacers team: Rick Carlisle. And when it was all over Wednesday, Carlisle told the story of how Mathurin — after getting his shoulder surgically repaired last spring — got one of those calendars that counted down the number of days he had to wait before being cleared to play again. It was in the Pacers' training room and part of Mathurin's routine was to tear off a page each day. 'He was counting the days down to being cleared sometime in August and then be able to begin training camp, begin 5-on-5 with our guys in September and then be in training camp, really, with his eyes firmly set on an opportunity in the playoffs,' Carlisle said. 'And so, he's putting a lot of work to be ready for these moments.' Mathurin said he learned a lot as well from just watching last year's playoff run, when Indiana made the East finals. 'Just being on the bench and being next to the coaches who were able to run me through the game and stuff like that ... I was fortunate enough to learn a lot and be ready for this year,' Mathurin said. Mathurin has had four 20-point games in these playoffs. The Thunder knew he had the capability. 'He seems to have a game like this in every series. He's a talented player,' Thunder coach Mark Daigneault said. 'He was really aggressive. He did a great job. McConnell did a great job. Their bench really came in the game and was excellent.' ___ AP NBA: recommended
