Explanations for the Luka Doncic Trade

Rationalizing the irrational

Late last night, lead NBA breaking news guy Shams Charania reported that the Dallas Mavericks had traded their 25-year-old generational superstar Luka Doncic to the Los Angeles Lakers for 31-year-old center Anthony Davis, role player Max Christie, and a first round pick.

Basketball hasn’t been my beat here on this blog. But this trade so boggles the mind that it demands a quick treatment.

For those who do not watch basketball, there is very little more valuable in sports than a true franchise basketball player. If that player is young, resistant to injury, and wants to play for your team, then you do everything you can to ensure that they stay on your team so that they can do things like take a mediocre roster to the Western Conference Finals and take a half-decent roster to the NBA Finals.

But there can come a time when, for some reason, an all-time great basketball player in his prime ends up being traded. It basically only happens when that player requests a trade, but there are other reasons that could make sense.

Luka is one of those all-time greats. But perhaps he could be dealing with some baggage that made the Mavericks want to trade him.

The reports coming out of the Mavericks camp are strange. Apparently they were worried about offering him the “supermax” contract, which was projected to be worth $345 million over 5 years. Every other team would jump at the chance to give him this contract, so why might they have balked?

There must be something we don’t know. Say that Luka has put on more weight than expected as he’s been recovering from injury, as he has struggled with conditioning in the past. Say that Luka has medical issues that have yet to come to light. Say that he has had serious disagreements with Mavericks management, who personally didn’t like him and also thought that he would demand a trade at some point in the future, although he had not requested a trade as of last night.

If all of those things are true, this trade would still make no sense. As Ryen Russillo put it, Luka “could have been smoking cigarettes bringing the ball up the fucking court, and I would still be like ‘When can we sign you to the supermax?””

If the Mavericks were dead-set on trading him, and various warts about Luka came to light during an open bidding process for Doncic’s services, then they still would have acquired a dramatically better return than the one they got.

There’s a solid chance that the San Antonio Spurs would prefer a roster of 13 G-leaguers, Victor Wembanyama, and Luka to their current roster. Doncic is a transcendent talent who can be expected to make his teams contenders singlehandedly for the next decade. Even if he’s half as valuable as expected, even if he comes with the significant issues outlined above (even though there is no reason to think he does except that he was just traded) the upside is worth mortgaging your team’s future for him, and plenty of teams would have done so. In a world where a player like Mikal Bridges, who has never been an All-Star, can be traded for five first round picks, the idea that they traded Luka and got back only one first is mindboggling.

The return was very poor given Luka’s ability. Anthony Davis is an extremely talented player, but he is on the wrong side of 30 and has always been injury prone. He is not the guy who brings you a title. He probably never has been, although when his jump shot decided to fall for a whole postseason one year he came close.

All the Mavs got for trading Luka is Davis, one first round pick, decent role player Max Christie, and getting rid of a couple of mediocre contracts in Maxi Kleber and Markieff Morris.

I don’t understand how the Mavericks didn’t get more assets from the Lakers, who could have offered strong role players like Austin Reaves or the rookie Dalton Knecht as well as their 2031 first round pick. What leverage did the Lakers have here? There were no other bidders; other teams were not told that Luka is available.

Now, this may not go down as the worst trade in NBA history. Off the top of my head, the Celtics trade with the Nets in which they gave up some veterans long past their prime in return for picks that converted into Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown could end up being better from a strict value perspective. But the Celtics had no way to know that they’d get top 3 picks two years in a row, much less that they’d get the best player in both drafts. That trade was probably always strong value for the Celtics, but it only became this good because they got lucky. They were lucky that the Nets imploded and they were lucky to succeed in the lottery and get top picks in consecutive years. From the perspective of expected value at the moment of the trade, this is so much more of a coup. It beggars belief.

So we will have to look further afield, beyond basketball concerns, to figure out how this trade may have come to pass. Here are 7 possible explanations, in honor of Luka’s jersey number 77.

Explanation 1: New Mavericks owner Miriam Adelson wants to alienate fans and move the team to Vegas

Former majority Mavericks owner Mark Cuban once said "if I had to choose between my wife and keeping Luka on the Mavs, catch me at my lawyer's office prepping for a divorce.”

But in 2023, Cuban sold his majority stake to the Adelson family, best known for founding casino and resort company Las Vegas Sands and donating more money than anyone else to Donald Trump’s campaigns in both 2016 and 2020. Cuban now owns 27% of the team, and while at the time of the sale he claimed that he would continue to have oversight over basketball operations it appears that things have changed, as he said that he was not involved in the decision to trade Doncic.

When the Adelsons purchased the team, many speculated that they did so with the intent of expanding Las Vegas Sands operations to Texas. Owning the Mavericks could bring them goodwill with the Texas Legislature in order to facilitate such development. But despite spending many millions on lobbying efforts, the Texas GOP does not appear interested in the expansion of gambling that would be necessary for Las Vegas Sands to establish themselves in the state.

