Pretty much right away, late on Saturday night when the Luka Doncic trade was first announced, I was convinced there had to be something wrong. Not just that I thought Shams was hacked—which I did—but even after we found out it was legit. Not to get all conspiracy-brained, but none of it passed the smell test, and it didn't help that various commentators seemed to have the same talking points explaining the trade, all of it revolving around Luka Doncic being so fat that when he sits down, he swallows the whole arena, or something. There is just no way to convince me that "conditioning" is why the Mavericks had to trade a 25-year-old superstar that just took them to the Finals last season. To that end, I would like to dissect some of the talking points.
Let's talk about that first point before we get to the second one. I genuinely find it infuriating that they expect people with eyes to believe that "conditioning" is a reason the Mavericks had to do this. You were worried about a 25-year-old's conditioning? Joel Embiid and Zion Williamson don't even play basketball and their teams won't get rid of them. Jimmy Butler is still in Miami! Come on, man.
There had been significant frustration within the organization about Doncic's lack of discipline regarding his diet and conditioning, which team sources considered a major factor in his injury issues. Though Doncic was relatively lean by his standards when he reported to camp, his weight ballooned to the high 260s early this season, sources said. He sat out five games in late November, when the Mavericks listed him with a sprained right wrist, an extended absence to allow Doncic to focus on his conditioning. He had a similar early-season layoff in the 2022-23 season.
— ESPN
I get it. It's not ideal that your star player is constantly out of shape. That said, there's been a Kobe Bryant-ification of this league, where we have just unanimously decided that there's only one surefire way to succeed in basketball or sports (or life really), that I just don't totally agree with. When Shaq admitted to coming into a season out of shape because he wanted to spend the offseason recovering from getting beat up in the paint all year, and would play himself into shape in time for the playoffs, people took the Kobe angle that if only he'd taken his training more seriously, they could've won so much more. But Shaq was the kind of athlete who could get away with it. So is Luka! He's dragging your team to the Finals anyway! Who cares if he likes beer or štruklji a little too much; maybe it powers him. It's a mistake to treat every human body the same. And it's a mistake to treat a top-three NBA star as disposable because you think he could potentially be even higher.
In Mavs GM Nico Harrison's awkward press conference, he said a number of things that just didn't add up. One was the implication that Doncic was not "lifting up" the team culture. I feel like I am losing my mind. Am I the only person in the world who watched the playoffs last season? This Mavericks team was not some championship roster shocked by the underdog Boston Celtics because Luka Doncic couldn't catch his breath. They were a talented but extremely scrappy, extremely young team that inexplicably made the NBA damn Finals because they had Luka Doncic and the Western teams did not.
So Harrison pushes this idea that they needed a champion like Anthony Davis to lift this program to the next level. I love AD. I've been an AD defender his entire Lakers tenure, but his biggest issue was that he actually didn't lift the Lakers any higher than they should've gone. There was never one playoff series where the Lakers were overmatched and AD turned on the superstar button and dragged them to a series win. LeBron James can't really do that anymore, so the Lakers were consistently out on their ass except in the fake bubble season. Davis is 31 years old, and while he's been good about staying healthy lately, he's not exactly the player I think about when it comes to availability.
But OK, fine, let's pretend you had to trade Doncic. You were sick of the beers and the diet and the attitude. Another thing Harrison said was that they only reached out to the Lakers. Which is essentially saying that you were so desperate to get rid of this guy that you did it on Los Angeles's terms. You could've gotten a bigger haul for Doncic—I'm thinking about Rudy Gobert's four first-round picks, or Mikal Bridges's five—and instead you decided you wanted Anthony Davis and nothing else mattered.
So, I do not believe that what the Mavericks have said and leaked tells the whole story. What do I believe? "I think we might be shifting away from player empowerment back to ownership empowerment," Jay Williams said on ESPN this morning. "There is no player not on notice anymore." While that might be going too far, I think he is onto something. I do think that there was something at play here other than pure basketball.
Fact 1: Luka's biggest supporter, Mark Cuban, is no longer the majority owner of the Mavericks and, contrary to what he promised, he no longer controls basketball ops. Cuban confirmed he wasn't involved in this trade. Fact 2: The Mavericks' new majority owner is Miriam Adelson, an extreme Trump and Israel supporter, donor, and fundraiser even among the billionaire class. Fact 3: Luka Doncic was up for a supermax contract of $345 million, and this trade gets Dallas under the luxury tax threshold. Fact 4: OK, fine. Luka has not endeared himself to Mavericks management through his use of private doctors, dietitians, injuries, and general ego stuff.
It is my belief that every GM occasionally dreams of doing what Harrison just did. The ability to swing your junk around and humble a superstar is the managerial fantasy, but the reason they never get to live it out is usually that ownership is smart enough to talk them off that ledge. Is it that Miriam Adelson doesn't know enough about basketball, or care enough about the Mavericks, to have stopped Harrison? (It was Adelson's son-in-law, who as team governor officially signed off on the deal because he reportedly appreciated the "financial flexibility.") Could it be that Adelson started picturing all the money she could give to Trump by not paying Doncic, and told Harrison to make it happen? I don't know, but these seem like better questions to ask than anything about Doncic's weight during training camp.
And even still, with all of that: The Mavericks could have gotten so much more, instead of choosing to make a Western Conference rival better now and better in the future because they only talked to one GM and it happened to be Harrison's longtime friend. As I said, not to get conspiracy-brained.
