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It will never be the same again
Editor’s note: Andrew Tobolowsky used to write for Mavs Moneyball, back in the before times, and has since been dropped off at the blogger farm to run around with other bloggers. He recently shared with us a piece he wrote about the Luka Doncic trade, hours before Doncic’s homecoming, and we’re sharing that here with you.
On the morning of Feb. 2, 2025, the
Dallas Mavericks made the dumbest move that any NBA team has made since the then-Vancouver Grizzlies had their infamous “real grizzlies in the stands” promotion. They
traded Luka Dončić. This is, to be clear, the main thing that you don’t do, if you happen to be an NBA team. The
main thing. If there was an official list of dos and don’ts, like at an orientation for NBA general mangers, this would be number one on it: if you happen to be the Dallas Mavericks, and you have say the second best player in the world, and he is (at the time) 25-years-old, and if you’ve just made the
NBA Finals, and if you just made the Western Conference Finals two years ago, don’t trade him. But they did do that, which was — so dumb.
The thing about it that makes it dumb is not what usually makes a trade dumb, which is a bad return, relative to what you’re trading away. That is true — I’ll get to it. But you don’t do it because
even if it works out it’s ridiculous. It was, above all, a staggering display of general manager
arrogance, the type of arrogance it is impossible to imagine real human beings walking around with. It’s like walking into the Louvre and replacing the Mona Lisa with something you drew at home. Because, just like the Mona Lisa, there isn’t really a substitute. There isn’t some way to give your team the potential it has with Luka on it, or anywhere close, no matter how judiciously you make your next moves. Because — the one thing you cannot approximate is a star of his caliber, of which there have been very few in the history of the NBA.
And the thing is, almost everybody actually connected with basketball, and not primarily with selling shoes, understands this. That’s why Joel Embiid is still with the
Sixers after eleven years, after missing his two first years, after playing fewer than 60 games in, now, five other seasons, after never making it even as far as Luka has made it twice. It doesn’t really matter that he’s unreliable,
because there is literally nothing you can do — except, I guess, trade him for Luka Dončić — that can come close to what the team can do with him out there. That’s why Zion Williamson, about a year and a half younger than Luka, is still with the Pelicans after six years of not making much impact. There are a few things that happen to you in this basketball life, if you’re very lucky, that cannot be replaced, or exchanged, or improved on. You just hang on as long as you can — no matter what.
That, by the way, is why, to paraphrase
Bob Sturm,
This Trade is Different. Unfortunately, losing beloved stars is the name of the NBA’s game these days. From LeBron’s “The Decision” to the present, lots of teams and fanbases have gone through something
like this. Even just this year, a number of stars changed squads, the most impactful of which was probably De’Aaron Fox’s move to San Antonio. Fox, only a couple of years older than Luka, was the heart and soul of the Kings’ revival, and earned MVP votes as recently as two years ago. Zach LaVine, also, finally left Chicago. It usually hurts, sometimes a lot.
The reason this one hurts so much
more, though, is only partially because of how much better Luka is than Fox or Lavine. It’s even only partially because, unlike those other two franchises, the Mavs were winning, with a Finals berth and a Western Conference Finals berth in the last three years. It’s only partially because Luka clearly wanted to stay, and only partially because Nico managed to get the equivalent of a flatulent goat in return. It’s only partially because no one even knew to worry about it as a possibility, because no one had ever done something like this before. It’s only partially because when every other GM in the history of any league has said “this is a win-now move,” they meant that they were sacrificing future prospects to load up now and
not that they were trading a very young superstar in order to get much older and more injury prone so that it would be literally impossible for them to do anything but
win now, even though they were already winning now and would have won more now by not making the trade.
No. It is because getting a guy like Luka is literally what fandom is for. Your whole sports life you wait and watch for something like that to happen to your team. Sometimes it never does, maybe often it never does. You end up, suddenly, with one of the two or three best players in the entire game, a guy who looks like an all-time great from more or less game one. A guy who doesn’t just make you an instant contender but is almost always the best player on the court even in the playoffs, the one guy you know the other team can’t counter. I don’t want to shade Dirk at all, I think we sometimes forget his Mavs averaged roughly 57 wins a season for an entire decade, and as a clutch player, there are obvious ways he was better than Luka. But he was never that – never the one guy everybody wished they had at the beginning of the season, never the one who could take almost anyone all the way. And they just – gave it up. It’s never happened to us before, there’s no reason to think it’ll ever happen again. And we woke up one day and it was gone for good and “Luka magic” is now, forever, for somebody else. We were supposed to have a decade, at least — he wanted it too — and somebody else, somebody who just showed up, gave it away.
