The Dallas Mavericks lost in the NBA play-in, and the Los Angeles Lakers lost in the first round of the NBA playoffs. Neither team experienced the level of success they hoped to achieve when they agreed to the trade that sent Anthony Davis to the Mavericks and Luka Dončić to the Lakers.
After the trade, the Mavericks fell in the standings, mostly due to injuries to Davis and superstar Kyrie Irving, while the Lakers managed to rise to the third seed in the Western Conference as a result of Dončić coming into the fold.
As the offseason arrives for both the Mavericks and Lakers, the Davis for Dončić trade still impacts many. Noted NBA insider Shams Charania recalled the moment the trade broke. When asked if he thought his source’s phone was being hacked or he was being duped, Charania was honest in a recent interview.
“That would be the first instinct, that there’s no way this is true, but the way I heard it was not that Luka Dončić had been traded for Anthony Davis. It was really a process throughout the week,” Charania told Front Office Sports on May 9.
“The deal happened late Saturday night. Wednesday, I’d gotten word that the Lakers and Mavs were discussing a trade that would send a Mavs player, who was not in the final deal, and I’m not going to name him, to the Lakers. I dug on it and got complete denials.”
Charania then recalled how he focused on trade talks that were taking place for other players in the league and said, “I carried on with my business. There were other league things to monitor. Jimmy Butler and De’Aaron Fox were on the trade block. There’s always other moves you don’t know about that are coming.”
When the realization dawned on him that the Dončić trade was happening, Charania had to ensure that his tweet didn’t contain typographical errors when he was breaking news of this magnitude. He added that his “hands were shaking.”
“It was an out-of-body night,” Charania said. “Even afterwards. My phone had 300 messages. Call on call on call. I took a few calls—a couple people around the league, Pat McAfee, Stephen A. Smith.
“SportsCenter producer Tom DeCorte called me a few times. I had to take his call because he was wondering what everyone else was wondering—did I get hacked? My phone was malfunctioning. It was overheating.”
Despite the trade being completed for months now, the fallout still lingers. People around the league, especially NBA insiders, will never forget where they were when the trade was announced.
