There have been worse trades than the one that sent Luka Dončić from the Dallas Mavericks to the Los Angeles Lakers in exchange for Anthony Davis, along with Max Christie and a future first-round draft pick. Here’s one: in 1919, Harry Frazee, the owner of the Boston Red Sox, sold Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees, for a hundred thousand dollars. Frazee had his reasons. For starters, Ruth was a selfish bum. As Glenn Stout wrote in his book “The Selling of the Babe,” “Finding Ruth after a bender—usually sleeping it off somewhere, often in the back alley behind a brothel, his pockets turned inside out—became something of a pastime for his teammates.” Ruth skipped games when he felt like it, and had a habit of gambling away his paychecks. The team tolerated his bad behavior for a while, and not only because he was charming. As a young pitcher, he won sixty-seven games in his first three seasons and set a scoreless-innings record during the 1918 World Series. Plus, he could hit. With his uppercut swing, a rarity at the time, he delighted fans by smashing home runs, though his teammates, who looked to slap the ball for singles instead of walloping it out of the park, thought his technique was suspect. But Ruth wanted to focus on hitting; the Red Sox wanted him to pitch. Ruth knew how to torment the team to get what he wanted, and, anyway, Frazee, who was also a theatre producer, was broke. So he shipped Ruth to the Yankees, who’d never won a playoff series. Legend has it that Frazee used the money to put on the 1925 Broadway musical “No, No, Nanette.”
Ruth went on to lead the Yankees to seven World Series appearances and four championship titles, launching one of the greatest dynasties in the history of sports. The Red Sox, who brought home their fifth title, with Ruth, in 1918, didn’t win another championship until 2004—so strong was the Curse of the Bambino. Never mind the truth behind the Red Sox’s failures (poor decisions by management, and the profound racism of a subsequent owner, Tom Yawkey, who resisted integrating the team). Even the accuracy of the facts is mostly irrelevant. (Frazee was trying to fund the play “My Lady Friends,” on which “No, No, Nanette” was later based.) The trade changed Boston’s sense of its trajectory, even its sense of its identity. What mattered was the story.
Dončić isn’t Ruth, and Davis, a ten-time All-Star, isn’t Nanette. But what matters is the story, and it’s hard to see, for Dallas, how this story has a happy end.
When news of the trade broke, late at night on Saturday, February 1st, disgruntled Mavericks fans gathered outside the team’s stadium in downtown Dallas. They congregated near the twenty-four-foot statue of Dirk Nowitzki, the Mavericks legend who spent twenty-one years with the team. A plaque on the statue, which was erected two years ago, reads “LOYALTY NEVER FADES AWAY.” The next day, workmen power-washed obscenities that had been graffitied on the ground near the statue’s pedestal. A GoFundMe raised tens of thousands of dollars to install billboards calling for the team’s general manager, Nico Harrison, to be fired, and for the Adelson family, the gambling magnates who recently bought a controlling stake in the Mavericks, to sell the team. On the night of the Mavericks’ first post-trade home game, hundreds of fans came to protest outside the stadium. There were Dončić jerseys, signs, a makeshift shrine to Dončić, expressions of rage and grief. Somebody brought a casket.
The trade took everyone by surprise. Rob Pelinka, the Lakers’ general manager, said that at first he’d thought Harrison was joking when he proposed it. Even Jason Kidd, the Mavericks’ head coach, wasn’t informed until the deal was as good as done, according to Harrison, who said this at a press conference as Kidd sat next to him, with a vaguely stunned look. When Shams Charania, the ESPN reporter who is the usual conduit for this sort of news, first posted the deal on X, the general assumption was that he’d been hacked. Charania later said that, when he’d initially got word of it, he had assumed the news was fake, too. N.B.A. teams rarely, if ever, traded a player of Dončić’s calibre at that stage in his career. Not many teams would have even had a chance—only a handful of players had ever put up that kind of production at such a young age. Dončić, who is only twenty-five years old, already has more first-team All-N.B.A. selections than other greats of the game, including Nowitzki and Stephen Curry, in a sport where most players don’t enter their prime until their late twenties. He plays with a rare competitive intensity, a taste for big moments, and a disarming, dazzling style. Last June, he’d dragged a middling Mavericks team all the way to the N.B.A. Finals, in a series of heroic performances: orchestrating and improvising, hitting clutch shot after clutch shot. Mavericks fans embraced him as the new Nowitzki, except better. Few players were more fun to watch than Dončić—at least, when he wasn’t moaning to the referees.
