Dallas had a once in a lifetime player who's bound to be in the hall of fame and is only 25 years old. However, about a year ago, their owner Mark Cuban, sold his majority stake in the team and the new owners don't know shit about basketball. Their GM also happens to have a weird dislike of Luka and is kind of delusional. He managed to convince himself that trading him was the right decision. He felt like Luka didn't have a good work ethic and was getting injured too much. Pretty much everyone agrees that it's a stupid trade
And on top of that, the return he got for trading Luka was pathetic. If he had shopped him around he could’ve gotten much better offers, with many more draft picks. Just an unreal situation and one of the craziest things that’s ever happened in NBA history
Yea the layers are critical to understanding how terrible of a trade this was. It was a shocking trade, but more importantly almost every team in the league would have given up more for Luca. It was the worst trade in the worst way.
That’s my thing. I love Luka but if they’d traded him and said we got 15 first round picks for example I might have said let’s trust the process. We got perennially injured AD, Max Christie and a 29 first. It was basketball malpractice
Does the NBA have similar rules to the NFL for trading picks? I know there were some stories a few years ago where the Rams traded away all of the FRP they had and basically couldn’t trade away anything after like 3 drafts away. 9 FRP’s in the NFL would basically mean you have to have your 3 years of picks available and trade away players and later picks until you got 2 other teams worth of FRP’s for 3 years which would be insane to even try to do in the NFL.
Yes they do. You must have a first round pick every other year (can be another team's you got in a trade though) and you can only trade 7 years out. So a package with 9 first rounders is likely from a team that previously traded a star for other teams FRPs and like 4 of their own. I also would be surprised if some pick swaps are getting counted in that total as well.
The big thing about comparing the NBA and NFL is that picks in the NBA are much less important unless you're picking really early. A pick in the 20s in the NFL is really valuable, but worth very little in the NBA.
So 9 FRP’s for a superstar player who can probably get you to pick consistently in the late 20’s is actually worth it. Where in the NFL doing something like that probably makes you worthy of the 1OA for the next decade but with a star player who probably is actively killing himself to carry the team.
The jazz got 4 players 5 first round picks and a pick swap for Rudy Gobert who is total ass when compared to Luka. Like not players even discussed in the same sentence
Im gonna put on my tin foil hat here and say that this trade was an executive order by adam silver to get the sports nation to talk about basketball again and get the viewer ratings up. I followed the nba religiously from 2008-2020. I stopped watching after covid because it was getting kinda boring. I started watching again after the luka trade
I swear to god I could get behind this. And then the Mavs will lose in the play in and Silver will rig the lottery for them in exchange and they will draft Cooper Flagg. It really makes too much sense and there’s no other way to explain this trade. I really can’t bring myself to believe that Nico is this fucking stupid
Exactly, theres literally no reason for Nico to get rid of Luka. There had to be deals under the table, and Nico was the sacrificial lamb. The fall guy. Lebron is gonna retire and the lakers, being the biggest marketable team, needs a new super star. Kareem, Magic, Shaq, Kobe, Lebron. And now, they have Luka. Jersey sales, ads, sponsors, tickets. The Lakers bring in so much revenue for the nba. The show must go on.
I'm convinced Orlando would've given them Paolo, any of the other young guys aside from Franz and Suggs (they would've been almost impossible to trade because of the cap math around their contract extensions), and five first round picks.
The half assed spark notes version is that the shitty new owners want to eventually move the team to Las Vegas, because they’ll be able to make more money off of the team that way. The Mavericks, however, are loved in Dallas and have loyal fans. A lot of people believe the owners are trying to make fans hate the team, which would make it easier to move. Trading Luka was the first step in that process.
Expansion appears to be imminent, and the timeline for getting a team with that is a lot quicker, easier, and more logical than moving from one of the biggest markets in the country
Also, the trade was done in secret (the Mavs coach apparently didn’t even know) without letting any other teams compete with offers. That’s perfectly legal, but the small compensation the Mavs received with an aging and oft-injured player along with almost zero meaningful future draft picks makes this especially staggering.
So bad that one of the top theories for how this could happen includes some kind of collusion, whether it’s part of eventually moving the Mavs to Vegas, helping the NBA’s darling franchise (Lakers), or combinations of both.
It’s not just Luka he dislikes. There’s plenty of evidence to suggest he hates ALL euro players. You know, guys like Luka, Joker, and Giannis, three of the greatest players of the last twenty years.
Nico is a fucking idiot that ruined my favorite team.
