Dallas Mavericks Oafishly Edit Hype Video, Then Delete Hype Video

The most compelling reasons not to trade Luka Doncic are not the administrative kind, but those reasons exist, too. Weaker-minded decision-makers would have been stopped by more urgent basketball and business considerations having to do with Doncic being a historically good player beloved by the team's fans, and dismissed the urge to deal Doncic as a fleeting call-of-the-void-type impulse. But the Dallas Mavericks' new ownership and GM Nico Harrison were able to see, beneath the jarringly ruddy exterior of the 25-year-old superstar who carried an otherwise unremarkable team to the NBA Finals just last season, a toxic and fast-depreciating asset that needed to be jettisoned 1) immediately and 2) in secret. That trade happened three weeks ago, which turned out to be much more time than was necessary for it to blow up on the Mavericks. Basically no one understands any of it.

And, again, that is just the top-line stuff. The deal itself might not have been anything more than the faulty whim of the team's bummy new ownership, represented in this case by a man who looks like the result of entering "business doll boy (real)" into an AI image generator, and facilitated by a GM with a dangerously advanced case of Contemporary Success Guy brain. It might just be one of those classic deals that instantly immolates a generation or so of fan goodwill and makes a team worse in both the near-term and long-term, made out of spite or boredom or just as the result of a decision-making process that is the result of having contracted some sort of debilitating brain spore from a Mar-a-Lago steam-table entree. This does not make it any easier to parse, to be clear, and also doesn't really explain anything. Also in retrospect that sort of trade is not really one of the classic kind of deals that exist, at least beyond the extent to which the Hindenburg could be said to represent one of the classic kinds of dirigible excursions one could have.