Mavs fans for life? After Luka Doncic trade, not necessarily: ‘It’s just such a massive betrayal’

On Saturday night, Ben Collins watched “Flow,” the Golden Globe-winning animated film about a cat that finds friendship as it tries to survive a flood. “Very beautiful movie,” Collins said. It left him feeling zen, like “maybe life is going to be OK, these are just the waves of life.” 

Five minutes after it ended, he saw that, according to ESPN’s Shams Charania, the Dallas Mavericks had traded Luka Doncic to the Los Angeles Lakers. No more zen.

“I mean this sincerely: It was the first time in my life when I was like, ‘Oh, I’m not awake right now,'” Collins said. “When I read it, I was like, ‘I’m not awake, this isn’t real.’ And then I was like, ‘He was hacked, though, so that’s fine. I’m awake, but he was hacked.’ And then, yeah. I am … disconsolate is probably the word.”

Collins’ girlfriend “immediately went into triage mode,” he said. 

“She was like, ‘It’s going to be OK, take a beta blocker.'” 

The trade, though, “was f—ing brutal.” 

“It was the last vestige of, like, a calmer world,” Collins said. “Like, Luka got us through the pandemic. We had the Western Conference Finals run with him and he was, like, the nice thing in that time, just as Dirk [Nowitzki] got us through those 20 years before it. I think it’s just such a massive betrayal.” 

Collins’ favorite Mavs podcast, “Pod Maverick,” was doing a live show. He joined in and offered his dire analysis of the situation.

Kirk Henderson, who co-hosts the show with Josh Bowe and runs the blog Mavs Moneyball, expected to talk about the trade for about 90 minutes. Instead, he sat there for about three-and-a-half hours. “The later stages were people waking up across the world,” he said. 

One fan said he’d torn all of his fingernails off. Another said that his parents kept “calling me to see whether I’m actually, like, alive and functioning.” More than one said they weren’t sure if they’d ever watch the Mavericks again.

Henderson has been a Mavs fan since he was a teenager. “For a significant portion of my life I lived outside of the Dallas area, and the internet really helped me find basketball and find basketball friends,” he said. “Why I do these shows is that I wanted people that were in my spot watching games by themselves, not having anyone to talk basketball with, to have a reason to actually talk basketball.” 

Why he did this particular show was “to give people an outlet for their grief. And it is grief. You wait multiple lifetimes for a player as good as Luka Doncic.”

He added: “If you’re going to suffer, you’re at least suffering together.”

‘The kind of trade that ruins a franchise’

To Henderson, the trade, in which Dallas received Anthony Davis, Max Christie and a 2029 first-round pick from Los Angeles, was unfathomable. 

“A lot of trades, you sit there and you look at them and you can find some justification a little later,” he said. “This looks worse 12 hours later. I can’t imagine what it’s going to look like in 12 days. I can’t imagine what it’s going to look like in 12 months. It is the kind of trade that ruins a franchise.” 

Had the Mavs’ franchise player requested a trade, fans could be upset with him, but Doncic had reportedly planned to sign a supermax extension this coming summer.

“The GM decided this,” Henderson said. “One person. And that’s why Nico Harrison will go down as the villain.”

There is no precedent for trading a top-three player out of the blue, weeks before his 26th birthday. Harrison has said that he believes the trade will make the team better, but few fans or observers agree. “It’s like Icarus,” Henderson said. “I mean, this is a GM who thinks he can fly.” 

On Sunday afternoon, some Mavericks fans went to American Airlines Arena to protest. One had a sign that read, “WORST TRADE IN NBA HISTORY.” Three dressed as pallbearers and brought a casket.

“They f—ing should,” Collins said. “They should boo the s— out of the team. They should boo Anthony Davis. I have no problem with that guy, but, like, sorry, buddy. You are the avatar for this. They don’t announce Nico Harrison in the starting lineup, buddy. Anybody who shows up should boo them, and they shouldn’t show up.”

Collins, who grew up in Massachusetts, became a Mavs fan when he was 12 years old. Mark Cuban had seen something he’d written “on, like, angelfire.net or whatever” about choosing them as his team, Collins said. Over email, Cuban asked if he’d like to write for the team’s official website. Soon, he found himself interviewing Nowitzki in the locker room. His fandom endured as the team transitioned from the Dirk era to the Luka era, as he went from writing for SLAM to covering disinformation and conspiracy theories for NBC News to becoming the CEO of The Onion. But it is over now.

“I don’t care about this team anymore,” Collins said. 

