What can I say? It’s downright hellish in Mavsland right now. We’ve spent a little over five weeks in this miserable post-Luka world, and every day is worse than the one before. We mourn. We wail. We pour bleach into our eyes at the sight of a No. 77 jersey in purple and gold. There has been much gnashing of teeth and rending of garments. Human sacrifices! Dogs and cats living together! Mass hysteria!
What’s worse, there’s seemingly no end to our basketball pain in sight. I know some may be sick of hearing about The Trade, a term that has already joined the ranks of Dez Caught It or One Strike Away, infamous phrases that will forever instantly bring a local sports fan back to the heartbreak that those words have come to embody. The topic has dominated the media in the month since, with SNL even dropping an offhand line about it during a sketch last weekend, and it’s understandable to have trade talk burnout. However, even if we fans have consciously decided we want to move on, events surrounding the team continue to make that an impossibility.
Since the fateful day that sent the most beloved athlete in the city to one of the most hateable franchises in all of sports, the Mavs’ front office has been stridently giving fans the double birds while flying in the face of karma. At every turn, they’ve done the exact opposite thing to what any franchise even slightly focused on building goodwill among a frustrated and hurt fanbase would do. They initially approached suppression of fan discontent with all the fervor of Chinese President Xi Jinping trying to erase satirical images of him as Winnie the Pooh. (Look it up.) For a time, they wouldn’t allow signs (of any kind) in the arena and, prior to eliciting more backlash, had multiple fans removed from their seats for chanting the words that literally every local sports fan has been repeating to themselves like a prayer daily since Feb. 2: “Fire Nico! Fire Nico!” As a hilarious aside, though the tyrannical Mavs regime has somewhat successfully squashed these sorts of chants inside American Airlines Center, angry former #MFFLs have taken to striking up the chorus in new strange and fun places like FC Dallas soccer games and overpriced jousting-tourney meals at Medieval Times.
Also, like all effective authoritarian strongmen, GM Nico Harrison and owner Patrick Dumont have revved up the propaganda machine, actively running an ugly smear campaign on our departed hero through the media, painting our boy as a lazy, beer-swilling crybaby (which he very well might have been, but he was our lazy, beer-swilling crybaby). And all this while sticking their finger two knuckles deep into fans’ ocular cavities by jacking up ticket prices for next season.
It was only a matter of time before karma caught up with the organization. It looks like it has. This team is cursed. For Monday’s 133-129 victory against the San Antonio Spurs, the club’s first win in six games, the number of Mavs players in uniform on the bench were outnumbered by those of them in street clothes. An already injury-plagued season has become a veritable tragicomedy. With the most recent addition of point guard Brandon Williams, who exited Sunday’s game against Phoenix with a bad hamstring, the number of names on Dallas’ injury report has been increasing faster than anti-vaxxer measles cases in West Texas. Williams joins an ever-growing $100M cheering section already consisting of point guard Jayden Hardy (ankle); forwards Olivier-Maxence Prosper (out for the season with a broken wrist), PJ Washington (ankle), and Kai Jones (quad); and centers Derrick Lively (foot) and Daniel Gafford (knee). These names are in addition to the loss of both of the team’s remaining superstars in Kyrie Irving with a season-ending ACL tear (one of the most heartbreaking things I’ve ever seen) and Luka-trade return Anthony Davis with an adductor strain suffered just three quarters into his Mavs debut. (Tell me that’s not karma.) Though Davis is thought to have a chance to return, at this point, why? Seems his representation has similar feelings, and though absolutely dominant in those three quarters, it’s all Mavs fans will get this year in return for sending away their Superman.
As eye-popping as the injury scenario is, believe it or not, it could be worse. Both forward Kessler Edwards and the club’s last remaining center, Dwight Powell, collided horribly on Sunday, sending both to the locker room, with the latter bleeding from his face. Powell getting hit in the kisser during a Mavs game is so common it should be a weekly prop bet with the over/under set at 0.5, and you should take the over. Dallas dressed just eight players on Monday, and even the most hardcore NBA fan would not have heard of any one of them outside of Klay Thompson. Like, literally, who are these guys? The only two players left who were on the team last year are Dante Exum and the aforementioned Dwight “Let-Me-Take-One-in-the-Face” Powell, and last year they were garbage-time players at most. They’re starters playing 30 plus minutes now. Things are dire.
The worst thing is that Dallas somehow effed up and won the game against the Spurs, which moves the Mavs further away from a potential lottery pick. The only thing that might reverse this franchise’s current center-of-the-Earth downward trajectory is to somehow win the lottery this year and draft Duke freshman phenom Cooper Flagg. Though far from the generational talent that Luka Doncic is, he could go a long way in filling the hole left by “The Don” as the face of the franchise. That is, until Nico trades him to the Sixers in 2030 for a 35-year-old Joel Embiid.
