What the f--k??? Luka to L.A.
I just… wow.
Lakers receive: Luka Doncic, Maxi Kleber, Markieff Morris
Mavericks receive: Anthony Davis, Max Christie, 2029 1st
Jazz receive: Jalen Hood-Schifino, 2025 2nd, 2025 2nd
The NBA trade deadline is next week, so I’m offering a 25% discount on paid subscriptions.
A paid subscription gets you access to weekly deep dives, Three Things I Noticed on League Pass, subscriber mailbags and chats, and daily-updating leaderboards for Adjusted Efficiency, Aggression+, and Variance+. For a full breakdown of what’s on offer, click right here.
The Mavericks
Congrats to the Mavs on ducking the luxury tax by $678K!
Congrats to Anthony Davis on getting to play next to a center!
I realize I am probably the 347,962nd person to say this, but I have never been this shocked in my 15 years covering this league. I have been speechless for the last eight-plus hours, as I sit down to write this.
The Mavericks apparently had concerns about Luka’s weight (supposedly pushing 270 pounds) and conditioning. Okay, well… despite his weight and conditioning issues, Luka Doncic is, at worst, a top-five player in the world. He is also 25 years old, several years away from his prime. Why exactly am I supposed to care about his weight and conditioning issues? This guy could be 370 pounds and it still wouldn’t be a legitimate justification for doing this. He could be drinking beer instead of Gatorade in the huddle and it still wouldn’t be a legitimate justification for doing this.
The Mavericks apparently had concerns about offering Luka a super-max extension. Okay, well… even if you don’t actually want to pay it, you absolutely offer it and THEN look to trade him, so that you can get full freight. (Like the Clippers did with Blake Griffin, but a little less shitty because you don’t have to promise him he’ll be a Clipper for life to convince him not to sign with another team.) Nobody turns down the super-max, even if they don’t want to be in that situation long term.
That said, why exactly do they care about the dollar value of a contract that will take one of the league’s five best players through his physical prime? This team was in the NBA Finals seven months ago, and Doncic looked like he was ready to take the crown as the best player in the world! He even looked like that early this season, at times. There is no salary too high!
You just can’t do this. You don’t do this. Not with this guy.
Honestly, even if he comes to you and demands a trade, you probably shouldn’t do it. You absolutely shouldn’t do it like this, in the cover of night, for something like 40 or 50 cents on the dollar, and without opening up the bidding to anyone else. (You didn’t even get both available Lakers first-round picks!) You can’t do it like this five days before the trade deadline. Why the rush? Why not just play out the season and move him this summer, when there are so many other avenues open?
And all of this is before we get to the psychic impact on Mavs fans, who are going to be in open revolt and will legitimately never forgive Nico Harrison and/or the new ownership group — and rightfully so.
I guess we have to talk about what this looks like on the court, so here goes: The Mavs are spinning this as a win-now move because defense wins championships and Davis is an All-Defense player. That’s nice.
Yes, Davis makes Dallas’ defense immeasurably better. Yes, having him and either Daniel Gafford or Dereck Lively together on the front line will make the Mavs extremely difficult to score against at the rim. Yes, he will paper over the mistakes and the shortcomings of almost everyone else on the team, often multiple times on the same possession. Yes, he is basically a pterodactyl capable of swooping down and shutting off any action at any time.
But all of that was also true in L.A. and the Lakers did not consistently play top-flight (or even top-10) defense. They’re 19th in defensive rating right now. In other words, he is a fantastic defender, but clearly not an elite-defense-unto-himself defender. And if you’re not even definitively getting elite defense (the Mavs themselves enter today 13th in defensive rating), then what are you even doing here?
And that’s before we get to the other end of the court. Not having Luka changes the offense in such a way that it will become nearly unrecognizable. Obviously.
As is often the case with players of his caliber, he himself essentially was the system. So, there will have to be a new one. There’s no more, let’s spread the floor for 50 pick and rolls a game for our best player and let him pick out shooters from the top of the floor and/or hunt mismatches all night.
There will, of course, still be plenty of pick and roll. And probably more dribble hand-off stuff. But the elite spacing won’t be there anymore, the gravity of the court will shift dramatically, and everything will be exponentially more difficult because one of the greatest passers the game has ever seen is no longer there to work those issues out.
In theory, I like Kyrie and AD together. I like having Klay Thompson space the floor. I even like having a center next to AD on occasion. But your window is now both open less wide, and for a shorter length of time, than it was before the trade. I don’t think there’s even a question about either of those things.
