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Luka Dončić, LeBron James and the biggest winners and losers of the Lakers-Mavericks trade

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Luka Dončić, LeBron James and the biggest winners and losers of the Lakers-Mavericks trade

Any time a newsbreaker has to follow up a report of a trade with, “Yes, this is real,” and “It’s 1000% real,” you know you have an absolute brain-melting stunner of a swap on your hands.

We awoke on Sunday morning in a world where Luka Dončić is a Laker, Anthony Davis is a Maverick, and the landscape of the NBA has changed. The reverberations from this one will be felt far, wide and for an awfully long time; let’s start getting our arms around it.

What follows is a stab at a first draft of history — a thumbnail sketch of who and what seems to have been helped and hurt through one of the most shocking moves the NBA has ever seen. We begin with the team that, yet again, lands the brightest superstar:

Strip out the spin, and here’s what’s left: The Los Angeles Lakers just traded a 31-year-old big man in his 13th season, a pair of 21-year-old guards not widely seen as future stars, a 2029 first-round draft pick and the Clippers’ 2025 second-round pick … for one of the five best basketball players on the planet.

Through six NBA seasons, Luka Dončić ranks third in league history in points per game, 12th in assists per game, and fourth in assist percentage and triple-doubles. He’s made the All-NBA First Team for the last five seasons, and has finished in the top five in MVP voting three times. He was the unquestioned best player on an NBA Finals team seven months ago. He is 25 years old and under contract through the end of next season (with a player option for 2026-27), giving the Lakers a long runway to work out a new longer-term extension to ensure that he will be the signature superstar of the NBA franchise most associated with signature superstars for the foreseeable future. (Which, in fairness, given the state of play in an NBA where Luka friggin’ Dončić just got traded, might not be as long as you’d think.)

This is a dream scenario for a Lakers franchise whose hopes for perennial championship contention after signing LeBron James and trading for Anthony Davis had resulted in one title, one Western Conference finals berth, and three play-in tournament appearances in five seasons. As excellent as Davis has been and still is — I just voted for him to start in the All-Star Game two weeks ago — the Lakers have outscored opponents by just two points in nearly 4,600 minutes when he has played without LeBron since his arrival in L.A. in 2019. Not two points per 100 possessions; two points total.

Those numbers have trended more positively over the past two seasons, as James has finally started to show some more signs of slowing down and begun actively referring to Davis as the Lakers’ best player. But it was reasonable to wonder whether a version of the Lakers built around AD — an elite finisher and high-end defensive anchor who isn’t the sort of shot creator who all but guarantees a top-flight offense by himself — could sustain bona fide contention as he moved toward his mid-30s. If he was the price of doing business to land Dončić — whose Mavericks have finished in the top 10 in offensive efficiency in four of the last five seasons, and routinely scored at top-five-or-better levels with Luka at the controls — then it’s a price you gladly pay if you’re the Lakers.

Davis has long represented effective excellence, but Dončić offers breathtaking brilliance. And for decades — from Mikan and Baylor to West and Wilt, from Kareem and Magic to Shaq and Kobe, and from LeBron, now, to Luka — breathtaking brilliance has been the Lakers’ brand. Whatever this deal doesn’t guarantee, it does ensure that, for at least the next few years, the brand remains strong.

“The sense around the league, when talking to rival scouts and front-office personnel,” Jovan Buha of The Athletic wrote on Jan. 21, “is that standing pat or making a half-measure trade (likely one or two second-round picks) is more likely than the Lakers going all-in and trading both of their future first-round picks that can be moved.”

“The Lakers’ recent discussions with teams,” ESPN’s Tim Bontemps and Brian Windhorst reported on Jan. 24, “show little sign of aggression, sources say.”

Pelinka exited January seemingly holding a pair of first-round picks and not much else, reportedly looking for a serviceable center and some ball-handling help. He enters February with LUKA DONČIĆ — and he’s still got one of the first-round picks.

That’ll do. (Now he really needs that center, though.)

