Everyone was shocked when news broke on Saturday night that Luka Doncic had been traded to the Lakers for Anthony Davis: Fans, players on other teams, and even the players involved in the trade and their agents had no idea this was happening until minutes before it was complete.
Also in the dark: Other general managers and front offices — and they are pissed about it. Those other GMs see this as Dallas GM Nico Harrison neglecting his duty by not shopping Doncic around to extract the most value in trade instead of lasering in on just Davis and the Lakers. Here is what some executives told Howard Beck at The Ringer.
“The return sucks. Your job is to get the best return,” said another Western Conference team executive.
“It’s shortsighted,” said an Eastern Conference team executive, adding: “If you want to do this, shop the guy. The deals you could have gotten for him are ridiculous.”
ESPN’s Ramona Shelburne and Tim MacMahon said executives were “furious and jealous.”
Unfathomable,” one Western Conference executive told ESPN.
“I’m stunned,” an Eastern Conference executive texted.
From the Dallas perspective, there were two parts to this trade, and around the league executives and fans are still trying to wrap their heads around either part of it. Let alone both of them together.
The first was the decision to move on from Doncic in the first place — teams do not trade away a 25-year-old, First-Team All-NBA five years running, top five players in the world entering their prime unless forced to do so. Doncic forced no such thing — he is literally just about to close escrow on a new $12 million home in the Dallas area. Doncic planned to stay with the team both because he wanted to win in Dallas — he had visions of following the footsteps of Dirk Nowitzki, playing his entire career with the franchise — and because they were the only team that could offer him a supermax contract this summer of five-years, $345 million.
It was that contract that gave Dallas some pause.
“There’s some unique things about [Doncic’s] contract, that we had to pay attention to,” Harrison said at his press conference. “There’s other teams that were loading up. He was going to be able to decide [as a potential free agent in 2026], to his make his own decision at some point of whether he wants to be here or not, whether we want to supermax him or not, or whether he wants to opt-out. So I think we had to take all that into consideration and feel like we got out in front of what could have been a tumultuous summer.”
“Tumultuous summer” is an interesting phrasing by Harrison.
In theory, the supermax contract was designed specifically for teams such as Dallas to hang onto their superstar players, like Doncic, and not have him bolting to another market offering similar money. The idea is to keep the best players with their teams by incentivizing them with larger paydays. However, Dallas appeared to have been scared off by large supermax number, particularly when tied to Harrison’s concerns about Doncic’s commitment to conditioning. Doncic has never shown the commitment to conditioning stars like LeBron James have. There was a sense that the calf strain that has kept Doncic sidelined since Christmas this season might become the new norm, so for that and other reasons there was friction between Dallas and Doncic, Harrison talked himself into trading Doncic now at what should be the peak of his market.
Except Harrison didn’t get a peak of market return, which is the second part of this trade nobody understands — and it’s the part other GMs are angry about. Why did the Mavericks settle for so much less than they could have gotten?
Dallas did land Harrison’s top target — All-NBA two-way center Anthony Davis — and they also got the Lakers 2029 first-round pick. However, the Mavericks didn’t demand the Lakers’ other available first-round pick (2031) or a quality young player like Dalton Knecht — or both. The Knicks gave up five first-round picks to get Mikal Bridges last summer, and while a good player he’s no Doncic. Many other GMs would have liked the chance to beat the Lakers’ offer.
Harrison had his reasons for wanting to keep this quiet, starting with the chaos he knew would ensue if word of the Doncic being available got out — and he understood there would be a massive backlash from fans.
Mavs GM Nico Harrison decided early on, team sources said, that the best way to trade a player of Doncic’s caliber was to pick the trade —and the star— he wanted, rather than open up the process, to avoid Doncic and his agent exerting their own leverage and the crippling fan…
— Ramona Shelburne (@ramonashelburne) February 3, 2025
More than just fans, if word of the trade got out Doncic himself would have complained, fans would have sided with him, and Dallas’ new ownership likely would have balked at any trade — former Mavericks majority owner (who sold his majority share last year) Marc Cuban unquestionably would have and killed the deal.
So Harrison went into stealth mode, working only with Lakers GM Rob Pelinka. Even Danny Ainge, the Utah executive who was the third part of the trade, taking on Jalen Hood-Schifino, didn’t know the principal players involved until less than an hour before the deal was finalized.
Harrison got his man, and Dallas didn’t get dramatically worse in the short term — and they would argue they got better. Harrison wants to build a defense-first team and culture, and Davis fits that much better in Harrison’s mind, even if AD is six years older than Doncic and not near the offensive force.
“I’ll just say there’s levels to it,” Harrison said of how players mesh in a team culture. “And there’s people that fit the culture, and there’s people that come in and add to the culture. And those are two distinct things, and I believe the people that were coming in are adding to the culture.”
That culture has to be strong, because in the NBA talent wins out most of the time, and the Dallas Mavericks did not get enough talent back in sending out Doncic.
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