A quick analysis.
On Saturday night, the Dallas Mavericks traded Luka Doncic to the Los Angeles Lakers for Anthony Davis and a 2029 first-round pick, effectively. As the world’s biggest hater of the Mookie Betts trade, my suspicion is that this one is worse, but I’m gonna talk it through.
My kneejerk reaction is that a true NBA superstar improves a team far more than their MLB counterpart, Barry Bonds 2001-2004 excepted; there are far fewer of them and fewer players in the NBA overall, which makes them the most valuable commodity in sports outside of—and maybe including—a franchise quarterback.
Why’d they do it? The Mavericks were looking ahead to Doncic’s free agency at the end of next season, when he’d be an ancient 27 fucking years old, and were balking at the (capped) $350 million price tag and decided to cash out at 40 cents on the dollar, shocking pretty much everyone. The simple answer is almost certainly correct: Miriam Adelson, the Mavericks’s owner and one of the key underwriters of Donald Trump’s candidacies and kingshi— sorry, presidency — doesn’t want to shell out the cash, and her general manager is left sputtering nonsense in order to make 1 plus 1 equal 77. If it sounds familiar, that’s because it is.
Congrats to Red Sox management, who no longer have the worst “we don’t want to pay this guy” trade in superstar athlete history
— Ken Tremendous (@kentremendous.bsky.social) 2025-02-02T17:09:36.357Z
The Mookie trade remains unforgivable the same way K2 is still a really tough mountain to climb, even if it’s shorter than Mount Everest, but the little details probably give the edge to Dallas. In addition to everything I wrote above about the dynamics of an NBA star w/r/t those of an MLB star, it was fairly well known that the Sox were trying to offload Mookie, and the aborted first attempt at a deal with the Dodgers gave the whole game away. It allowed any team to jump in and top the offer, and no one did. That said, Dallas probably got a better relative return than the Sox did — Anthony Davis is still quite good — but it hardly matters. Luka’s gone and never coming back.
The deals are both, beyond anything else, extremely cynical. The Sox put Betts’s name out there for a decent amount of time and still only got A*** V******, J**** Downs and Connor Wong, illustrating a league-wide collusion effort that, to this day, only the Dodgers and Padres seem to really want to buck. If Dallas had put word out that Luka was available, there’s no way the return would have been this light, because the NBA doesn’t collude, at least not like that. The way it colludes is by trading everyone to the Lakers for reasons they can’t quite explain and probably don’t understand. I sure don’t.
All of that is prologue to the part where I try to tell Mavericks fans they’ll be alright, because I was similarly spurned, and I’m fine now. But that would be a lie. The Mookie trade is the defining Red Sox moment of the last 10 years, a decade which includes them fielding one of the 10 best baseball teams of all-time and winning it all. This move for Dallas, alongside Mark Cuban purchasing the team, will be one of the two defining moves in Mavericks history, and will age even worse than it was received in the moment, not leastwise because of everything they left on the table. Mikal Bridges, a quite good but far inferior player to Doncic, was dealt for five first-round picks last offseason. The Mavs didn’t get more because they didn’t try, whereas the Red Sox didn’t get more because the league is run by a chummy group of hedge fund idiots.
It’s a pick-your-poison situation, and in the end, while I think the deals are equally shitty, I think the Luka trade is worse, by a nose. At least when the whole league is stupid, you can blend in. When it’s just you being dumb, people tend to notice. I’m sorry, Mavs fans. I know how you’ll carry this with you, and I wish I could say it gets better. And I could, if I was made of lies. But I’m not. You’re as fucked as we were, and are, and there’s no two ways about it.