In his first on-the-record comments about the trade, Mavericks president of basketball operations Nico Harrison told ESPN’s Tim MacMahon that he pulled off the deal because “I believe that defense wins championships.”

Subsequent reporting cited “extreme frustration throughout the [Mavericks] organization about Dončić’s lackadaisical approach to diet and conditioning, which Dallas’ decision-makers believed negatively impacted his durability” … which is a long way of saying that they think the best ability is availability.

For all the new types of information that teams have access to and use in their decisions, sometimes the rationale is the same kind of stuff you might’ve heard from your coach, or your uncle, in the fifth grade. The game is always changing; the game, though, remains the same.

However stunned you were to learn that Luka had been traded … imagine how stunned Luka must have been.

Again: top-five player, already likely on a glide path to the Hall of Fame, just entering his prime fresh off a first Finals appearance, firmly entrenched as the sun around which everything in Dallas orbited … until, suddenly, he wasn’t. According to the post-mortem reporting, Dončić didn’t request this trade; instead, it was the Mavericks who approached the Lakers about it.

As longtime NBA insider Marc Stein put it, Dallas’ decision-makers had “decided that they no longer trusted Dončić as the heir to the franchise.” That sure seems like a dramatic, 180-degree change in the way Dallas’ brain trust, led by Harrison, viewed Dončić. That shift was predicated, according to a slew of follow-up reports, on concerns regarding Luka’s commitment to conditioning, the possibility that hard living and light work might conspire to expedite his aging curve, and — most notably — the downside risk of committing a five-year, $345 million supermax contract to a player who has missed 45 games over the past three seasons with a litany of ankle, knee, quad, hamstring, groin and calf injuries, the latest of which has kept him on the shelf since Christmas and ensured he won’t be eligible for year-end awards consideration this season. (Stein reports that Dončić had been eyeing a return next Saturday; we’ll see whether the trade changes that expected timetable.)

It’s easy to imagine a player of Luka’s caliber hand-waving those concerns. Remember: Dončić has been the wonder boy, the special one, the prince and the prize since before he could drive. From Slovenia to Real Madrid to Dallas, there has never been an environment in which his brilliance was not the most important element in the equation, the most important factor in determining what a franchise did — which, as often as not, wound up being “whatever Luka wants.”

Now, in one fell swoop, he has been moved, in the middle of the season, by the only NBA franchise he’s ever known, without his say-so. He has lost out on that supermax contract, which only the Mavericks could have offered him (though he does have a pathway to recoup most of that money over time). He has been stunned by a realization that must have felt like a bucket of cold water to the face: that, in an environment where franchise cornerstones will soon be commanding nearly half a billion dollars in salary under a collective bargaining agreement in which spending deep into the luxury tax imposes draconian team-building restrictions, even the special ones aren’t invincible. Even the wunderkinds can be left wondering what the hell just hit them.

Which brings us to …

… how Dončić responds to that realization.

The Lakers are betting that his supernova talent, combined with what you’d imagine is a furnace of fury at having been sent out of Texas on a rail under cover of night, will produce an even better Luka: one fueled by the desire to make Dallas pay for this, devoted to getting into the kind of shape that shows he’s worth every penny the Mavs cost him, committed single-mindedly to the task of becoming the latest luminary to land with the Lakers and wind up in the promised land. They’re betting that the reward of paying Dallas’ asking price — even knowing that it’s probably not as much as Dallas could’ve commanded in an open market, and surmising that Dallas must be doing things this way for a reason — is worth the risk of whatever might come with Luka over the years.

The Mavericks? They’re betting that the guy they’ve seen behind the scenes for the last half-decade — the one routinely dinged for showing up to camp in subpar shape and playing at over-par weight, whom they’d become accustomed to seeing pull up with a hitch in his giddy-up multiple times a season, whose two longest playoff runs ended with him misfiring a hail of jumpers against eventual championship defenses — isn’t going to find better health or calisthenic religion as his career enters his second decade. They’re betting that, as painful as moving on from one of the greatest players in franchise history is, it’s less painful than it would be to pay him $345 million to miss a quarter of every season, with their pathways to contention dwindling year over year.