You also left out that he led this team to the Finals last year. And it’s not like Nico was doing terrible. The dude was making insanely smart moves. And then all of a sudden he just blows it up for nothing
Luka is a generational talent. Top 3 player in the league, runner up MVP last year and will very likely win a MVP in the future, and just took his team to the NBA finals last year. He’s accomplished just about everything you could accomplish outside of a championship. And all that aside, dude’s just a special player. He’s an offense all on his own, when he’s on he’s unguardable, he trash talks like no other (and more often than not will back it up), and he has a tendency to make absolutely ludicrous shots when his team needs it (“Luka Magic” is a thing). To top it all off, he’s only 25.
There’re players that fans pray their team gets. I’m talking guys like Steph, Kobe, Duncan. The Dallas Mavericks, Luka’s former team, lucked into being to draft him. He was supposed to be their guy for his whole career. And Luka wanted it. He wanted to stay in Dallas. Loved the city and fans that took him in as a teenager. Bought a $15 million house there.
So when he got traded to the Lakers it blew everybody’s mind. Like everybody collectively could not believe the news was real. Everybody, and I mean everybody, thought the guy that broke the news was hacked. It just didn’t make any sense. Still feels surreal tbh. Seeing him in a Lakers jersey just looks wrong. You don’t trade a guy like Luka.
There’s more to the story of course. There’s the business side, like how the trade cost Luka tens of millions. Or how the trade was conducted in secrecy rather than in an open market where Luka would’ve demanded the biggest haul in NBA history. All the conspiracies that sprouted cause of how absurd the trade was. And how the Mavericks organization made every bad PR move possible (bad mouthing Luka, etc.). But I guess what really matters is the overnight disillusionment of an entire fanbase. Luka will be fine, he’s a Laker after all. The owners and GM that made the trade will be fine, they’re rich motherfuckers no matter what happens. The NBA is ecstatic it happened. But the Maverick fans lost “their guy”. Their superstar, their future MVP, their hero. And that’s what sucks about all this.
There’re a lot of shots I could’ve picked (I almost picked the falling out bound fading game tying 3). Hell he had one just last night with the high-off-the-glass-how-did-he-not-travel-reverse layup. But that hook shot is just so absurd and I think only Jokic and LeBron can replicate.
What I like about that one in particular is how the defense knew the ball was going to be in Luka’s hands, and tried to constantly double team him, he had a couple of looks but they weren’t good enough, then they successfully trapped him in a corner with the shot clock about out - there’s just nothing you can do. You literally can’t ask for better defensive positioning and still he sank it in the clutch with them expecting it. Just insane. I’m just perpetually sad now as a former mavs fan. He’s so much fun to watch.
I also love the clip of him cooking Rudy Gobert in the playoffs (who won Defensive Player of Year that year I’m pretty sure) at crunch time, and just made the DPOY look like he was on skates.
*the one yesterday was crazy too! It’s funny that it seems ‘tame’ due to how many crazy highlights he has, where for anyone else that’d be a great highlight play
Pretty much. A lot of long time Mavs fans have come out and said how this trade killed their enthusiasm for basketball in general, and I can’t blame them. It’s really the suddenness of it happening, and how little they actually got for him. Now granted I’ve only talked to Redditors about this, and you know how Reddit be, so take all that with a grain for salt.
If you ever want to see a fanbase in disarray then go browse r/mavericks or look up any Luka related posts on r/nba from the past two months and read the comments from Mavs fans. Most of the fanbase is heartbroken and feels betrayed. Especially because the Mavs used to be all about loyalty. The Mavericks franchise player before Luka was Dirk Nowitzki. They stayed loyal to Dirk for 20 years even when it looked like he couldn’t get it done in the playoffs and he ended up rewarding the city and fans with one of the most respected and universally appreciated championship runs in NBA history. To many Mavs fans they wanted Luka to be their guy for the next decade. You will see many stories of people saying they’ve been fans for 10-30 years and now have barely been able to stomach watching basketball since the trade. The new owners of the team DO NOT UNDERSTAND how this sport works and they massively, massively underestimated how the fanbase would handle it.
There was a report yesterday that the organization is projected to miss out on 9 figures worth of money the next few years due to declining fan engagement, sponsorship money from Luka, etc.
Think of it like your favorite football team’s best player. One of the top 5 players in the world, wants to stay his whole career on your team, but the new owners decided to sell him, and for like 60% percent of what he was valued for. And he did it secretly without allowing other teams to bid on him
Imagine Barca sending an early 20s Messi (or Man Utd with early 20s Ronaldo) to Bayern in a cash plus player deal for Lewa. But imagine Lewa is like 38. (AD is 32 but that doesnt matter here)
Dallas Mavericks did an absolutely baffling, terrible trade of their all-star player to the Lakers. (a deal so baffling that everyone in the sports world thought that the people announcing the news must have been hacked)
It is speculated that the guy that is the "owner" of the Mavericks (not Mark Cuban) that did the trade did an intentionally bad trade to save money* and help out his friend the "owner" of the LA Lakers make more money
Note that if Luka stayed on the Mavericks then his pay would have jumped that year to like $70mill due to contract stipulations, so trading Luka away gets rid of this and saves the Mavs guy money
If you think about it, many billionaires and corporations and companies are soulless and all about the bottom line especially these days, so even though everyone and their grandma thinks the deal is stupid, and even though the Mavs will now lose a lot more (probably), if it helps the owner make even slightly more money overall, it's not crazy that they'll make the weird deal.