It was no secret that his whining bothered some (maybe all) within the Mavericks organization. After Game Three of the N.B.A. Finals last year, in which Dončić delivered a particularly dismal defensive performance and fouled out while complaining about the refs, Brian Windhorst, a well-connected ESPN reporter, went on a tirade about his “unacceptable” showing, and alluded to the team’s frustrations with his attitude. “I’m standing here in the Mavericks tunnel. Over there is the Celtics tunnel. That’s where the winners are,” Windhorst said. It was an entertaining viral clip at the time, and maybe an effective one at that; Dončić publicly apologized for his performance and ramped up his defense in the next game. Now, though, Windhorst’s rant sounds a little different. Between the 2023-24 regular season and playoffs, Dončić had played the most minutes of any player in the N.B.A., and had done so while controlling the direction of the play at a historically high rate. At times, he had willed his team to win, or that’s what a lot of people saw anyway. But there was Windhorst, calling him a loser on national television, while seemingly relaying a message from the organization.
Perhaps that’s how Harrison really saw him. The G.M. has emphasized that he drove the trade talks alone, and says he spoke only to Patrick Dumont, the team’s governing owner, though some have expressed skepticism around this. The stories started leaking out as soon as the news of the trade broke. ESPN’s Tim MacMahon almost immediately began tweeting about Harrison’s view that “defense wins championships”—a reference to Davis’s superior defensive chops and, no doubt, a knock on Dončić, who is an average defender at best. Harrison, as MacMahon put it, had “major concerns” about Dončić’s “constant conditioning issues and the looming commitment” of the contract extension that Dončić would be eligible for this summer. (The so-called supermax contract was created precisely so that teams could retain players like Dončić.) In Harrison’s first press conference after the trade, he talked about the importance of “culture,” and alluded to the idea that Dončić might not have wanted to sign the extension, a situation the team wanted to avoid. There were further reports that Harrison had concerns about Dončić’s weight, his injury risk, his habit of showing up to camp out of shape—basically, that he was a selfish bum. None of the rumors were particularly surprising; Harrison had made a huge bet against Dončić’s future, and was trying to justify it to the team’s fans. What was surprising, in fact, was that there weren’t more rumors. The team must have known something no one else did. Did he have a degenerative ligament in his ankle? Had he murdered someone? It didn’t help when Dumont gave an interview to the Dallas Morning News in which he implied Dončić took a “vacation” on the team, and said they wanted dedicated, hard workers, citing Shaquille O’Neal as an example—a champion who was famously a little bit lazy, and who also showed up to camp out of shape.
None of it made any sense. If the team was so concerned about Dončić’s body, why had they targeted Davis, who, despite being fantastic at thirty-one years old, is even more injury-prone than Dončić? Sure enough, Davis had a brilliant début for the Mavericks, until he crumpled over in the third quarter of his first game, in obvious pain from a non-contact groin injury; he’s expected to miss four weeks, at a minimum. If they wanted to win in the future, why had they traded someone on the cusp of his prime years for someone who was past them? If they wanted to win now, for that matter, why had they traded someone who was already a Top Five player for someone who was a tier below? And, if they were worried about leverage—which seemed strange because Dončić had let it be known that he’d planned on signing an extension—why had they kept the deal secret, only discussing terms with one team, as Harrison claimed, instead of gaining leverage by playing suitors off one another? (The veteran sportswriter Gery Woelfel later reported that the Mavericks called at least two other teams about Dončić, though these conversations did not seem to go far.) If anything, the Lakers had seemed to be the ones exercising leverage: Reports emerged that the original deal had included the Lakers’ best young prospect, along with Davis and two first-round picks instead of one. But, somehow, Pelinka had convinced Harrison that a deal for Dončić—the man whom LeBron James has called his favorite player—might fall apart over a first-round pick in 2031 and a rookie who is averaging 9.4 points a night. The trade was a “gift,” Pelinka said during Dončić’s introductory press conference. He seemed to glow.