“We really feel like we got ahead of what was going to be a tumultuous summer,” Harrison told Brad Townsend of the Dallas Morning News.

One of those bets is going to go bust. It’s going to be fascinating to find out which.

It seems fair to say that the Dallas faithful aren’t too optimistic about their end of the deal bearing fruit:

Here’s where we’ll note — just for the purposes of being fair and balanced — that there was plenty of skepticism surrounding the first three huge trade deadline moves of Harrison’s tenure: dealing Kristaps Porziņģis to the Wizards for Spencer Dinwiddie and Dāvis Bertāns in 2022; trading Dinwiddie, Dorian Finney-Smith and draft picks to Brooklyn for Kyrie Irving in 2023; and turning Grant Williams, Seth Curry and several first-rounders into P.J. Washington and Daniel Gafford in 2024. The first trade turned the page on the failed Dončić-Porziņġis experiment and set the table for a conference finals run; the latter two sparked last June’s Finals trip.

Maybe, given that track record, fans should give Harrison the benefit of the doubt.

“I’m sorry [fans] are frustrated,” Harrison told reporters on Sunday. “It’s something we believe in as an organization that’s going to make us better. We believed it sets us up to win, not only now, but in the future. And when we win, I believe the frustration will go away.”

The glass-half-empty view, though: Maybe those moves only worked as well as they did because the Mavericks had Luka friggin’ Dončić.

“You better be sure his body is going to fall apart,” an Eastern Conference executive told Bontemps. “That’s all I’m going to say.”

Speaking of bodies not falling apart …

In the short term, Davis gets to line up next to the rock-solid Gafford; in the long term, he can slot in alongside sophomore game-changer Dereck Lively II. No more 35-minute nights of banging bodies at the 5. Mission accomplished! (And lest we wonder if AD’s cool with the move … he waived a $5.9 million trade kicker to get it done while giving Dallas brass more flexibility to make further moves and work the buyout market. Seems like he’s on board!)

Harrison has reportedly wanted Davis for some time, targeting the Lakers as a Dončić destination specifically — rather than opening the Luka bidding to every team in the league — because L.A. could offer AD: an in-his-prime, two-way star who combines high-efficiency interior scoring, elite rebounding and the capacity to defang opposing offenses whether protecting the rim or erasing space on the perimeter. Mavericks head coach Jason Kidd, who coached AD as an assistant on the title-winning 2019-20 Lakers, can now deploy massive frontcourts featuring the 6-foot-10 Gafford, (eventually) the 7-1 Lively, 6-10 Davis and 6-7 Washington up front, and a range of 6-5 to 6-7 swingmen (Klay Thompson, Naji Marshall, Quentin Grimes, Spencer Dinwiddie, the newly arrived Max Christie, the just-returned Dante Exum) on the wing next to Irving.

It remains to be seen whether playing AD at the 4 with non-shooting 5s like Gafford and Lively results in too much offensive congestion for Dallas to consistently generate high-value looks in the half-court — though, with that complement of guards and Washington shooting 38% from deep on nearly five attempts per 36 minutes, there’s at least some cause for optimism about the ecosystem into which the Mavs would plop those the two-big tandems.

What seems clear, though, is that the Mavs are gonna be friggin’ huge, should be better equipped at locking down the paint, and could have the ingredients of a top-five defense … which, if Kyrie, AD and Co. can brute-force their way into an above-average offense, would give them roughly the same formula that propelled them to last season’s phenomenal finish and Finals run. And having Davis under contract on an extension through at least 2027 gives Dallas a multi-year window in which to maximize a construction that Harrison seems to think gives the Mavs a better chance of contention than it had before Saturday.

“He fits our timeframe,” Harrison told reporters Sunday. “If you pair him with Kyrie and the rest of the guys, he fits right along with our timeframe to win now and win in the future. And the future to me is three, four years from now. The future 10 years from now, I don’t know. They’ll probably bury me and [Kidd] by then. Or we’ll bury ourselves.”

