What Were the Mavs Thinking?
Thoughts on the Luka trade
The basketball community has had nearly a week now to process the trade that sent Luka Dončić from the Dallas Mavericks to the Los Angeles Lakers… and it still doesn’t make any sense. It is hard to come up with a good reason why a team would send a 25-year-old superstar to a conference rival. Some of the explanations that were initially floated — that Luka had perhaps asked to be traded, or indicated that he would not sign a supermax contract extension with the Mavericks — were quickly debunked.
Everyone is wondering what the Mavericks were thinking. And given the confusion, and even anger, around the trade, there are already some fun conspiracy theories around the team’s new owner, Miriam Adelson, and her hypothetical motives. Obviously I love a good conspiracy theory, but before we even get there, I want to talk about the basic way we think about a question like this: What were the Mavericks thinking?
Because, on a purely technical level, “the Mavericks” are a corporate entity not capable of thought. When we talk about “the Mavericks,” we’re talking about a large group of not only players on the team, but coaches and trainers and scouts on the staff, and even down to every intern in the social media department. All of these people have their own thoughts and responsibilities; there is no franchise hive mind. This might seem like a pedantic point, but I think it’s important to be really precise about how decisions like this are made.
It’s common to talk about large collective enterprises — whether that’s the Mavericks or Apple or the US State Department — “thinking” something or “doing” something, as if they are individuals capable of rational thought. Of course, that’s just a metaphor, but it’s a metaphor internalized by capitalist ideology. The “thoughts” and “decisions” of these enterprises get attributed to whoever exists at the top of the internal hierarchy, and that is a big part of how corporate leaders get so lionized and deified in the culture: People attribute to them the actions of thousands of subordinates, so that, for example, every modest improvement to the iPhone by some anonymous designer becomes something that Apple (and by extension Steve Jobs or Tim Cook) “decided” to do.
On a sports team like the Mavericks, that person is the owner, in this case Miriam Adelson. And since Adelson is a particularly detestable figure, even by the standards of billionaires, a lot of the attention for the decision has gone to her. Especially since the Mavericks’ previous owner, Mark Cuban, had famously said he would never trade Luka, even if it meant destroying his personal life:
Even the circumstances in which Adelson took over the team are murky. Although the initial reports, in December of 2023, suggested that Cuban would still be in charge of running the team’s day-to-day operations…
…it turns out that’s not what happened.1 According to ESPN, when they reached out to Cuban to ask what he thought about the trade, “Cuban declined to comment… saying it wasn’t his team anymore.”
So a lot of the focus is on what Adelson’s motives for the trade might be. Perhaps she is punishing the state of Texas for not legalizing gambling. Perhaps she is trying to sabotage the team’s relationship to Dallas so the family can relocate it to Las Vegas. Perhaps this is a roundabout way of getting revenge on Kyrie Irving for his support of Palestine. There’s lot of fun speculation.
Even for people who don’t think so nefariously, there is a tendency to talk about this deal as if it were ordered from on high. I’ll quote Colin Cowherd quoting a source for a representative look at how this deal is being discussed in sports media:
“This came from above and beyond the General Manager. When you only get one first-round pick back, that is somebody in ownership telling you, ‘Just make the deal. Subjugate your ego. Make the deal.’... No reasonable person, who’s smart enough to make the Kyrie Irving deal work, and the trade deadline deal work last year, is going to give away Luka for one draft pick and 32-year-old Anthony Davis. That just doesn’t make sense… This is pressure from upstairs… I was told by a different source, that this is not something that just came up in the last month. They have been troubled. [Luka] missed back-to-back training camps, or most of them. Hurt on Christmas, hasn’t been back. Not going to be back for a few days. His defense is not good, and he’s so ball-centric that by the playoffs he can often look like an exhausted, one-dimensional player.”
Now, forgive me for being unkind, but this is dumbest fucking thing I’ve ever heard. Miriam Adelson is an octogenarian Israeli psychopath. Do you honestly expect me to believe she is concerned that Luka Dončić is “so ball-centric”? I would wager almost any amount of money that she doesn’t even know what that means. Does the Adelson family care if Luka shows up to training camp healthy? Do they even KNOW? Color me highly dubious that Adelson or her son-in-law, team president Patrick Dumont, thinks about Luka in such granular detail. They’re too busy funding ethnic cleansing and being insane to involve themselves in roster decisions.
To be clear, I have no doubts that SOME PEOPLE within the Mavericks organization thought this way about Luka. But attributing those thoughts to Adelson or Dumont seems quite foolish — the family didn’t even own the team at the time that one of those training camp absences occurred. This is the sort of confusion that happens when we talk about what “the Mavericks” were thinking: We start attributing different thoughts of multiple people to whoever sits at the top of the org chart, and then resorting to whatever fanciful explanations occur to us to reconcile these often contradictory motives.
