When did it start to feel real for you? Sorry, more real—it might take another week to fully metabolize, maybe longer. Was it when ESPN’s Shams Charania reiterated that he hadn’t been hacked late Saturday night after breaking one of the most shocking trades in the history of sports? Was it when Dallas Mavericks general manager Nico Harrison took to the mic the following morning and lined his own coffin—in the eyes of Mavs fans and just about everyone else—while trying to explain away the inexplicable? Or maybe it was the flash photo taken just as Luka Doncic was coming off the Lakers private jet, eyes bleary and rose-tinged, putting up the L.A. fingers. (It’s a bit crooked, misaligned, not fully connected. But he’ll have plenty of time to work on his form.)
Looking at Luka’s eyes, you tend to believe the reports that claimed he was caught unawares by the news. How could he suspect that the team that moved heaven and earth to acquire him in 2018, the team that spent the past seven years trying to crack the code on how to build the ideal roster around one of the greatest offensive prodigies in basketball—and succeeded!—would banish him under the cover of darkness? Yet there he was on Sunday night, on a flight with Lakers vice president Rob Pelinka and fellow Dallas departee Maxi Kleber. Another photo op, another look of detachment. It clearly doesn’t feel real to Luka yet, either.
“I thought I’d spend my career here and I wanted so badly to bring you a championship,” Doncic wrote in his official farewell statement to the city of Dallas (and notably not to the Mavericks organization). Of course he’d think that way. The team was three wins away from glory just seven months ago. Now, we’ve somehow reached the point of eulogy. There was a storybook quality to Luka’s arrival in Dallas, the way franchise legend Dirk Nowitzki’s final season coincided with Doncic’s first. Under the gravity of myth, these kinds of coincidences feel like destiny. It’s the kind of spiritual successorship that becomes part of a team’s DNA, the way it’s impossible to tell Victor Wembanyama’s story in San Antonio without referring to the lineage of David Robinson and Tim Duncan before him. These are the kinds of tidy narrative constructions that bridge generations of fans; that they can apparently so easily be ruptured without warning isn’t just disorienting—it’s destabilizing. And, unfortunately, it’s a zero-sum game when you’re dealing with a monolith like the Lakers.
In severing their ties with Luka, the Mavericks have reinforced and reengaged the league’s most prevailing, dominant myth: Every Lakers generation shall be gilded by a superstar, one way or another—deserve really has nothing to do with it. Luka was always the Chosen One, though perhaps his true spiritual lineage wasn’t as Dirk’s inheritor, but as the latest in an even more inevitable chain: the Lakers’ unfathomable, league-shifting deus ex machina.
And as much as I feel for Mavericks fans, I’m too weak a person to resist the allure of the Lakers’ new tandem. Of what Luka might be able to discover about himself through LeBron James—the Lakers’ previous unfathomable, league-shifting deus ex machina—whose career blueprint could only ever be traced by a player with Doncic’s gifts. Part of that blueprint is the work it takes to maintain peak performance for decades. LeBron’s work ethic (and all the resources he’s committed to maintaining his fitness) is part of his legend; jokes about Luka’s Erewhon smoothie era abound, but LeBron himself is both the ultimate motivator and the ultimate proof of concept.
Part of the magic in this pairing is also what Luka might teach LeBron about himself. For the first time in his career, LeBron won’t necessarily be the best creator on his own team. How will that manifest on the court? LeBron’s made it clear that your least worst option in defending Luka in the two-man game is blitzing. You can blitz a Doncic–Daniel Gafford pick-and-roll, but can you blitz the Doncic-James version? LeBron has always had the ability to shape-shift depending on the players around him, but what might it look like if he can expend his energy as a hammer rather than a handyman? There are still layers of his game yet to be fully revealed. At 40, he can be a yassified Draymond Green dismantling defenses with a four-on-three advantage. He can be the Russell Westbrook to Luka’s Nikola Jokic. In this line of work, at LeBron’s age, possibilities don’t exactly open up. But, to state the obvious, he’s different.