For all the talk over the years about James operating as his teams’ de facto GM, orchestrating every move from behind the scenes just as he would manipulate the pieces on the chessboard on the floor, he reportedly had no idea this blockbuster was coming:

Whether you believe that or not, the nature of a blockbuster that imports a player 15 years James’ junior — one that Pelinka heralded as the arrival of “a one-of-a-kind, young global superstar who will lead this franchise for years to come” — lays bare a new state of affairs in Lakerland. As Dan Woike of the Los Angeles Times wrote in the aftermath of the deal, “The trade […] means that getting James another run at a title in the short term is not the Lakers’ top priority.” Which, naturally, invites questions about what LeBron’s priorities might be, and whether we might find they’ve changed come the summer.

As unbelievable as it is that LeBron is averaging 24 points, 7.6 rebounds and 9.1 assists per game on 51/38/77 shooting splits at age-40, and about to start in his 21st All-Star Game, nobody knows how long he can keep this, or some version of this, up. Before Saturday, the looming specter of the end of King James’ reign cast a long shadow over the Lakers’ future. As of Sunday, though, that future will now be illuminated by another shining superstar — one the franchise expects will supplant James as its leading light. For the last six years, the Lakers have been LeBron’s team. This deal says that, soon enough, that won’t be true anymore.

That said:

LeBron wasted little time in confirming that he’s not in any rush to waive his no-trade clause, and that he intends to stay put in L.A. through Thursday’s trade deadline. Seems pretty smart!

Reasonable people can disagree over whether Dončić at this stage in his career is a better running buddy for James than Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh were back in 2010, or Irving and Kevin Love were in 2014, or Davis was in 2019. What is clear, though, is that outside of making his way to Denver, LeBron was not going to find a better playmaking partner than Luka — one of the few players alive with a credible claim to being James’ equal as a facilitator in the pick-and-roll; in forcing a defense to commit multiple bodies to stopping him in order to open up something juicy on the weak side; in predicting and executing the kinds of passes that only a handful of players ever have even seen; in solving and breaking even the most complex coverages in real time.

LeBron can no longer guarantee a top-10 offense or a playoff berth on his own; a healthy Luka effectively can. I don’t know how long LeBron wants to keep playing. A partnership with Dončić, though, gives him yet another megawatt young partner who could help him remain in the mix for deep playoff runs for however long he does.

L.A. entered Sunday giving up 115.7 points per 100 non-garbage-time possessions without Davis manning the middle, according to Cleaning the Glass — a rate of defensive (in)efficiency that would sit 22nd in the NBA for the full season. It’s difficult to see things getting much better if head coach JJ Redick has to construct lineups around the 40-year-old James, the oft-derided Dončić and the oft-targeted Austin Reaves, especially without Christie, an ascendant on-ball defender, at the point of attack, and without a high-end rim protector behind them. (Sorry for the stray, Jaxson Hayes.)

In the absence of a new 7-foot anchor in the paint — which I’d expect Pelinka to continue searching for between now and Thursday’s buzzer (sorry again, Jaxson) — I’d anticipate Redick and Co. to lean into switching, trying to leverage the liked-sized-ness and physicality of groupings featuring James, Dončić, recent addition and longtime Luka buddy Dorian Finney-Smith, new arrival Maxi Kleber, Rui Hachimura, Jarred Vanderbilt, Dalton Knecht and Cam Reddish. Whether a switch-almost-everything approach with aggressive help and an attempt to force more turnovers can generate anything close to a league-average defense remains to be seen. It might not need to be much better than that, though, because …

… I’m betting that the Lakers, who largely underwhelmed in half-court point production during the LeBron-AD era, are going to score a lot of points.

