It's Okay to Be Angry About Basketball Forever
Is it too late to write about how the Dallas Mavericks traded Luka? No. Rage is eternal.
The trade cleared. The reverberations have been felt and recorded. The affected players have put on their new jerseys and integrated into their new teams.
But you never, ever have to move on from it.
The start of February was the end of one of the relationship between the Dallas Mavericks and its most promising star since…well, since the last time the team and city fell in love with a preternaturally gifted European ball player. Despite leading the team to the Finals last season and regularly generating farcical stats and highlights, and despite his proximity to the current fandom’s overall love of their team, Luka Doncic was traded from the Mavs to the Los Angeles Lakers.
You already know the terms of the trade. How could you not when it’s been discussed practically everywhere? It was a breathtakingly stupid move that generated no shortage of press—hell, even the nerds at NPR covered it. So I won’t go into the details, both because of this widespread coverage and for the sake of managing my blood pressure, but also because the details of the trade matter less than the execution, which saw the Mavericks front office scheme in private then line up to kick a beloved star player and community member on his supposedly-too-heavy backside on his way out.
We received explanations and defenses for the trade and why it happened the way it did, and frankly, they sucked. The gist is that replacing Luka with Anthony Davis would be better for the long-term success of the team, even though we gave up a younger player we’d built a roster around for someone older and with more injury troubles, troubles that arose literally the first game he played for his new team.
It was also supposed to save us in the long term because we’ve been told Luka was a ticking time bomb, that his conditioning and weight would hold him back from lasting greatness. They haven’t done a damn thing to his past and current greatness, and they certainly didn’t hurt his relationship to the team and region, but the front office decided to trust in what it can quantify and understand (discipline and the extractable data from past successes) rather than appreciate the blessing of a loyal and popular superstar who could easily have at least a decade of elite ballplaying ahead of him.
Essentially, this move can be interpreted as the front office feeling that the soul of the team is actually their machinations, data crunching, and business savvy. A sense that because the success of the star player and team did not correlate with what success looks like in the simplified, quantifiable terms that members of the ownership class tend to prefer, something needed to be done, effects on morale and reputation be damned.
Of course, the trade didn’t just hurt because it sat on shaky logic. The arrangements were furtive, made in private and thrust upon all of us with shocking suddenness. This is key to both why it stings so much and why you should never let this action go for two reasons: One, it’s an insulting way to treat anyone, let alone your best player and a pillar of DFW culture. Two, it betrays what I believe to be the true motivation behind the trade, the innate desire of an executive with Executive Brain Disorder1 to make Bold Business Moves and Exciting Business Decisions.
The latter point, supposition I’ll admit, is being made in response to both the machinations behind the trade and the drive to see it through. Reporting has revealed that Mavericks GM Nico Harrison was determined to make the trade happen without the pesky interference of its target. This speaks to both a dunderheaded certainty about the move and a general lack of feeling around who it would affect—or at least a preference for the maneuver over the impact on its subject, the larger roster, or the fans.
From the executive perspective, the effects of this trade on team and fan morale, and on the comfort new players have with joining a franchise that would be so cold toward its superstar, are surmountable provided the trade leads to more success, making the team more attractive to championship-hungry players and placating fans. But this is the executive perspective, which exalts profits and success while lacking regard for matters of the soul. The executive perspective persists and takes command when it sees fit in sports and in pretty much everything, especially these days. The Luka trade isn’t the first time this has borne out, but it’s an especially galling case in an especially trying time.
I’ve been trying to make more time for sports, specifically basketball and the Dallas Mavericks, partly because we’re stuck in what appears to be a national death spiral. Technophilic racists with delusions of grandeur and their squadrons of nerds are pilfering our national coffers, poisoning our discourse, and generally fucking up our country. I didn’t want to look away per se, but it’s nice to have recourses when one needs to catch their breath and decompress.
Now, I can’t watch a game or even read about the team without thinking about the hubris and sociopathic lack of concern that went into sending our star to a powerful rival2. This trade may not be in the same league as what’s happening to the United States, but both are happening because the people at the top of the economic ladder are free to remake the world in their grisly, dumbass images.
In so many ways, we are made to feel powerless while the rich do things to us. Whether it’s private equity buying and bleeding a favorite restaurant franchise, an arrogant front office trusting what’s in their self-help books more than what’s on the court, or virulent demagogues tearing down America brick by brick as punishment for marginal gains in equity and equality, we’re supposed to be little more than distressed onlookers, or worse, faithful supporters.
The way out of this circumstance is past my field of vision; I don’t know what we ultimately do to make things better, but the first thing we can do is be irate. Even if you have nothing to give but vocal opposition, take solace in the fact that you have the potential to annoy these bad actors. The GM can hide from press conferences, but he can’t hide from the radiation generated by the Mavericks fandom’s outrage. The government can do…well, a lot of illegal shit, apparently, but they can be gotten to. I hope. To be honest, the solution to what’s befallen the Mavericks (pushing them to fire Harrison and generally make a good faith effort to stop being a franchise that ratfucks players) seems more attainable right now than the solution to what’s afflicting our country. Still, I’m not letting that get in the way of being angry at all the bigotry and naked greed, which is a start!
I may not be a Mavericks fan anymore. At the very least, I can say that I might not be one, but I’m not fully severing my relationship with them. For now, that’s because I need to see this trade blow up in the faces of those who made it happen. I’d like to think the connection also persists because the relationship is salvageable, albeit with some significant changes to the organization.
I do fully intend to maintain a relationship to the game; whether that means moving my support to a new team or becoming a devoted but neutral observer remains to be seen. I have no plans to let go of my anger over what’s gone down. It may not stop this or other franchises from behaving in similarly cruel ways, but it can inoculate me against turning into someone who can abide these shit decisions. Based on what’s happening at a national level, it could be one of the last inoculations I can enjoy.
I don’t have a grounded, researched definition for Executive Brain Disorder, more a feeling, but the gist is that someone with Executive Brain Disorder loves to feel responsible for making a company money, so they’ll do any number of illogical, evil, and just plain stupid things if they think they’ll get credit for making numbers go up. Someone who develops a love of capitalism for the love of the game rather than just for what it does for them materially. Hence the term “disorder,” because that’s a fucked up way to be.
Not really room for this discussion in the main text, so I’ll address it here—I am not prepared to become a Lakers fan even with Luka on the roster, even though I do live in Los Angeles and feel I should adopt at least one local team. Frankly, it just feels tacky to jump on their bandwagon. It would actually be easier to do if they didn’t have such a long and storied history of success. This is another area where the human spirit shines with respect to caring about sports: If liking who you liked was just about maximizing how many victories you get to celebrate, it would be a cold, mechanical pursuit. If you don’t have the pull of hometown pride to guide you, then you gotta vibe your way into a favorite team. Feel the hum and quiver of the soul as it discovers a wavelength it likes. Or you could choose based on your favorite color or mascot.