Harrison, meanwhile, was nowhere to be seen at Davis’s introductory press conference. There were reports of death threats, along with racial epithets, directed at him. When he showed up at a Southern Methodist University basketball game, the student section started chanting “Fire Nico.” In Philadelphia, when the Mavericks played the 76ers, a little boy approached and asked him why he’d traded Dončić, the Athletic reported. Harrison, who is a former Nike executive, does not have a traditional background for a general manager, but he’d made a couple of savvy moves last season, and was well liked and respected. Was it possible that he was really so bad at his job? Conspiracy theories proliferated. Maybe Harrison had been coerced into the trade by Dumont and his mother-in-law, Miriam Adelson. Maybe Adelson, who has been bankrolling pro-gambling efforts in Texas, plans to build a new Mavericks complex that would serve as a stadium and resort casino, and wanted the team to lose so that she could move it to Las Vegas. The conspiracies were far-fetched. Dallas is the fourth-biggest media market in the United States, for starters, while Las Vegas is the fortieth. But, in the absence of a more plausible explanation, they gained oxygen. Multiple fans, meanwhile, were kicked out of the stadium when the team played the Sacramento Kings last week, for offenses like holding up “Fire Nico” signs and wearing a T-shirt that depicted Adelson as a clown. Mark Cuban, the team’s colorful former controlling owner, apparently had a couple of fans kicked out, too, alleging that they booed in the game’s close moments. (The evicted fans disputed his account to the Dallas Hoops Journal.) Not that any of this could stop it: the security guards escorting out the booers were booed, and Dumont was repeatedly booed, too. As Mavericks fans were being ejected from the stadium, Nowitzki was out in Los Angeles, sitting in the stands to show Dončić his support. “I will always be a Mav for life, but had to come support my guy 77 @luka7doncic in the first game of his new chapter!” Nowitzki posted on X.
It may be that Harrison’s bet against Dončić’s future might prove to be right, strictly speaking. Maybe the Mavericks will win a championship with Davis, though that seems unlikely; the team is ravaged by injuries and may not even make the playoffs this season, and Davis is closer to the end of his career than the start. It may be that they’ll draft a superstar with the 2029 first-round pick they procured from the Lakers, although it’s hard to imagine they’ll do better than they did by drafting Dončić. And it may be that Dončić doesn’t win a championship with the Lakers. There are lots of reasons to think he’ll thrive in Los Angeles. Watching him ping-pong passes with LeBron James, one of the few players whose court intelligence matches his own, during his first couple of games in the Lakers’ lineup has been thrilling, and James, who has cared as much about conditioning as any player in history, can show him how it’s done. But perhaps James will bridle at having to accept that he is not the central player on the team any more. (James has seemed to embrace Dončić, but there are already murmurs hinting at some dissatisfaction at how the team is handling the transition.) Maybe Dončić’s chronically injured calf will give out and his Achilles will pop, and he’ll never quite recover. Maybe the Lakers, who have serious front-court issues now that Davis is gone, won’t be able to make it far in the playoffs in the near future. Maybe Dončić won’t become the all-time great that most people think he has the potential to be. Maybe he would have tried to force his way out of Dallas eventually. Maybe he was, and always would be, irritating to someone like Harrison. Winning one championship, let alone multiple championships, is hard and takes luck.
The problem with Harrison’s wager—conspiracy theories aside—is that he’s mistaking his story for the story. One of Harrison’s most important clients at Nike was Kobe Bryant, the prototypical maniac, who was consumed with becoming the best. Bryant famously hated when teammates would show up out of shape. He might have hated being teammates with Dončić. But Bryant was Harrison’s guy. Dončić was Dallas’s. For Harrison to be right, Mavericks fans would have to discover that the guy who they thought was their guy is actually a fraud. Who wants that? Trades happen. It was Harrison’s and Dumont’s defensiveness about it all, their refusal to see the tragedy in it, that made it a farce. ♦
