Hey, guess what?
Tyson Chandler isn’t above holding a grudge against the Dallas Mavericks.
For some reason, it feels like Chandler played in Dallas forever, when nothing could be further from the truth. Just two of his 14 NBA seasons have been spent in a Mavericks uniform, but because he won a title with them, that’s the team with which he’s most often associated—the same team that’s done him dirty…twice.
On the heels of the Mavericks’ 2011 title, owner Mark Cuban and company disbanded the core. Chandler ended up in New York, where he suffered through injures and front-office stupidity, and Dallas began its years-long run of mediocrity. The two sides then reunited via trade last summer and everything felt right. Chandler was home.
Surely the summer of 2015 wouldn’t be an encore of 2011. Chandler was a free agent again, but the Mavericks knew what they had. They wouldn’t make the mistake of letting him go only to chase bigger, younger names that did nothing more than flirt with the prospect of signing in Dallas.
Except that’s just what they did.
Chandler’s free agency became a secondary storyline to the Mavericks’ pursuit of DeAndre Jordan. And he’s not happy about it.
The 33-year-old, now a member of the Phoenix Suns after putting pen to paper on a four-year $52 million contract, commented on his latest departure from Dallas, and per AZCentral.com’s Paul Coro, he had nothing good to say:
I definitely felt like, after winning a championship and help bringing it there, that I was going to be there for the long run. I never heard of a championship team being broken up like that. When they traded for me to come back, I sat at the podium with everybody else and heard them say this was going to be a long-term deal and they weren’t going to make the same mistake as last time and blah-blah-blah. Seven months later, the same thing happens again. But I learned in this business that you can’t trust everybody. That’s why it is what it is.
These are fair feelings on Chandler’s part. The Mavericks probably sold him on retiring in Dallas, on rejoining them for the long haul, on being a key member of the contender they would build to usher them past Dirk Nowitzki’s twilight and into the future.
Instead, his second stint in Big D turned into another one-year stay. Now he’s in Phoenix, on a mediocre team with wafer-thin playoff hopes, left to spend the next four years, barring a trade, competing for nothing of championship value.
To be fair, that’s pretty much all there was for him in Dallas, too. Still, it seems the Mavericks could have handled this situation a lot better.