With AD unavailable for Saturday’s matchup with the Knicks, the Lakers leaned heavier into smaller lineups, with Finney-Smith operating as a small-ball 5 (which he did throughout his tenure in Brooklyn, and at times in Dallas) alongside some combination of James, Hachimura and Vanderbilt, with Reaves, Christie and Gabe Vincent in the backcourt. Against the drop-coverage-heavy Knicks, Finney-Smith drilled five of six 3-pointers; the Lakers went 19-for-40 from deep as a team; and James, all 40 years and 21 seasons of him, went for 33-11-12 in an impressive double-digit win.

You can kind of mind’s-eye it from here: Luka on the ball in LeBron’s place; LeBron bumping up a slot, moving from point to power forward and playing more like Draymond Green as a short-roll playmaker in the pick-and-roll; Finney-Smith or Kleber spacing the floor at the 5; acres of space and opportunities for two of the most visionary playmakers in recent NBA history to seize and exploit. Sprinkle in Hayes — a consistent high-efficiency finisher in the two-man game dating back to his days in New Orleans, and a nice above-the-rim target for a lob-threat-loving playmaker like Dončić — and you’ve got the makings of an offense that could rise from eighth in half-court scoring efficiency up toward the top of the league … which, for the record, is where the Mavs have lived for most of the last half-dozen years, especially with Luka at the controls.

Harrison might not be wrong that defense wins championships, but in this era — one where the last two titles were won by overwhelming offenses, and the two before that went to a defense-snapping chaos agent in Stephen Curry and a defense-destroying battering ram in Giannis Antetokounmpo — you’ve also got to be able to short-circuit and unlock the elite defenses you’ll see along the way. In James and Dončić, Los Angeles now boasts two of the very best 16-game offensive players in the world; if the Lakers can get to mid-April, you can bet they’ll feel pretty confident about their chances of making it to June.

On the other side of the coin:

Whatever problems Dončić created for the Mavericks behind the scenes or on defense, he solved damn near every one of them on offense. His presence on the court all but ensured that everybody else got delicious looks on which to feast:

Without him, the Mavericks’ offense could go from feast to famine.

Davis, for all his skills on the offensive end, has played his best basketball as an elbows-and-in finisher of what others (largely James and Reaves) create for him; self-created, unassisted field goals have accounted for less than 40% of his offensive diet in every season of his career. Without Dončić, Dallas now has one (1) player averaging more than four assists per game: Irving, who is about to turn 33, who has missed significant time every season for seven seasons (and four teams) running, who has already been battling shoulder and back issues for the past couple of months, and whose effectiveness waned considerably by the time he ran up against the longer and more athletic Celtics in the Finals.

Outside of Kyrie, the Mavericks’ top playmaking options are Dinwiddie and Jaden Hardy — both fine enough players capable of producing in spurts, but hardly high-end facilitators who can serve as the backbone of a top-quality offense. Getting back Exum, a really nice connective-tissue passer and playmaker who’s missed most of this season due to injury, should help … but only so much. This Dallas roster was a race car built to be steered by one driver, and that guy races for another team now. Building a new kind of car on the fly is an awfully tall task; if Harrison, Kidd, Irving, Davis and Co. aren’t equal to it, the result could be the Mavericks stalling out — and a premature end to their time as a contender.

The Lakers now definitely need another big man and, after pairing Luka with LeBron, don’t really seem to need Reaves’ ball-handling and shot creation, and still have a first-round pick to play with. The Mavericks now definitely need more ball-handling and shot creation, and now have an extra first-round pick to play with. Ladies and gentlemen, start your trade machines!

On a long enough content-generation timeline, even the juiciest rumored names — Jimmy Butler! De’Aaron Fox! Zach LaVine! — can get kind of stale. An out-of-nowhere move like this one shakes the table, gets the blood pumping, and injects fresh energy into the proceedings. (Jimmy and Pelle Larsson to Dallas for P.J., Klay, Naji, Dwight Powell and some picks, anyone?)

Everything we thought we knew before Saturday night turns out to have been wrong — and, like, galactically so. Just imagine what new worlds we can imagine and destroy between now and Thursday.



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