Nowitzki’s journey “genuinely inspired me as a human being,” Collins said. The Mavericks traded Nowitzki’s best friend, Steve Nash, then they lost in the Finals, then Nowitzki won an MVP award that he accepted in a “weird, dingy closet because they’re out in the first round,” then he went to the Australian Outback to find himself and then, after taking criticism for supposedly not being tough enough, he led them to the 2011 title. 

“I think about it all the time,” he said. “It helped me formulate the idea of taking risks in my life, and, like, overcoming adversity. And I don’t think Nico understands the assignment. I don’t want a GM to be brave. I want the player that I like to remain on the team to overcome these things. It really is, like, why do you watch sports? I watch sports because it tells a story about life. And the story that was told about life here is like, ‘Oh, we’re just going to take everything nice away from you.’ It’s awful.”

‘They just blew it up for no reason’

Henderson is pressing on with his fandom, site and podcast. “I don’t want the Mavericks to fail,” he said. But he is concerned, and he thinks the franchise should be, too. Since the trade was reported, he has received a barrage of messages, some from people he hadn’t spoken to recently.

“It’s like high school friends, college friends, people I’ve met once,” Henderson said. “Facebook messages: ‘What is happening here?’ You would have thought that somebody died based on the reaction that I’ve gotten here.”

People have told Henderson that they love “Pod Maverick,” but have no reason to listen to it anymore. “Quite candidly, this sort of thing could kill my website and kill my podcast,” he said. In Dallas, the team is already a distant third in popularity behind the Cowboys and Rangers, and he worries that “even fewer people are going to be interested in finding and seeking out these Mavericks because, even if they’re good, the chances of them being great are low.” 

He has had to tell diehards that, no, the trade doesn’t mean that ownership is going to move the Mavs to Las Vegas. 

“This is a nuclear bomb on this franchise that, frankly, they don’t deserve to recover from,” Collins said. “Dude, I used to cover conspiracy theories for a living, and I’m like, ‘Are they doing this to move to Las Vegas? Is that what’s happening?’ This trade is so bad that the on-its-face explanation is either the biggest case of malpractice in the history of professional sports, or there’s something fishy happening. There’s two options, and the part of your brain that wants to make connections in your head might lead you to an answer that is malice instead of incompetence. And I haven’t ruled out either yet.”

Henderson and Collins both said that, if Harrison is being transparent about the reasoning for the trade, it’s worse than there being some kind of conspiracy. In a press conference on Sunday, Harrison said that Dallas negotiated only with the Lakers. 

“If you’re going to do this, you make phone calls,” Collins said. “You don’t just call your friend that you had coffee with and talk through your galaxy-brain idea and then do it. You try to get the best value for, at worst, the third-best player in the NBA. It’s crazy.”

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Collins said that he doesn’t think the Mavericks will make the playoffs this season, given that they’re dealing with numerous injuries, they have to integrate new players and they appear to be moving toward a “1995-style” lineup construction with Davis at the 4 and P.J. Washington moving to the 3. If this doesn’t work, not only will Harrison “be fired from the Mavericks,” Henderson said, “he probably won’t work in basketball again.”

“He will be the man who traded Luka Doncic. That’s who he will be.” 

Henderson believes that “we’re never going to see a trade this lopsided ever again.”

It is a “very strange feeling,” Collins said, to “sleep through the night and wake up in immediate anger.” More than just the basketball consequences, he’s mad about the “collateral damage” of the trade. This will affect “the Josh Bowes of the world, who was able to get his kid clothes and food because he ran a Mavs blog and a Mavs podcast that people listened to because of Luka Doncic.”

To Mavs fans, it mattered that Doncic liked to “go sign shirts for sick kids,” Collins said, and “had bought into this whole stupid f—ing thing. They had this motherf—er wearing cowboy boots and a cowboy hat yesterday. They had him doing the whole shebang. He had a terrible haircut and was walking around Dallas being a pedestrian, lovely dude, and then he’s going to sign up for seven more years of it. And that is a miracle. And they just blew it up for no reason.”

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In this respect, Collins doesn’t think that Harrison and the Mavericks fully considered the magnitude of their decision.

“It feels culturally of a moment where, like, two guys who are completely isolated from the real world just made a decision that impacted tons of people’s lives, and they didn’t understand what they did. And now everyone just has to show up to work and be like, ‘I can’t f—ing believe it.'”

Collins continued: “It just seems indicative of the larger thing. It seems like these people are totally separate of the world in which they inhabit and why people do things. If colleges aren’t completely shut down in the next six months, I could go and write a Ph.D about the analogs to this and AI and the government. But I don’t know. At this stage, in this moment, it’s just upsetting.”