Nico Harrison and the Mavericks ownership don’t understand the basketball community in Dallas.
I won’t get into how bad Nico Harrison’s trade of Luka Doncic to the Los Angeles Lakers is, or was, or will be. We’ve already done that here plenty. We’ve gone over how bad the return was, and how this sets the Dallas Mavericks backwards, and how blatantly incompetent Harrison has been at this year’s trade deadline.
The trade has sparked a wide range of emotions for so many people, most of them very negative. Fans are angry, disappointed, hurt, in denial and disbelief. Going through all five stages of grief at once, or very quickly. Almost a week later, everyone is still left asking “how could this happen?”
My mind keeps drifting back to a different question, though. What’s the point of all this?
I’ve never known the Mavericks to be irrelevant in my lifetime. I don’t remember the woeful Dallas teams of the nineties. All I know is Dirk Nowitzki leading the Mavericks to the playoffs year after year, until he could barely move. A down year or two, then Luka showed up. And they were back in contention every year, and I thought it would continue that way for another decade at least.
Luka has been to the NBA Finals more times than the Charlotte Hornets, Los Angeles Clippers, Memphis Grizzlies, Minnesota Timberwolves, and New Orleans Pelicans combined. Those teams have never made the Finals. Doncic has made the conference finals twice since 2018. Those five teams have made four conference finals combined in their entire franchise history.
The point is there are teams that have been waiting for twenty or thirty years for a guy like Luka. Waiting for a decade or more of relevance.
You know what it’s like when your favorite team makes a deep playoff run. It’s all over the news and the radio. You chat about it with people at your job, sometimes with people who’ve never really paid attention to sports. You walk by someone wearing a jersey while you’re wearing one, and you nod at each other.
These sports teams, these collections of players in the same jerseys we spend so much of our time watching, they do mean something. It’s just sports, of course, but it’s so much more. It’s how people connect with their fathers, brothers, sons, mothers, sisters, daughters, and friends. It brings a community together, in the most organic way, and gives them something in common, which is a thing we desperately need these days.
If you’re reading this site, some of your best memories are probably littered with scenes with friends and family, either watching Mavs games in person or in the living room together. You’ve sent thousands of texts and spent hundreds of hours arguing, debating, celebrating, and commiserating with fellow fans. Along the way, you built connections that will last a lifetime.
And when that team you follow is winning, all of that is supercharged. When that team you follow slides into irrelevance, they might as well not exist. The conversations tail off, the jersey sightings fade, and the connections you treasured aren’t as strong. A hole in your life develops, and other things take the place of the team you followed so closely. Maybe you watch more movies, or start building Lego sets. It’s just not the same.
Players like Nowitzki and Doncic carry these franchises. They’re the leaders these communities rally behind, even if it’s just for a distraction from increasingly unprecedented times, just an excuse to be with their loved ones.
So it seems especially disorienting that one or two people in an organization can torpedo these communities almost overnight. Without a player like Doncic, the Mavericks will likely become inconsequential in the next few years. Maybe that won’t happen, but again, franchises wait decades for players like Luka. The Mavericks came into two of them in twenty years. Harrison scoffed at those miraculous odds and jettisoned the player who would make the Mavericks continue to matter.
Now, instead of the third decade of a homegrown superstar to rally behind, Mavericks fans are left with a mercenary squad quickly acquired from Harrison’s contacts list. The Dallas GM hopes to quickly happen into a championship and then leave, stating in a press conference that in 10 years he’ll likely be “buried,” i.e., gone. He’ll win a championship with his guys or he won’t, and either way, he’ll be gone, never interested in what a franchise can mean to a region, and what a special player can mean to a franchise. With a single trade, he wiped away a future full of memorable moments for fans for a long-shot chance at winning a championship for himself, not for a city.
All of this—blogs that recap every game and every roster move, podcasts discussing the team ad nauseum, watch parties with friends, wearing team gear, going to games with family, investing hours and dollars on end—happens at a smaller scale, sure, but it’s nothing like when there’s a franchise player to rally behind. When the team has a chance to contend every year. The community is emboldened and it just matters in a way it doesn’t when the team is buried at the bottom of the standings.
All that camaraderie, togetherness, and team pride, ties the city together. And sure, the franchise isn’t a nonprofit, they’re not out here just doing community service. But all those good feelings, they translate into money for the owners, so it should matter to them as well.
With the Doncic trade, though, it shows that it doesn’t matter, for Harrison or this ownership group. And if that’s the case, if all this can be ripped away by just one guy bent on trading for his buddies, how much can fans actually invest in this?
If the community this is built upon doesn’t matter, then what is anyone doing here? Why even pay attention? Why even own an NBA franchise? The obvious answer is to make money, to extract as much capital as possible from the fans, but that money flows much more easily when the fans have something to believe in. Something to care about. And to rip that away for such selfish and shortsighted goals shows that Harrison doesn’t get what a basketball team means to a community, and doesn’t even understand what basketball is all about. At the end of the day, it turns out he’s just a guy who sells shoes.