I'm No Basketball Expert, but the Luka Dončić Trade Is How You Alienate a Fanbase

Babe Ruth was bigger...maybe

Full disclosure here: I’m not a big basketball fan. I’ve watched the Mavericks when they’ve been in the playoffs since I moved back to Dallas in 2019, but I’m about as much of a basketball fan as most basketball fans are hockey fans, which is to say casual at best, on off nights.

But this trade dragged me out of bed at midnight because I’m still trying to process what just happened, like everyone else. Because this has to be the most explosive trade in Dallas sports history, and maybe in NBA history.

The Dallas Mavericks just traded Luka Dončić to the Los Angeles Lakers, and the return doesn’t matter here on a Stars blog, because all you need to know is the main player they got back is currently injured, is often injured, is 31 years old, and most importantly, is not Luka Dončić.

Some of you are interrupting me right now to bring up another trade, because you’re as pedantic as I am. And yes, Herschel Walker brought back a haul that gave the Cowboys years of dominance that are still echoing in Jerry Jones’s head, if not on his field. But Walker was a running back, and the Cowboys had been struggling for years. When you’re struggling, things get shaken up from time to time, and there are a heck of a lot of players on a football team. A lot of the faces change every year. That’s how sports go.

The Mavericks just made it to the NBA Finals last year. Then they added Klay Thompson to a renewed Kyrie Irving and their breakout center Dereck Lively, and there were people talking about them adding another huge piece, too. They were so close to doing something even more special with this group.

This year could have been the year when one or two final pieces got the Mavericks back to glory, when they finally got Dirk Nowitzki’s spiritual successor a trophy that would far outlast his pesky ankles. It hasn’t been a perfect season, but it wasn’t a disaster, either. With a generational superstar on your basketball team, you never know what he can do. Except this year, the Mavericks decided that they did know that, and it wasn’t ever going to be enough.

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There are two statues outside American Airlines Center: Mike Modano and Dirk Nowitzki. Fans went to gather there Saturday night because they didn’t know where else to be.

Those statues aren’t there because of cumulative statistics, or because one GM outsmarted another, or even because of a championship in 2011 or 1999. Those statues are there because people feel things about those two players. Dirk and Mo grew into more than any single player can be in any given game, and even a basketball idiot like me knows about Dirk’s shot, and how beloved he is, and how much it meant for him to get his championship in Dallas, and to retire here.

Here’s the secret: Sports aren’t really about winning games, but winning hearts. And tonight, Dallas’s hearts just got shattered.

Luka is a 25-year-old, first-name superstar, the sort of figure everybody in Dallas knows even if they don’t care about sports one whit. I know that at any given restaurant in the metroplex, if I say “Luka,” any number of people in there will know precisely who I mean. The nature of basketball is a small court with big people, and if you excel on that stage, immortality seems close enough to taste. No hats, no helmets, no pads: just five of your players jumping around, scoring dozens and dozens of times every game, trying to beat the other five at any given time.

That doesn’t mean basketball isn’t ferocious and costly and grueling, because it certainly is. But there is a ton of glory to be won by individuals in that sport in a way that hockey makes a lot harder, and a young Luka spent a season basking in the sunset of Dirk’s farewell while his own star began to rise. As a teenager, he got to see what you can mean to a city as a European basketball star in Dallas, and for the better part of the decade, he’s taken that baton and carried it imperfectly, but stubbornly. And even if his conditioning or his arguing or his performance drives you crazy at times, you know he’s special. He’s Luka.

He’s bled for his team, and his adopted city. People have their Luka stories, if you ask. Even with the impetuous acts of youth, with the suspensions that go along with them, Luka has won over more people as each year has gone by, even if he’s lost some fans along the way. Dirk did too, back in the day. So did Modano. But legacy gets created over decades, and it’s rarely a straight line. And I guarantee you that there are thousands of people in Dallas who can locate Slovenia on a map who couldn’t ten years ago.

This trade, even if you think it makes the Mavericks more likely to win a championship—as their GM purportedly does, though most basketball folks I’ve heard from are far from convinced of that—it also makes this team far less likely to live beyond a given season. A decision like this one shocks everybody because of how obviously damaging it is, how angry it will make people for years, and maybe forever.

There’s a reason most people can’t tell you whom Babe Ruth or Wayne Gretzky were traded for.

In 2007, the Texas Rangers traded Mark Teixeira, and they got a haul that led to a couple of AL pennants. But Teixeira was always leaving the city anyway, so it was more a case of selling your dotcom stock high than betting the company payroll on red. Elvis Andrus was one of the players Texas got from Atlanta in that deal, and even though he never became a superstar, his return to the organization means a lot to people here. It brings a little more joy to the upcoming Rangers season, and that’s what you want to see your team do. Sports are supposed to be fun, but joy contains fun within it, because joy transcends entertainment. And when teams recognize the importance of joy underneath the winning, that’s when the extra special things happen.

