This festering wound of a Mavs season has reached the “sign Kemba Walker three years after chasing him in free agency” stage of the proceedings. And, yes, it’s a stage. To clarify, I’m referring less to the belated capture of a player who would have clogged up their books were he getting paid max money—although this inadvertent strategy worked reasonably well with Deron Williams and less so with DeAndre Jordan—than I am the team finally turning to Walker six or so weeks after giving him the cold shoulder.
Recall prior to the season, when Dallas was down a ball handler after Jalen Brunson left for New York. Walker was readily available after the Detroit Pistons waived him in October, but the Mavericks didn’t sign him over Facundo Campazzo. And they didn’t get down the road to either of them until Luka Doncic’s Slovenian uncle, Goran Dragic, was off the board, which is telling because Dallas offered him only a glorified cheerleading role. Considering the team might not have called Dragic in the first place had Brunson re-signed, that makes Walker a backup plan to a backup plan to a backup plan for fixing what they somehow never anticipated would be a glaring need: a competent ballhandler beyond Luka Doncic and Spencer Dinwiddie. Not ideal!
Your expectations should be finely tempered, in other words. Walker is on his final breaths as an NBA player at just 32 years old, a situation which owes itself to an arthritic left knee that sapped the explosiveness that made him an All-Star as recently as 2020. He was a defensive liability in the best of times and never the most efficient shooter inside the arc, shortcomings that are more glaring than ever now that he can’t compensate by zipping around corners or separating from defenders to rip off late-game heroics.
There is a reason, then, that the Boston Celtics attached a top-20 pick to entice the Oklahoma City Thunder to pry his salary off their books, that the Thunder bought him out two months later so he could sign with the New York Knicks, that the Knicks attached another first-round pick to dump him on Detroit, and that Detroit ate more than $9 million to release him again in October without him playing a game in a Pistons uniform. All of that happened in less than a year and a half, which makes it no wonder that every other team had stayed away this go-around and that the Mavericks would have preferred to do so themselves.
That doesn’t mean Walker can’t be effective in a limited role; virtually anyone would provide better playmaking than the Mavs’ non-Doncic, non-Dinwiddie options have been to date. But no matter the outcome, this is a glaring process failure by Dallas. If Walker washes out, it’s one more reminder of the folly in treating such a fundamental aspect of this offense—a roster of 3-and-D shooters is only as effective as the players who get them the ball—as just another gap to stop. If he succeeds, why couldn’t the Mavericks spot it sooner instead of wasting time turning to Campazzo first, only to waive him to make space for Walker? Walker can only move the needle so much, but the tiniest margins matter more than they should with a team that has taken nine of its 10 L’s by single digits and many of those on the game’s final possessions. They could be felt even more acutely in April if Dallas is among the teams clambering to escape the play-in round in a crowded Western Conference playoff picture.
You can feel good about this without feeling great. Kemba Walker will handle the ball and he will be fun, and the latter might be even more necessary than the former for Dallas at the moment. He should make the Mavericks better, but if he doesn’t, he can’t make them meaningfully worse, either. There’s no way for it to be a bad move, which automatically guarantees this will be better than so much else that came out of an increasingly disastrous offseason. And that, more than anything, explains why the Mavericks are where they are: treading water after their best season in years, asking a down-on-his-luck point guard to come in off the street and help turn things around.
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