You must be signed in to post a comment

Andrew D. Bernstein/NBAE via Getty

Lakers center Andrew Bynum missed the team's charter flight from New York to Toronto on Saturday morning. After tallying 21 points, nine rebounds and two blocks, maybe he should pay out of pocket for commercial flights more often.

• Camby: 12 points, 19 rebounds, 5 blocks

James

NEW YORK -- Erick Dampier was in street clothes, Josh Howard again looked like a shell of his former self, Jason Kidd wasn't within 1,000 miles of Madison Square Garden -- and still the Mavericks won by 50.

Forget for a moment about Kidd, who was excused for personal reasons, and consider what the Mavs did without Dampier and Howard in a 128-78 slaughtering of the Knicks.

Then, consider the fact that Dampier is under contract for $13.1 million next season and Howard for $11.8 million. That surely will eat up too much of Dallas' cap space for the Mavs to be a major player in free agency this summer, won't it? Not necessarily, because the Mavs hold team options on the final seasons of the contracts of Dampier, Howard and J.J. Barea, while Drew Gooden, Tim Thomas and James Singleton are on expiring deals, and all six could either come off Dallas' cap or be used in sign-and-trade deals.

(Dallas cannot get far enough under the cap to make a max offer to a major free agent. Aside from the $47 million committed to Dirk Nowitzki, Jason Terry, Kidd and Shawn Marion, Quinton Ross has a $1.1 million player option for next season, and Matt Carroll has a cap-clogging $4.3 million salary for 2010-11, then two more seasons after that at $3.9 million and $3.5 million.)

So the Mavs will be ready to play ball with any team that stands to lose a max-level free agent (look no further than Toronto, where Texas-raised Chris Bosh resides tenuously), and Howard, Gooden, Barea and Singleton all are nice pieces.

And given the profound difference, demonstrated Sunday, between what the Mavericks and the Knicks have on their respective rosters, this MSG matinee mauling illustrated the relative positions of strength and weakness with which each team will enter the summer. Much of the focus around the NBA through the first half of the season has been on the cap space the Knicks, Heat and Nets have accumulated for the summer of 2010 for the likes of LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, Bosh and others, and the space Chicago is expected to create for this summer's free-agent bonanza. Nobody speaks about the Mavs much, but they will have the resources to go after Bosh, Amare Stoudemire, Rudy Gay, David Lee or others if they hang on to Dampier and Howard through the trade deadline and then decline to pick up both players' 2010-11 options.

So the Mavs could be a major sign-and-trade player in 2010 free agency -- if they stand relatively pat at the trading deadline. They're wrestling with the options, having already registered interest in Sacramento's Kevin Martin; and they are believed to be tracking the availability of Washington's Caron Butler and Philadelphia's Andre Iguodala. The problem with any trade-deadline move is that the Mavs would have to use Josh Howard for any of those guys and thus would take themselves out of the Bosh/LeBron/et al. sweepstakes.

"I speak to LeBron probably 10 times a day, and that's not something we talk about," Mavs owner Mark Cuban joked prior to Sunday's game, the largest margin of victory in Dallas' franchise history and the Knicks' most lopsided home loss ever.

"You know, every team wants to get better, and you look at the best guys in the league and you say, 'What gives me an opportunity to add them to my team?' Some people want cap room, some people think sign-and-trade. So it just depends. We'll see; you just never know. You never know," Cuban said.

The victory capped a 3-2 Eastern Conference road trip for the Mavericks, who moved 14 games over .500 and pulled within a half-game of Denver for second place in the West. The Knicks, meanwhile, dropped nine games below .500 as another crowd comprised largely of international tourists (lots of New Yorkers were gearing up for kickoff of the Jets' playoff game against Indianapolis) passively looked on.

If LeBron or Bosh had been in attendance, he would have seen the dark side of what the world's most famous arena can become when the home team drops a stink bomb.

"With any top tier player -- when there's multiple choices at [max] money, it really comes down to where he thinks he has the best chance to win, and that's just up to each individual organization to try to convince them of that," Cuban said.

"New York is a great selling point, Miami's got great selling points, Dallas, Chicago, L.A., Memphis -- they all have their own selling points," Cuban said. "Maybe Memphis, maybe he's a huge Elvis fan and he wants to be close. You just never know."

The "you just never know" part is what is causing a lot of sleepless nights for Cleveland fans, and the thought of Cuban getting into the mix for their local hero isn't exactly going to act as a sedative.

Same goes for the folks in Toronto who are anxious about Bosh's future.

"We always try to position ourselves to be opportunistic, and we think we've got some scenarios that we can be that way," Cuban said. "So we'll see."

Chris Sheridan covers the NBA for ESPN Insider.