That’s why this front office will never get what it wants. That’s why it doesn’t matter that — maybe there’s even something to what they say. So far, people have generally ignored the fact that Luka
is injury prone, that he too, has played 70 or more games only twice in his career. That he was injured all last playoffs, which is part of the reason that he, a decent three-point shooter since about 2021 and a legendary playoff performer, couldn’t buy a bucket from deep most of the time. That they almost missed their other deep run in 2022 because he was injured for the first three games of their opening series against the
Utah Jazz. Instead, Jalen Brunson stepped into the breach, and of course, then they lost Jalen Brunson immediately after those playoffs ended. I absolutely believe that Luka didn’t do what he needed to do conditioning wise, had bad habits, was a long-term risk in some ways. And I could have thrown a slipper at the TV every time he was complaining about the refs instead of staying in the play, were I the kind of person who wears slippers — or even, simply had one lying about, as ammunition. It is hard to believe he could age well. But you don’t do anything about it — because there’s nothing else to do, when you’re as lucky as we were, than hang on and hope.
And yes. It matters a little, too, that the trade was so bad. Like, okay, you think you know something about his long-term future, so you trade him for…
Anthony Davis? You’re worried about durability so you... build the team around Davis and
Kyrie Irving? All respect to them as players, a little less to them, okay one of them, as conspiracy theorists but Anthony Davis is 32, Kyrie is 33, and on the list of superstars who are already considerably less durable than Luka has been, every basketball fan in America would place them right at the top of the flat, flat earth right? Every single one. Trading away Luka for Davis because of durability concerns is like selling your house because the backyard is too small in order to move into a basement apartment in Brooklyn. It’s like the old “why don’t they build the plane out of x” joke except the whole thing is the part that breaks. And then to top that off by trading Quentin Grimes who’s averaged over 26 points, 4.5 boards, and 5 assists a game over the course of March and April, for a guy who doesn’t play – I mean, it really paints and picture, doesn’t it.
And yes, it matters that all of the defenses of the trade they offered were plainly absurd on their face. So, okay, you only engaged one team in serious trade talks because you didn’t want the star to find out you were trying to trade him? I would think most GMs who have a little insight, and don’t come straight from hocking Nikes, would think that if you were going to be the only team in history to trade one of the greatest players of all time when they haven’t demanded a trade, just after he led a team to the NBA finals,
before he entered his prime, would think “well at least I have the greatest trade asset of all time,” rather than “how can I make sure to completely hamstring my ability to get a decent return, in this, a once in a lifetime opportunity. I know, I will make it a deep, dark secret, to create the only possible circumstance in which the other team is the only one with any leverage.” In fact, I would think that kind of high level economic thinking — I should try to get the best return for what I am selling — might even be operational at a shoe conglomerate, in most cases. Do you understand that that makes it worse? I’m speaking to you personally, Nico, do you understand that the supposed coup of keeping it a secret to avoid a toxic workplace situation actually only helped the
Lakers and hurt you? Is that something that you can realize, in retrospect? And if you’re going to do this absolutely preposterous thing, maybe admitting out loud what you’re doing is not only the only practical and strategic thing — but the non-cowardly thing?
And yes, okay. It matters a little that Davis played one great half for the Mavs and immediately succumbed to injury. It matters that Kyrie tore his ACL, which doesn’t only end his season, but will, in point of fact, likely affect a lot of next season as well, if not more. If not his career. It matters that a season that was going very well is now, it seems, about to end with a thud. To be sure, much like the protagonists of a Greek tragedy, the Mavs are getting what they deserve for an incredible act of hubris, such as stealing fire from the gods, or defiling Zeus’s temple, or trading one of the absolute best players to ever live for a pretty good player on the downslope of his career. Unfortunately, I am also getting what they deserve, which is too bad. I’ve been pretty good, all things considered, basically kind to others, generous in my way, a reasonably good father, husband and citizen. I’ve never even traded Luka Dončić once, to anyone, not even as a joke. But
I am getting what
they deserve. And more!
It matters more, however, that they gave away magic, and history, and the unbelievable serendipity of Luka Dončić ending up on your team just as Dirk Nowitzki was leaving it. It matters more that they think they can replace that with some random combination of players, and that winning, if winning were possible would solve it. I’m 40 years old, I do root for laundry, I’ve done it before, and I’ll do it again. But you do it
because you have to until
something like this happens. The moments you wait for, the sweeter for all the waiting. But they took something that mattered, and traded it for something that doesn’t, a collection of players, none of them nearly as good, the main ones with no potential left. They took a decade, maybe, or more, of hope and promise and possibility and replaced it with a couple of years, at most, and probably less.. And they think they’re the smart ones, and they’ll probably go on thinking they’re the smart ones. It has not been a good decade for anyone publicly learning anything about what they believe that they don’t want to learn. But they’re not smart enough if they don’t know this. Sports is about the thing you wait for, the thing you believe in — the hope that happens while you put in your time. When you get it, and you give it away, you break something you can’t fix.
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