🚨 Luka Doncic is... a Laker? 🚨

An emergency newsletter on an emergency trade, in which we ask: Why?

Everyone thought it was a joke. It had to be a mistake. The reporters breaking the news had to reiterate that they had not been hacked, nor was this a February Fools’ gag. This actually happened. Luka Doncic had actually been traded. And not just to any team, either! He’d been traded to the LA Lakers.

You know, the guys who pilfered Pau Gasol all those years ago? This is that trade on an industrial-grade accelerant that the FDA hasn’t even heard of yet, and if they know what’s good for the American public, they’ll never clear it. This stuff is dangerous, as evidenced by the extreme degree of irrationality on display here.

This just doesn’t happen. That’s number one. You don’t trade a player like Luka Doncic, really in any sport, but definitely not in the NBA. Just about every piece of available evidence suggests that winning titles in the NBA demands an MVP-caliber player on the roster. Those guys don’t grow on trees. Teams give any and everything to get a capital-d Dude like Doncic. Some wait decades. Some never get them.

Except, apparently, the Lakers, who gave up an aging Anthony Davis, a bench guard in Max Christie, and a single first-round pick conveying in 2029. This happened less than a year after the New York Knicks gave up five first-round draft picks for Mikal Bridges to be their third, maybe fourth option. For those two things to happen in the same world, within the space of eight months, is incomprehensible.

This can’t have very much to do with basketball on the merits. There has to be something else going on, some other explanation that casts some semblance of reason over this total blindside.

At times in the last few seasons, and certainly in those to come, Doncic has had a legitimate claim on being the very best basketball player in the world. This is not an exaggeration: this guy, all his trumped-up conditioning concerns aside, has a genuine shot at being one of the ~20 best players in the history of the league. The history of the league! He is that good, that singularly talented.

Dallas made the Finals last year largely because of him. They did not win those Finals, but he got them closer than this team is likely to get again anytime soon. Fans of this team were rightly expecting to have Doncic on this team until he retired. I would be pissed.

For the Mavericks, this is organizational malpractice on a level that I can barely describe. Remember Boston’s Mookie Betts trade? This is worse than that. Way worse than that! The fact that that conclusion is both possible and true is utterly baffling to me. Players like this should never get traded without forcing their way out themselves. Ever!

There is no amount of hyperbole that fully captures the shock of this, and less that can explain the return they got back. The problem with quietly cutting a deal in the shadows like this is that you don’t get a market. You don’t get a bidding war. There would have been dozens of better offers than the one the Mavericks took, sight unseen.

Anthony Davis is great. I even like Max Christie. As a swap for a 25-year-old perennial MVP, that’s unconscionable. It’s a fireable offense. The sort of thing that would make a young man vow revenge for the rest of his days, which I now expect Luka Doncic to do.

It certainly makes you wonder, once again, about the strange circumstances that led to Mark Cuban stepping back as majority owner of the franchise. At least we always knew where he stood on the Doncic front.

“If I had to choose between my wife and keeping Luka on the Mavs, catch me at my lawyer’s office prepping for a divorce,” Cuban said in 2020.

And he was right to be that single-minded about it. They’d been fortunate to land and keep a star like Dirk Nowitzki for as long as they did. And much as we all like Dirk, he was never at his very best in the same echelon as Doncic already is.

We will learn more about all this at some point, somehow. Someone will be able to shed some light on the thought process that led to this frankly bizarre exchange, which is nothing less than the most shocking trade in the modern history of the league.

What we can say at this point is that the Lakers somehow lucked their way into a succession plan for LeBron James, replacing him with the closest thing we’ve seen to LeBron since.

I worry about their glaring lack of size, and resulting lack of defense, if they’re going to try and play Doncic, James and Austin Reaves together. Still. They’ve put themselves back in the title mix for the next decade, which is way more than the Lakers could have reasonably hoped for exiting this season.

Reason, clearly, didn’t have much to do with this. They just got their next Dude, and the rest of the league never even got a chance to place a bid.

If you guys haven’t called for a Congressional inquiry yet, I’ll get on that. We’re gonna need at least three task forces. I have some questions.

🏈 That’s enough outta me, right? Give it a rest, lower-case-d dude. I’ll be back Friday with some NFL mourning and Super Bowl thoughts. Till then!