Welcome to the NBA Hater Report: A breakdown of some of the players, teams and trends around the league that are drawing the ire of yours truly. This week, there’s only one team that makes the cut. The Dallas Mavericks. As always if you’re not a fellow pessimist, or in this case a Mavericks fan still reeling, understandably, from the dumbest trade since Babe Ruth, proceed with caution.
The Dallas Mavericks, namely GM Nico Harrison and owner Patrick Dumont, have tried their best to spin this utterly insane Luka Doncic trade as a good move. But now, in addition to their fans and every sports analyst on Earth, they’re being torn to shreds by the most vindictive force of all.
Karma.
All the reporting indicates that Harrison basically thought Luka was a fat, lazy player whose body was going to break down due to his unwillingness to prioritize diet and conditioning. Dumont tripled down on that with what could only be described a thinly veiled shot in Doncic in an interview with Brad Townsend of the Dallas Morning News.
“If you look at the greats in the league, the people you and I grew up with — [Michael] Jordan, [Larry] Bird, Kobe [Bryant], Shaq [O’Neal] — they worked really hard, every day, with a singular focus to win,” Dumont said. “And if you don’t have that, it doesn’t work. And if you don’t have that, you shouldn’t be part of the Dallas Mavericks.
“That’s who we want. I’m unwavering on this. The entire organization knows this. This is how I operate outside of basketball. This is the only way to be competitive and win. If you want to take a vacation, don’t do it with us.”
OK, so basically they’re suggesting that Luka doesn’t give his full effort to basketball, by way of his lack of commitment to conditioning, which is a major leap to make considering how unbelievable his production has been through the first seven years of his career. But fine. You don’t think Luka gives his all. To call on Shaquille O’Neal as the embodiment of the type of conditioning-committed player you’re looking for only proves how wrong the Mavericks got this. Kobe Bryant couldn’t stand Shaq’s, shall we say, lenient stance on his own conditioning. They still won three straight titles.
There are some players, like Shaq, who are so great that you don’t let your ideals of what a perfect player should look and train like get in the way of old-fashioned greatness. Luka is one of those players. Even at 270 pounds, he’s still, at worst, one of the five best players in the world and that’s being generous to every player not named Nikola Jokic.
The numbers he puts up and the impact he has on winning (the guy has been to two conference finals and one Finals in his first six seasons) cannot be understated. Only Michael Jordan has a higher postseason scoring average than Luka’s 30.9 PPG through this first 50 playoffs games for crying out loud. This guy could be lighting up cigarettes on the bench and there would still be no justification for trading him.
What makes it worse is this idea that his body is going to break down, considering the fact that the guy for whom they traded him is one of the most injury-prone players imaginable, the last two years of good health notwithstanding.
You never want to mock any injury, and that’s definitely not what I’m doing here, but the karma factor, if you believe in that sort of thing, is impossible to ignore after Anthony Davis literally got hurt in his first game with the Mavericks and could, according the ESPN’s Shams Charania, miss up to a month. It is expected to be multiple weeks at least.
Hell, I was on air with CBS Sports HQ’s go-to sports doctor Marty Jaramillo on Monday and he warned of the possibility that Davis’ particular combination of upper and lower adductor/groin injuries puts Davis in the danger zone of a sports hernia, which would require season-ending surgery.
We’ll all hope it doesn’t come to that, but even the possibility darkly illustrates the microscopic margin for error the Mavericks gave themselves by trading for a 32-year-old even in perfect health, let along one that gets hurts, well, quite a bit. If you lose a season with a 25-year-old as your franchise player, you can come back. The clock on Davis’ viability as a championship cornerstone is ticking like a bomb. There is no time whatsoever to waste.
Even a couple-week absence, or surely a month, could derail Dallas’ playoff hopes. And again, Harrison had full access to what we’ve all seen from Davis as a major injury risk, and he went ahead with this, on what he believed to be a strong argument against Luka’s injury risk, anyway.
With that in mind: Consider this nugget from Tom Haberstroh regarding the durability, of lack thereof, of the 32-year-old Davis and 25-year-old Doncic over the last seven seasons.
If Davis misses 10-plus games [from this latest injury], it’ll be the seventh double-digit game absence over the last seven seasons. Luka Doncic has one such absence in last seven seasons.
And now, on top of Davis, center Daniel Gafford went out on Monday with what the Mavericks are calling a knee sprain, which can have a range of severities. Dereck Lively III and Dwight Powell are also out. Dallas has gone from this team that pumped itself up on all this size and line-up versatility and the ability to play Davis at the four in two-big lineups to a team without one healthy big man in the wake of giving up a guy who literally comes along, maybe, every 50 years.
I hate to say it, but Nico Harrison and Patrick Dumont and every other person who had even a shred of a say in making this trade asked for this. They really did. Karma can be a, well, you know.
