The stunning three-team trade that sent Luka Dončić to the Los Angeles Lakers for Anthony Davis left the NBA world reeling, in part because superstar players just entering their prime years—and less than a year removed from reaching the NBA Finals—are basically never traded unless they force an exit.
But folks in NBA circles were also shocked because there was absolutely no indication that Dončić was on the trade market in the first place. That, however, was very much by design.
According to ESPN’s Ramona Shelburne and Tim MacMahon, Mavs’ general manager Nic Harrison “decided early on, team sources said, that the best way to trade a player of Dončić’s caliber was to pick the trade that he wanted, rather than open up the process, to avoid Doncic and his agent exerting their own leverage. It would also avoid the crippling fan backlash that might influence the deal. [Rob] Pelinka and the Lakers understood. Nothing could leak. Not a breath of it.”
Harrison and Pelinka reportedly kept the talks so close to the vest that the Utah Jazz—who served as the third team in the deal by acquiring a pair of second-round picks to take on Jalen Hood-Schifino—”didn’t know Dončić and Davis were a part of the deal until about an hour before it was completed, league sources said. Even Jazz president Danny Ainge, who hails from the Lakers’ hated rival, the Boston Celtics, had only about 30 minutes notice, sources said, that Los Angeles was about to acquire Doncic to be the new face of its franchise.”
Meanwhile, executives around the NBA were reportedly both “furious and jealous” that a player of Dončić’s caliber was traded without having so much as an opportunity to make offers of their own.
“Unfathomable,” a Western Conference executive told Shelburne and MacMahon.
“I’m stunned,” an Eastern Conference added.
Harrison, meanwhile, hinted in his press conference that the Mavericks traded Dončić now, in part, to both avoid having to make a decision on signing him to a five-year, $345 million supermax extension and to preempt the possibility of the superstar player forcing his way out of Dallas later on down the line.
“There’s other teams that were loading up that he was going to be able to decide, make his own decision at some point of whether he wants to be here or not,” he told reporters. “Whether we want to supermax him or not, or whether he wants to opt out. So, I think we had to take all that into consideration, and I feel like we got out in front of what could have been a tumultuous summer.”
The backlash was immediate. Harrison was not only accused of making a bad deal—giving up a 25-year-old superstar for a player like Davis, who is 31, and only getting Max Christie and one first-round pick in addition was a questionable return—but also of completely ignoring the implications of trading the most popular player in Dallas since Dirk Nowitzki.
The fact that Harrison wanted to move quickly, and quietly, to trade Dončić in an effort to avoid the sort of fan backlash that could have nixed the deal will make an already unpopular move in Dallas all the more loathed.
It is basically unheard of that a franchise’s best and most popular player—in this case, a perennial MVP candidate and five-time first-team All-NBA selection who is averaging 28.6 points, 8.7 rebounds and 8.3 assists per game for his career—is traded in his prime unless he forces such a move. Those types of players are hard to come by.
Instead, Harrison and the Mavericks decided they wanted to get out of the Dončić business, and they wanted to do so before fans could let their feelings be known on the matter. No matter how the Mavs’ front office and ownership spins it, that’s the sort of decision that has the potential to create a major rift between an organization and its fans.