In this case, it seems like people are doing it to defend Mavs General Manager Nico Harrison, a well-respected, longtime basketball executive. Surely someone so smart could not have made such a stupid trade without nefarious influence from above…
And yet that seems to be what happened. The details we have about how these negotiations unfolded are still sketchy, but based on the reporting we have, it was Harrison and Lakers GM Rob Pelinka who worked out this deal. Dumont wasn’t even brought into the negotiations until late in the process and, according to Harrison, was somewhat surprised by the decision to trade Luka before signing off out of deference to the GM. (Miriam Adelson was, seemingly, not told until after the news broke.)
Could Harrison be lying to cover for Dumont/Adelson? That’s certainly possible.2 But Harrison also said something revealing in the press conference announcing the trade. When saying that this trade set them the team up for the future, Harrison said, “The future to me is 3-4 years from now. The future 10 years from now, they'll probably bury me and J-[Kidd] by then. Or we'll bury ourselves.”
He’s not wrong. Most coaches and executives do not last that long in the NBA, and given how long player contracts last and the ebb and flow of a player’s prime, it’s just hard to predict much about basketball beyond a four-year window. But that ought to shed some light onto how this trade happened.
Consider the following:
That there seems to have been a contingent within the Mavs organization that was continually frustrated with Dončić’s training and conditioning, and attributed his recent injuries to a failure to get in shape despite repeated warnings.
That, relatedly, some people might not have liked Luka’s impact on the locker room “culture” in Dallas. Combined with Point #1, this might have led many within the Mavericks organization, perhaps including GM Nico Harrison, to have a less rosy view of Luka Dončić than the rest of the league has.
That Harrison might legitimately believe, as he said in the press conference, that “defense wins championships” and that Anthony Davis might sufficiently improve the team’s defense in a way that offsets losing Luka on offense.
That Harrison’s longstanding personal relationship with Lakers GM Rob Pelinka facilitated an unusually smooth and private negotiation between two teams, without the usual bidding wars that would take place for a player of Dončić’s caliber.
That GMs, in general, typically prefer more flexibility that comes from NOT having a supermax player on your roster, especially since a contract so big gives a star player de facto control of the roster in ways that we’ve seen exercised by LeBron James and James Harden and Kawhi Leonard, to name a few. And this power generally comes at the expense of the General Manager.
That a great deal of Luka’s value comes from being 25-years-old, and therefore likely to be great for another 10+ years if he can stay healthy. But most decision-makers within an NBA franchise are unlikely to last nearly that long, and so, for them at least, that value is hard to factor in. Should a GM be expected to retain a superstar who could help them win the 2032 Finals if that GM is going to be long-fired by then?
That the person who, at least theoretically, is supposed to look after a team’s long-term assets is the owner, but that the Mavericks’ new owners have no real connection to the team, or the city of Dallas, or even professional basketball. And, as a result, do not seem to have any particular investment in the on-court success of the Dallas Mavericks.
That the Adelsons seem to have purchased the team largely as a way of gaining a toehold for construction of a multipurpose casino/sports complex in the DFW area — a proposal that seems on hold now that the state hasn’t legalized gambling. So perhaps their interest in long-term investments in the franchise has cooled.
That, if it’s true the Adelsons are primarily interested in the Mavericks as a piece of their long-term gambling business, then they are probably inclined to defer questions about this and future Mavericks’ seasons to the people running the basketball operations — the people who might have their own reasons for moving on from Luka, as mentioned above.
When you put all these points together, you can see how it might add up to, as ESPN’s Brian Windhorst put it, “the Mavericks want out of the Luka Dončić business,” even if, as I said, the Mavericks cannot “want” anything. I suspect if you polled people within the Mavericks organization about this trade, the overwhelming majority of them would have been against it. And yet…
As tempting as it is to attribute the actions of an organization to the thoughts and desires of that organization’s leader — and as fun as it can be to speculate about those thoughts and desires — an organization’s actions are really determined by the structure and distribution of power within that organization.
This is why it’s so important to pay attention to the rules that govern an organization’s structure, and not get drawn into speculation or fantasies about the whims and ideas of any particular owner or leader. Put another way: Blaming owners for every dumb trade gives them too much credit. It’s not enough to say owners are bad when they do bad things. That leaves open the possibility that they can do GOOD things and, in theory, be good. But the problem with private ownership is the power structure it enables — specifically that it gives absolute power to the top of the hierarchy. It’s not that dumb trades will never happen under socialism. After all, people are free to do dumb shit. But at least we can know who’s actually responsible…
It seems that was largely about Adam Silver’s desire to prevent the team from being run by the publicly toxic Adelson. When she put her son-in-law in charge of the team, Cuban became just another minority investor…
Although it’s worth saying that both Harrison and Mavs Head Coach Jason Kidd were hired before the Adelson family bought the team, so it’s not like they’re just loyal flunkies. Nor is it inconsistent that the family that retained the team’s basketball people after buying the team would defer to their basketball judgment.