Maybe this has led Miriam Adelson to give up on Dallas, and her goal with this trade is to drive the team into the ground so that Dallas no longer seems like a feasible place for an NBA team. The NBA is currently planning on bringing an expansion team to Las Vegas, but if she could instead move her team to Las Vegas then the synergies would be good for her company’s bottom line.

I can’t imagine anything that would be better at pushing fans away than trading Luka Doncic. Fans have already been protesting at the American Airlines Center in Dallas, with three of them bringing a coffin to mark the death of their Mavericks.

Explanation 2: Nico Harrison was a Nike sleeper agent

Mavericks general manager Nico Harrison has been claiming all the credit for this trade since it happened. He says that defense wins championships, and that Anthony Davis puts them in a better position to win right now. This is of course false.

He says that when he proposed this trade to Mavericks team governor Patrick Dumont, son-in-law of Miriam Adelson, Dumont laughed. The idea that any NBA general manager could think this trade was in the best interest of his team defies logic.

Perhaps this trade was able to happen because Harrison did not want his team to win, either in the short term or the long term, and was optimizing on something else entirely. Meanwhile, perhaps the Adelson ownership was so disconnected that they just let him do what he wanted, as his previous moves have gone fairly well, with a couple shrewd trade deadline moves last year bringing the Mavericks to the Finals against the Boston Celtics.

Before working for the Mavericks, Harrison worked at Nike for 19 years, raising as high as President of North American basketball operations. Luka Doncic is signed with Nike’s Jordan brand, which produces his signature shoes.

You don’t hear about a lot of people wearing the Luka 3s. Perhaps Nike wanted to elevate Luka’s profile, and thought that a move to the Lakers would best achieve that. So they activated sleeper agent Nico Harrison to run the “Luka to LA” play, and he just didn’t care about what return the Mavericks got; in fact, for Luka to best succeed in LA he probably wanted to keep the Lakers as intact as possible. Mission accomplished!

Explanation 3: Adam Silver made a call

There’s been a lot of discussion around how NBA ratings are down. Some ascribe it to changes in the style of play. I would guess that a significant portion of the decline comes from more of the audience just streaming games illegally on their computers.

Either way, NBA commissioner Adam Silver is clearly aware of the ratings decline and wants to fix it. He has floated changes like shortening the quarters from 12 minutes to 10 minutes.

But you know what’s really good for the NBA’s ratings? When the teams that people like are good. People like the Lakers. People love when the Lakers and Celtics play each other in the Finals, and this trade makes that more likely. SportsCenter is already speculating about it.

So maybe the Adelsons just don’t care about how their team is run, and let Adam Silver make the decisions for them. Or maybe he has sway over them and also all other owners, with every trade being exactly according to Adam Silver’s bidding. This one sure looks like a trade he’d draw up to fix the ratings issue.

Explanation 4: Donald Trump made a call

If there’s anything that we’ve learned from the last few weeks, it’s that if Donald Trump wants something corporate leaders and government sycophants alike will move heaven and earth to make it happen. Maybe Trump just asked Miriam Adelson nicely if Luka could go to the Lakers.

Now, why would Trump want this to happen? Well, his wife is Slovenian like Doncic and his son is a 6’9” Slovenian demigod who would be playing for Cedevita Olimpija out of Llubjana right now if his father hadn’t decided to run for president a decade ago.

Maybe Barron just wanted to see his favorite player passing to LeBron, and all Donald had to do was call his top donor to make it happen. The fact that Trump loathes Mark Cuban, who adored Luka Doncic and this team so much, is just icing on the cake.

Explanation 5: The Slovenian mafia put out a hit on Luka

Maybe, somehow, Luka offended the, uh, Slovenian mafia. Maybe he didn’t listen when they told him to pull a Jontay Porter and pull himself from a game so they could profit on the unders in a prop bet?

Okay, a quick Google search indicates that there really isn’t much of a Slovenian mafia. So maybe it was the Slovak mafia, or the Chechen mafia, or the Russian mafia, or some other Balkan group that wanted Luka dead. Either way, the outcome would be the same.

If the Mavericks leadership had intel that Luka Doncic will be dead within a week, then this trade starts to make sense. In this scenario there would be no time for them to get other teams to bid up the price, so they would just try to lock in a trade as soon as possible to get some value in exchange for losing Luka from both their roster and this mortal coil.

Explanation 6: Shams got hacked and everyone played along

Shams had to clarify twice that this trade report was for real. His ESPN colleagues had to quote tweet him that it was for real. Everyone had been convinced that he must have been hacked, because this trade was that ridiculous.

So maybe he really was hacked. But because Shams plays such an important role in the NBA information ecosystem, the teams all wanted to stay in his good graces so they just agreed to actually do the trade. He who controls the flow of information controls the world, or something.

Explanation 7: Miriam Adelson was possessed by the ghost of Kobe Bryant

Mamba mentality.