Dallas Mavericks fans are wallowing in grief in the wake of young NBA superstar Luka Doncic being traded away to the Los Angeles Lakers. The radical announcement of the trade that would send Luka out of Dallas would return All-Star talent Anthony Davis in the deal. Immediately news of the trade was met with egregious dissatisfaction from the Mavericks’ fanbase. Fans across the league were left befuddled by the shock when reports broke in the media of the trade.
Only on paper does this trade make sense. Anthony Davis is an aging superstar in the league that has struggled throughout his career with the injury bug. The visceral reaction to the trade within the Mavericks’ fan base was compounded when in Davis’ first start with the team he was struck down with an injury that could likely end his season. The Luka trade could prove to be a franchise altering trade, and in all the wrong ways.
In 2024, Mavericks’ fans saw the team reach highs that hadn’t been reached since the days when a man named Nowitzki was in a Mavericks’ jersey, and expectations for the team were higher than they had been in a number of years. After witnessing the duo of Kyrie Irving and Luka Doncic in 2024, there was no ruling out the possibility of another deep playoff run being in the team’s future, and that was true until the name Nico Harrison became known to the world.
The NBA world was taken by storm when news of the blockbuster trade was announced, baffled beyond belief, so much so that much of the public initially assumed this to be another case of a media member’s social media account being hacked. But sadly for Mavericks’ fans, it was all true. In a Mavericks press conference, Nico Harrison said that the organization operated with secrecy when attempting to trade superstar Luka Doncic, and not even head coach Jason Kidd knew of it. This admission raised a number of questions that to this day have yet to be answered by the organization. A team trading one of the league’s top stars actively avoided making it known they were looking to move the player.
While the trade did return the top center in the game Anthony Davis, it doesn’t align with the reasons the Mavericks’ front office and Nico Harrison gave for trading Luka in the first place. Concerns were raised about Luka’s conditioning as an athlete by the team, only adding to the oddity of replacing Luka with Davis, and further fueling the discontent of their own fans. Conditioning did not appear to be an issue just a year prior when the team reached the NBA finals, so what could have changed in such a short time period? To put it bluntly, ownership changed. In December of 2023, Marc Cuban sold majority ownership of the team, while still retaining a smaller level of ownership and remaining with the team. Cuban was officially no longer calling the shots from that point on, and in a year’s time, the trajectory of the organization has made a radical adjustment.
The blows just kept coming for Mavericks’ fans when Kyrie Irving went down mid-game with what was later confirmed to be an ACL tear. There is a very legitimate possibility that due to the severity of the injury and the recovery time-table typical to this kind of injury it could cost Irving the entirety of next season.
The fallout from the Luka trade has led to season ticket-holders canceling their plans, protests both within and outside the Mavericks’ arena, and throughout the Dallas area. The dysfunction currently existing within the Mavericks organization has even led to conspiracy theories about this being a methodical plan to move the team to Las Vegas. It is difficult to say what the motivating factors behind the Luka trade were exactly but one thing seems to be certain. Ownership wanted Luka gone, and Nico Harrison was the puppet with the honor of being the sacrificial lamb.
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