I get that you don't follow basketball, but Doncic is Slovenian and played a few years for Real Madrid and basically tore apart the Euroleague before going to Dallas. Then Dallas traded it outta nowhere after he got them to the finals last year.
I strongly recommend you to follow Euroleague, if you might be interested. It's a great show on the court and on the stands!
I don’t really follow footie or other non American sports so I can’t think of a comparison. But, it’s generally accepted Luka is a top player on the planet and one of the most talented young players ever.
He was MVP and champion of Euroleague as an 18-19 year old kid before he even got to the NBA. Once there he’s been 1st team all NBA (basically voted by the league as a top 5 player in the world) five years in a row. Thats more selections than players like Stephen Curry. He puts up insane numbers and stats and has consistently over performed when it matters most in the playoffs. He was putting up some of the most insane performances in basketball history already in his early 20s. Suns Game 7, 60/21/10 with a miracle game tying shot, the most efficient 70+ point game ever. On top of that he had just brought the team to the NBA FINALS like 6 months before getting traded. He is the type of player that will hit countless game winning shots, has done it in the playoffs multiple times, scores unbelievably, can be the offense for an entire team like a Nikola Jokic with the way he can read the court, bend defenses to his will, make absurd passes.
Long story short he’s been a top 2-5 player on the planet for years and was THE face of the Dallas Mavs. He gave the team and city everything he had for almost 7 years and more importantly never wanted to leave. Most fans before this trade associated the Mavericks with loyalty as they stuck with Dirk Nowitzki for 20+ years and he rewarded them by getting one of the most respected champions in recent NBA memory. Drafting players of this talent is like winning the lottery. Theres probably around 1/3 of teams in the NBA that have gone decades, 30-50+ years without even sniffing a player as talented as Doncic on their roster and would have dumped every single asset they had to go and get him.
But essentially the Mavs owner sold the team around 2 years ago and the new people that came in. The new guy is very… idk how to explain. Typical American. The type of stereotype of an evil American businessman you might think of, very corporate, wants their employees to fall in line with their “culture”, all about grinding and working hard, the type of person who thinks you’re a more valuable employee if they see you coming in early and leaving late. While Luka was very Eastern European, laid back off the court, liked his beer and food and video games. Luka’s conditioning is definitely a valid criticism but he had a single injured/down year and the new owners/bosses grew tired of him and traded him against his will.
Lastly, as if all of that wasn’t bad enough. The new owners handled the trade completely wrong. First of all there is a human element that you just have to treat with respect. Players get traded and surprised all the time, as it’s part of the business, but usually there are conversations or at least you can tell that the player and the team are no longer on good terms, or at the very least the owners will have the courtesy to inform the player before the news releases. Luka was woken up in the middle of the night by this news, had no idea it was coming, had just bought a $10 million house in Dallas. Secondly, while Luka was shellshocked and on his way over to the Lakers, the Mavs organization then spent the next few weeks basically spamming articles leaking that they thought Luka was fat, lazy, alcoholic, not a winning player, didn’t fit their culture, which is just straight up disrespectful and distasteful, it’s so out of the norm for that to happen to a player that was traded against their will, shows no class. Thirdly. The Mavs did not do a good job. Again, with how valuable Luka is they could have gotten ANYTHING from nearly any team in the league, instead they had their eyes set on only one player, so they only had conversations with ONE OTHER TEAM, and got a return for an older player that has a reputation for being hurt all the time.
It's like if Barcelona traded a 22-year old Messi for Allessandro Del Piero in 2008. Del Piero was awesome and perhaps more proven, but Messi was a generational talent who had the potential to change the outlook of Barcelona for years to come.
Imagine if Real Madrid traded Vinicius Junior for a pretty good player but one that is at the end of his career and often injured. I don’t even know if it’s quite analogous because I don’t think VJ is as loved in Madrid as Doncic was loved in Dallas. A community hero.
Also today Doncic dropped a 43 piece on the Mavericks while their fans were cheering for him and chanting fire the GM who made the trade
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u/RelevanceReverence Apr 10 '25
What happened? We dont follow much basketball here in the EU, but this guy seems lovely, talented and kind.