Luka took this team to the Finals and the Western Conference Finals within the last three years. Even in his prime, Davis wasn’t playing at a level where he could carry a team like that. Now he’s 31, and he’ll be 32 in a few weeks. Kyrie is 32 and will be 33 in a few weeks. Klay is 34 and will be 35 in a few days. How much longer can these guys (or even just Kyrie and AD) really be the core of a contender — even one with Dereck Lively and P.J. Washington and Daniel Gafford and Naji Marshall and Quentin Grimes and I guess Max Christie around them?
I’ve been against a lot of Harrison’s moves at the time they happened. I did not understand betting on Kyrie Irving, given [gestures at everything that happened in 2020 and 2021]. It worked out. I did not like the P.J. Washington and Daniel Gafford trades, at those prices. They worked out. I didn’t even really like their pivot this summer, much as I like Klay Thompson and thought he would pair quite well with Luka and Kyrie. (We didn’t really get to see how well that would have worked out.)
Maybe I’ll be wrong again this time. Maybe Harrison pulled off another stunner of a move that makes no sense on the surface but will work out great. But I doubt it.
The NBA trade deadline is next week, so I’m offering a 25% discount on paid subscriptions.
A paid subscription gets you access to weekly deep dives, Three Things I Noticed on League Pass, subscriber mailbags and chats, and daily-updating leaderboards for Adjusted Efficiency, Aggression+, and Variance+. For a full breakdown of what’s on offer, click right here.
The Lakers
Lakers exceptionalism blah blah blah. You know the deal there. You don’t need me to be the 851st person to talk about how lucky they are and how they can’t keep getting away with this and 17 years to the day after the Pau Gasol trade and whatnot.
I actually do want to talk about this on the court, both in the short and long term. The first thing I don’t want to hear is how LeBron and Luka can’t play together because they both need the ball. These are two basketball geniuses. They will figure it out. We’ve seen it before. Chris Paul and James Harden supposedly wouldn’t fit together. Those Rockets teams basically solved NBA offense for a few years. When you have guys that are this good, this smart, they will figure out the best way to work together. They just will.
Whether that means LeBron or Luka getting into the post more often, setting ball screens for each other, doing what-fucking-ever, they will figure it out. The Lakers will score, and do so at an incredibly high level. Put two shooters in the corners and get them a rim-rolling big man and let one or the other go to work. It will lead to buckets. It always does, for both of them.
That also plays into the long-term plan. In terms of basketball skill set, if not athleticism, there has never been a player closer to LeBron than Luka. The best way to build around them is basically the same. We’ve seen it throughout their careers. Rim-roller. Shooters. Let them be the offense.
The returns on the LeBron version of that teams have been diminishing, though not nearly as rapidly as you’d expect given that he is 40 goddamn years old. But they should only get better as Luka ages into his mid-to-late 20s, which again is the prime age for basketball players.
The Lakers for some reason completely changed their roster build after winning the title exactly that way in 2020. They traded Danny Green for Dennis Schroder, signed Montrezl Harrell and pivoted to “we need people to run the offense when LeBron and AD are on the bench” instead of maximizing for when LeBron is on the floor, which is what really mattered. It took them several years to finally work their way back around to that type of team build. They absolutely cannot abandon it now that they have Doncic to lead them into their next era.
It makes sense to maintain several pieces over the longer term, but it's worth noting that only one guy on this entire team remains under contract beyond 2026 on a non-rookie-scale deal. It's just Jarred Vanderbilt. Doncic and Austin Reaves both have player options for the 2026-27 season and that'll be the third year of Dalton Knecht and Bronny James' rookie deals, but the team is otherwise a totally blank slate.
We can therefore consider these next couple of seasons an audition for the likes of Rui Hachimura, Dorian Finney-Smith, Gabe Vincent, and Maxi Kleber, all of whom are under contract next season for somewhere between $11.5 million and $18.3 million. By the way, look at all those tradable contracts! You can package some together or you can even get solid players for just one of them without triggering the first apron restrictions by taking in more money than you send out. They’re suddenly set up really well for the future, with one of the top two or three 5-to-10-year building blocks in the NBA and a lot of flexibility beyond next year.
I feel like I am both running out of things to say and have so much more to say about this, but my thoughts are so haphazard that I have to just end it here. But before I do…
The Jazz
Congrats on your second-round picks, Danny Ainge.
The trade is explained by the financial savings for the Dallas ownership, who may truly have been worried about Luka's conditioning (wouldn't you be if you were shelling out almost 500 million a year for 7 years?). And no, there's no guarantee some other team would have been willing to pick up that contract if Luka's conditioning and diet issues continued. In the apron age, teams are having to be more careful about how they spread their dollars. And there's already one team who turned down Luka before at his current contract cost ...
As usual in the NBA, money makes itself heard.
I don't understand the outrage across the league. I'm not a Lakers' fan but all this envy of their "fortune" is pathetic.