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The Dallas Mavericks just made the worst trade in NBA history. By and large that’s the sentiment after the Mavericks shockingly traded 25-year-old Luka Doncic to the Los Angeles Lakers in exchange for Anthony Davis, a 2029 first-round pick and Max Christie. It’s a trade so befuddling that when it was first reported by ESPN’s Shams Charania, everyone thought it was fake.
It wasn’t until multiple other reports came out to confirm it, and Charania sending out another update saying, “Yes, this is real” that the shockwaves really settled in and the magnitude of what just happened hit. The Mavericks just traded a generational player for a soon-to-be 32-year-old and ONE first-round pick at midnight ET on Feb. 1.
The question on everyone’s mind, and will likely be until the end of time is simple. Why?
The full picture is still coming into focus. CBS Sports NBA insider Bill Reiter says Luka was uncertain about staying in Dallas long term. A report from Marc Stein indicated that Doncic did not request a trade. Mavericks general manager Nico Harrison explained the trade by saying, “I believe that defense wins championships.” There are reports surfacing that Dallas had been concerned about Doncic’s conditioning, which has been a topic of conversation on multiple occasions.
“There’s some unique things about his contract that we had to pay attention to,” Harrison said at a press conference Sunday afternoon. “There’s other teams that were loading up, that he was going to have — he was going to be able to decide, make his own decisions of whether he wants to be here or not, whether we want to supermax him or not, and whether he wants to opt out. I think we had to take all that into consideration. I feel like we got out in front of what could’ve been a tumultuous summer.”
So the company line here is that they were afraid to lose Doncic down the line, and that he was out of shape and he’s a liability on defense. Nevermind the fact that he just took Dallas to the NBA Finals eight months ago because of his offensive brilliance that bailed them out on more than one occasion. Or that he’s a five-time All-Star, has finished in the top five of MVP voting three times and has more All-NBA First Team selections (five) than Stephen Curry. Even out of shape and a black hole on defense, Doncic is still a once-in-a-generation player.
There’s zero precedent for something like this happening, and worse, it shouldn’t have happened. Harrison got the blessing of new team owner Patrick Dumont to jettison a superstar player who has barely entered his prime for pennies on the dollar.
Even if you can rationalize trading Doncic, the haul they got is horrendous. Consider what the Brooklyn Nets got for Mikal Bridges in July: five first-round picks, four of which are unprotected. That was for a role player, not a face of the franchise, potential to be one of the best to ever play the game type of player. The Mavericks got one first-round pick.
Anthony Davis is obviously the big-ticket item in this return, but again, Davis looks like a No. 2 option on a championship team, as we saw when the Lakers won a title in 2020 with LeBron James as the best player on that squad. We saw the Pelicans try — and fail — to build around Davis early in his career, and though this Mavericks team is better assembled than any of those squads, that’s not the point.
You simply don’t trade a guy who is considered one of the three best basketball players in the world when there was no reason to. It’s malpractice. And even if you can justify the act of trading Doncic, you certainly don’t do it “in the shadows.” You also don’t consult just one team. You start a bidding war. You sell to the highest bidder, you squeeze every ounce of value out of this trade and try and come out on the other side with a package that will not just set you up for the next two, three years, but for the next decade.
Because that’s what this trade is, it sets the Mavericks up with a good, competitive roster for the next three years max. After that? Who knows.
But Harrison is resolved in his stance. He said “it’s my job to make the tough decisions,” though no one was holding his feet to the fire to trade his best player. This wasn’t a tough decision, it was a completely avoidable situation.
Harrison, though, has been known to make controversial moves since joining the Mavericks front office in June 2021. He hired Jason Kidd despite two previous disastrous stints in Brooklyn and Milwaukee. He traded for Kyrie Irving after the All-Star guard became a pariah around the league. The Kristaps Porzingis trade to the Wizards that ultimately helped the Mavericks get to the Western Conference finals in 2022 was Harrison’s doing. At last season’s trade deadline, Harrison traded two future first-round picks to land PJ Washington and Daniel Gafford, who were paramount in Dallas getting to the NBA Finals. All of those moves were successful after they received mixed reviews or were widely panned when they first happened.
But this isn’t swapping out role players, and taking a chance on a talented, but polarizing point guard. This is the kind of deal that defines your career for better or worse. Harrison is essentially saying Doncic isn’t the player who can lead the Mavericks to a championship, even when the past six years have proven otherwise. You’d be hard pressed to find a single other front office executive who would do this deal, or get as little of a return as the Mavericks got.
This is the type of move you stake your job and career on, because either Harrison comes out of this looking like a genius for wisely moving Doncic now before it became too difficult, or before he forced a trade. Or he’s the laughing stock across the league for years because he traded away one of the most transcendent talents in Mavericks franchise history when it wasn’t necessary. I’m betting on the latter, and unfortunately for Mavericks fans, they’ll have to watch Doncic suit up for another team for the rest of his career in a move that never needed to happen.