LeBron is basketball’s god archivist; where legends like Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant sought dominion over the landscape, LeBron surveyed and canvased the league across eras, endlessly adapting and thriving as he developed his ever-growing basketball intellect. Doncic has noted LeBron as one of his idols; it’s evident in his play. Maybe not in the athleticism, but in the extrasensory vision and precognition of the moment, the acceptance of burden. LeBron’s greatest competition always has been the idea of LeBron—and the shape of Doncic’s stardom was formed in the shape of that idea. Whether LeBron really was as oblivious about the trade as he’s made himself out to be isn’t of any real consequence. There is a really fascinating opportunity being presented to him, in what might be the swan song of his career. To adjoin his legacy to another generational talent’s. To close a loop. It’s evidently a once-in-a-lifetime feat to stay in the league long enough to play alongside your son, and equally so to play alongside an embodiment of all that you’ve ushered in.
In that sense, the only real analogue I can think of for the Doncic trade is a completely fictional gene editing of the past: Imagine if the Lakers had traded for Kareem Abdul-Jabbar at the end of 1972 instead of in 1975. What if Kareem, in his age-25 season, fresh off his second consecutive MVP award, had joined forces with Wilt Chamberlain in what we’d learn would be his final NBA season? (While we’re at it, we might as well lean into the fanfic: Imagine if Wilt hadn’t belittled Kareem at every step of his career.) “When I was in high school, there were only two men I could be like, Wilt or Bill Russell,” Abdul-Jabbar once wrote; from a young age, Kareem understood who he was to become. “[LeBron] is my favorite, he can play in a lot of different positions,” a 19-year-old Luka once said. “I can too, but to be like LeBron, I have to work much harder.” As Wilt was to Kareem then, so LeBron is to Luka now: the master of an archetype that sets the gold standard for what a modern superstar can accomplish on the court. And given that LeBron has long had playing alongside Luka on his basketball bucket list, there’s a much better shot at an amicable transfer of power.
But that’s just me falling into the quaint trappings of lore, defaulting to comfort when there are bigger forces at play. To feed the Lakers beast, a sense of trust had to be broken, and that fracture has reverberated leaguewide. Kevin Durant spoke about the double standard that exists between the loyalty expected from a player and from a franchise. (Of course, this was met with typical calls of hypocrisy, as it came from a player who left Oklahoma City to augment Golden State’s iconic run and has been a mercenary ever since.) But Sunday night, after the ESPN-televised bout between the Milwaukee Bucks and Memphis Grizzlies, Giannis Antetokounmpo, who has played for one organization his entire career, echoed Durant’s sentiments entirely. “You cannot have a double standard here, when the teams make the best moves for them and they believe they can get another player to win now,” Antetokounmpo said. “When a player believes that he can go to a different team and he believes he can have a chance to win a championship, we cannot crucify the person and say that he’s not loyal and he didn’t do the right thing and he let everybody down. Because history has shown you, you have to do what is best for you and your family. You have to do what’s best, most important to win.”
That faint humming buzz you hear is the energy AI is using to render Giannis in a Lakers jersey. Because in the NBA, nothing is sacred, and no one is safe. But Antetokounmpo’s insinuation, whether intentional or not, serves as one final twist of the knife in the Luka Magic era in Dallas. For years, the Mavericks made it painfully clear that their ideal scenario was pairing Doncic with Antetokounmpo, as if embarrassingly ignorant about how dreadful the team’s free agent signing record has been. They eventually gave up on that dream and constructed a new one. They came as close as you can get. And now, seven months later, they have elected to preemptively detonate the foundation. But by trading Doncic to the Lakers and ushering in all that entails, they’ve opened the door for another team to live the Mavs’ deepest fantasy. Such is the Lakers’ lot in this life. So it is, so it shall be.