For the most part, the pain of the Texas Rangers’ 2011 World Series loss has been healed by their 2023 championship. But if you skip to 56:21 of the below video, you’ll hear that, for players who never win it, that’s not really how it works. Ian Kinsler and Michael Young lost that series, and they always will have lost it. “That pain’s still there,” as Michael Young puts it.

And I think, no matter how happy Luka ends up being in Los Angeles or elsewhere, the pain of February 1st, 2025, will linger in Dallas hearts for a long, long time. Maybe forever.

As a Dodgers fan growing up, I remember hearing about the Mike Piazza trade, and I was crestfallen. Piazza was cool, and he mashed dingers, and he had a big ol’ mustache and long hair, and he played catcher, even if a lot of people thought he was bad at defense. Defense wins championships everyone likes to say, except for when they can’t score to save their lives. And Pizza could score, because he could mash dingers.

He got traded though, because Bill Plaschke said Brett Butler didn’t like him, and it hurt people. It hurt me! That probably wasn’t the worst thing the FOX corporation ever did, but it’s still one of the first things that comes to mind.

But it’s after midnight and I’m rambling about every sport except hockey, so let’s land this plane of sadness with an analogy that probably hits closest to home.

Back in the summer of 2016, the Dallas Stars were coming off a disappointing second-round playoff loss to St. Louis after a rock-and-roll season where Jamie Benn, Tyler Seguin, Jason Spezza, and John Klingberg ran roughshod over goaltenders around the league. A year after Benn had won an Art Ross Trophy by outscoring literally every other player in the league, the Stars looked like a team this close to doing something even more special in the playoffs. And Benn had one year left on his contract.

With that one year left and the Stars not anxious to go a whole season with trade speculation hanging over their captain’s head, Jim Nill had a decision to make, except he really didn’t. You had to bring back Jamie, didn’t you? Because “Jamie and Tyler” had burst into the Dallas first-name lexicon as newly minted first-namers. Not on the level of Dak or Dirk, because it’s the NHL and we’re in Dallas, but closer to it than any other hockey player had been for a long time in this city.

So Benn signed his $9.5 million-per-year extension over eight years, the final one of which he’s playing out this season.

Luka Dončić’s trade comes as the superstar, one of the five best players in the entire NBA, also coming due for a supermax extension that the Mavericks organization clearly didn’t feel comfortable giving him.

At first, that decision, to start over with a player who promises more certainty at a price you can stomach, can look almost smart. After all, that eight-year contract started to loom large for Benn, especially when the Stars’ ownership passed along a message calling out Benn (and Seguin, with his own recent nine-million-dollar deal) with profanity just three years later, claiming the pricey stars weren’t living up to their big contracts. That’s what organizations fear when they consider signing players to huge extensions—underperformance, and inflexibility. Players cashing checks, but not delivering.

Benn’s legacy isn’t written yet, but it’s fair to say that 15 years into his Dallas tenure, he’s delivered something pretty special to this city and a lot of people in it, even if the ultimate goal has eluded him so far.

People don’t ultimate care that a trophy is sitting behind some display case somewhere; they care about the stories they can tell about where they were when their team won it all, and how happy they were to see those players celebrate what they had earned. You can see the expression on Mo’s face as he hoisted that Cup, because it means infinitely more than just some names engraved in silver, or numbers on a paycheck.

Stars fans hardly even dare to dream about what it would mean to see Jamie and Tyler earn a celebration like that, because they also know how heartbreaking it is to see Joe Pavelski or Brenden Morrow retire without having done so. The story doesn’t always end happily, and that makes the rare moments of joy priceless when it does. When a special player’s victory is earned over years together with teammates and a city, that parade is something everyone gets to claim, just a little bit.

Heck, even when I was in Tampere, Finland this season, people in that city boasted to me about Sasha Barkov’s parade in that town, because he was theirs, and his joy was, too.

Luka’s joy, if he ever gets it, won’t really be Dallas’s to share anymore, and that’s a heartbreaking thing to say. In fact, in the immediate future, it will belong to one of the most loathed teams in the NBA, and that’s even worse. But weirdly enough, the fact that Luka is going to Los Angeles kind of isn’t that big of a deal right now, because the fact that he’s being sent anywhere but Dallas overshadows everything else. When you get dumped, you don’t really care where your ex is going for lunch the next day.

Everyone is saying the same thing right now, I’m sure, and probably with far more context and intelligence than I. But I know enough about Luka Dončić to know he’s irreplaceable. And when you ship out a player like that because you think you’re outsmarting the other GMs in the league, it tends to wind up being unforgivable.