Kyrie Irving tore his ACL on Monday night and while nobody would ever wish that kind of injury, or any kind of injury, on a player or an organization, it is impossible not to recognize the seemingly cosmic brand of poetic justice that’s been going down in Dallas since the dumbest trade in NBA history.
I hate to say it, but when you trade 25-year-old Luka Dončić for 31-year-old Anthony Davis, you are asking for bad things to happen. And man are bad things happening to the Mavericks, who lost Davis 31 minutes into his first game with the team and have now lost Irving for the remainder of this season and probably at least the first few months of next season.
Irving is about to turn 33. By the time Davis plays his second game with the team, which might well not be until next season since there doesn’t seem to be much point in bringing him back this season, he’ll be 32. We know about the injury history of Davis, who has now gone through seven absences of at least 10 consecutive games over the last seven seasons, and now Irving will be trying to come back from a major injury to the same knee that got so infected from the screws he had put in for a fractured kneecap that he had to have another surgery to have them taken out.
Nobody ever wants to dwell on the worst-case scenario to the point that it entirely informs your decision making, but when you’re making moves as crazy as trading a once-in-a-lifetime player, you have to plan from at least a reasonably pessimistic point. You have to look at the worst-case scenario and still be OK with making the move should that scenario play out. Otherwise you’re just playing roulette.
Which is say, when the Mavericks start crying the bad-injury-luck blues, which Jason Kidd already started doing Monday night and others are sure to do in the aftermath of the Irving news, don’t listen to it. Dallas asked for this. Nico Harrison, the owners, Kidd, whoever had even a fingertip of a hand in the decision to dump Dončić was knowingly tinkering with the wires of a nuclear bomb. Don’t act surprised when it goes off.
And make no mistake, this is a nuclear outcome. I can already see the writing on the wall, the Mavericks talking themselves into tanking for a lottery pick that they can then package up to trade for Kevin Durant this summer. Remember the last time Irving and Durant teamed up? That time it was Durant coming off the catastrophic injury, and the Nets talked themselves into the idea that they had a year to waste because when everyone finally got healthy, look out!
Problem was, those stars Brooklyn wished upon never lined up. Dallas’ aren’t going to either. They willingly shrunk their margin for error to damn near zero by trading Dončić. Not only did everything have to go right for that trade to register on the lower end of the disaster spectrum, but it had to go right immediately. Like, this season. Maybe next. That’s it.
The Mavericks could’ve afforded lost games, even lost seasons, with Dončić because they had another decade plus on the front of their timeline. With Irving and Davis on the wrong side of 30 and injury prone, they didn’t, and don’t, have the luxury of time on their side. They can’t work significant injuries into their equation and still come out healthy on the back end. They started their process on the back end. It was already coming up against the clock, which just struck midnight. Dallas is done.
And I don’t mean just for this season. I mean for this entire era. It’s over. They effectively ended it when they traded Dončić, but now, whatever ridiculous picture they painted in their heads of a post-Luka renaissance has already faded to black, even if the Mavericks refuse to admit it.
Keep in mind, Irving is up for an extension this summer. So what, you’re going to throw a max contract, or any kind of contract, at a 32-year-old coming off ACL surgery? Go ask the Warriors how that worked out with Klay Thompson, who, as it turns out, is now the biggest star the Mavericks have left in uniform. This would be cruel if they hadn’t asked for it, but they did. And now they have to live with the fallout.
