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原文如下：

Dallas had interest in Caldwell-Pope at the start of free agency last summer that it quickly abandoned when Denver signaled it would not participate in a sign-and-trade. Making such a deal with a top Western Conference rival was believed, at the time, to be prime among the factors discouraging Denver from helping facilitate Caldwell-Pope's exit, but it proved not nearly as decisive as ownership's well-chronicled reluctance to run up a luxury-tax bill.

According to one re-telling of the various Caldwell-Pope discussions from the summer that was relayed to me, Denver did show some 11th-hour openness to sign-and-trade concepts after initially balking. But by then it was too late. Orlando had firmly emerged as a team prepared to sign Caldwell-Pope into cap space and duly delivered a three-year, $66 million contract that brought KCP to Central Florida and, like Bruce Brown before him, stripped the Nuggets of a key perimeter defender from their championship team without compensation.