It’s been two weeks since many Dallas Mavs fans’ worlds came crashing down. How ya doing?
I went to watch the SMU men’s basketball team play Pitt on Tuesday. Mavericks’ GM Nico Harrison had come to scout the game. A friend watching from home had alerted me to his presence because the ACC Network broadcast had cut away to him at one point. Not too long after that, I heard a lone “Fire Nico” emerge from someone in the crowd who also realized he was there. A multi-person “Fire Nico” chant broke out a bit later. Late in the game, SMU big man Samet Yiğitoğlu went down hurt (he’s expected to be fine). As the athletic trainer tended to him, a fan above me yelled, “Nico, sign him!”
The fan referenced the status of currently-injured forward Anthony Davis, the lynchpin in a trade Harrison had executed that also added Max Christie and the Lakers’ 2029 first-round pick to the Mavs’ coffers. Dallas had given up Maxi Kleber, Markieff Morris, a second-round pick, and Luka Dončić.
Mavs fans were (and are) super upset to lose a 25-year-old star in Dončić, if for no other reason than their wardrobes. If you went to a Mavs game in recent years, you saw soooo many fans wearing his number 77 on a jersey or t-shirt.
That’s where my perspective on this trade starts. I worked for pro sports teams on the business side. I feel awful for the staffers in the merchandise department who had to figure out what to do with their stock of Dončić-labeled Mavs wearables (they’re marked down pretty heavily now if you still want one for some reason). I feel badly for the people in marketing and PR who had to spin the trade of the player around whom they had based so much fan outreach. I have a lot of sympathy for the employees who had to figure out how to change out all the images of Luka on signage, publications, and video elements.
When I worked for the Texas Rangers, we used to dread the trading deadline. You never knew who might get moved, forcing you to instantly have to redo multiple TV commercials or other collateral that included those players. That used to suck. But here’s the thing – colleagues like John Hart, Jon Daniels, or Nolan Ryan, all of whom, in my experience, bore no ill will towards their business-side colleagues, were not allowed to care about our inconvenience. Working on the baseball operations side of the organization, their job was to try to win baseball games. If that meant trading Kevin Mench, Francisco Cordero, and Laynce Nix (three guys I really liked and included in commercials I made for the team) to the Milwaukee Brewers for Nelson Cruz, they had to do it. The people in the marketing department can’t be a factor in those decisions, otherwise our outfield would still include quality people like David Murphy and David Dellucci. Elvis Andrus and Adrian Beltré would never be allowed to leave or retire. Brian Shouse might be the closer.
Now, nobody the Rangers traded during my tenure matched the status of an in-his-prime Luka Dončić. According to some, no player traded in any sport ever matched his mojo. But it doesn’t matter. Harrison’s job is to win a championship and if he thinks he is more likely to win one without the Slovenian than with him, he has to make the move. He has to do it even if his business-side colleagues hate it. He has to do it even if it makes the fans hate him (for now, anyway).
Some conspiracy theories have emerged regarding the GM’s relationship with his Lakers counterpart Rob Pelinka or ownership’s concerns about TV revenue. I have no way of knowing whether those could possibly be true. Here’s another thing I don’t know: whether or not this trade will work out from a basketball perspective. And neither do you.
Luka Dončić can do amazing things with a basketball. He’s also been hurt a lot and defense is not the best part of his game. The five-time All-Star was also due for an enormous contract extension that would occupy a lot of the team’s salary cap. A player of his superstar status can exert influence in how a trade might come together, potentially to its detriment. All those factors influenced how the trade went down in terms of its return and its level of secrecy.
What might happen? Maybe he continues to be injury-prone. Rumor is that the Mavs thought a lack of commitment to conditioning might cause that to be the case. Maybe his defensive shortcomings will hurt the Lakers to the point where they can’t ever contend, making that 2029 draft pick more useful. Dončić might even win a title in LA sometime in the next ten years. Which should be fine with Mavs fans as long as they win one, too.
Winning a title is hard in a 30-team league. It takes guesswork and luck. Even well-conditioned athletes can get hurt. The most you can usually do is hedge your bets and try to put yourself in a position to have a bunch of guys healthy for a run at the thing (think how lucky the Toronto Raptors were to have a healthy Kawhi Leonard for their title run a few years back).
In some ways, this was less about maximizing Luka’s window than it was those of Kyrie Irving and Klay Thompson. So you hope to have your 30-somethings all healthy in the same postseason sometime in the next two-to-three years. Davis, Thompson, and Irving have all won titles in their careers. It could happen.
Maybe that happens because the team’s defense improves. Maybe it happens because Irving and others become more productive out of Dončić’s ball-dominant shadow. Maybe it doesn’t happen at all because they’re all hurt. And maybe Dončić and LeBron James get hurt, too, and this all becomes a big kerfuffle over nothing because neither team contends. I hope none of them get hurt and we have an epic Western Conference final between them some year. But we just don’t know.
Dallas has won four of its last five, all games coming against teams in a playoff play-in position or better. They beat Boston, the number two seed in the East, and Houston, the number four seed in the West. Their only loss in that stretch came in overtime. Thompson is clutch. Irving is clutch. The season isn’t over.
If you’re a fan, it’s okay to be upset when the team trades your favorite player. If you’d declared yourself a Mavs Fan For Life prior to this, though, I’m not sure this trade justifies abandoning that status. Maybe don’t have your tattoo removed just yet. Maybe don’t heckle the GM when he’s doing his job scouting college players – Samet Yiğitoğlu has been playing pretty well, y’all. Heck, hang on to your Luka shirts – remember when the team traded current coach Jason Kidd early in his career and he returned later to win a title? You just don’t know what will happen.
