The sky wasn’t falling in Dallas. (That happened last month.) There were, however, violent downward gusts descending upon North Texas—ironically, the opposite of a windfall. On Tuesday afternoon, the skies in the Dallas-Fort Worth area became tinged with a muddy orange. A sepia-tone dystopia without the sandworms.
It wasn’t the result of Jerry Jones testing the Mr. Burns method of controlling the sun, and, as far as we know, it wasn’t Mavericks GM Nico Harrison making a unilateral decision to change the nature of the sky because he felt it was getting a little too blue. It was a haboob, a rapidly moving wall of dust stirred up and dispersed by winds created from a sudden and intense surge. The storm had hit early in the morning—part of a larger front moving all across the South that has led to mass power outages and caused a tornado 10 miles outside Dallas. The haboob was a sort of moody aftershock. Cold fronts interacting with warm air, pressure spikes in the atmosphere, gales carrying suspended, electrically charged dust. It’s science. It’s scary.
At some point between the natural anomalies—a few hours after the storm but before the haboob—the Mavericks announced that Kyrie Irving would miss the rest of the season with a torn ACL in his left knee, effectively ending all hope in what has been one of the most inexplicable seasons for any modern professional sports franchise. Mavs fans can’t catch a break. And they have no recourse. The call is coming from inside the house.
To literally add insult to injury, also on Tuesday, ESPN’s Shams Charania reported that there is a chance that Anthony Davis, who suffered a left adductor strain in his very first game with the Mavericks, could also sit out the rest of the season. There is a non-zero-percent chance that big men Dereck Lively II and Daniel Gafford could miss the rest of the season with their respective injuries, too. As it stands, the Mavericks, who traded all-time franchise cornerstone Luka Doncic in part because of anxiety over vague health concerns, have an injury list that looks like this:
The best player left standing in Dallas is now Klay Thompson—who persevered through devastating injuries himself over the years and signed with the Mavericks having agreed to a vastly different set of circumstances. He must be keeping himself awake at night imagining whatever Final Destination event might be coming for him next. Spencer Dinwiddie is the team’s only healthy lead ball handler; it seems probable that the team will once again promote Texas Legends standout Jazian Gortman to a two-way contract just to make sure they have another soul who can dribble a basketball and chew gum at the same time. (So … Dinwiddie & Gortman: prospective Mavericks point guard rotation or an interplanetary law firm in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series?)
The rash of injuries has only highlighted the front office’s historic mismanagement of the season, and that goes well beyond the Doncic trade. At the deadline, the Mavericks traded Quentin Grimes and a 2025 second-round pick to the 76ers for Caleb Martin, who was just assigned to the G League to get back into game shape after missing the past couple of months with a hip injury. Acquiring Martin, who makes more than twice what Grimes does this season, brought the Mavs to the very brink of the first apron: $51,148 is all that separates them from some fairly cumbersome transactional restrictions—transactions the team would have likely needed to make had the front office’s claims of a “better team in the short term without Luka” come to fruition. Grimes, an upcoming restricted free agent, meanwhile, recently scored 44 points in an ABC-televised game against the Warriors over the weekend. Whoops.
A Kyrie Injury Report
On Monday night, the 19,711 fans in attendance for the Kings-Mavs game gave what might be one of the last standing ovations of the season—applauding the fortitude of Kyrie, who sank two free throws through gritted teeth before limping off the court with what we now know to be a torn ACL. Kyrie was averaging 39.3 minutes per game in the 10 games before his injury. Acquiring Kyrie in the first place was an effort to lessen the load for the young but burdened Doncic; their galaxy-brain course correction was then to heap the entire burden onto the 32-year-old Irving. And now they’re left with nothing. On Tuesday night, Harrison issued a statement on Irving’s injury, lauding his passion and work ethic, comparing Kyrie’s dedication to Kobe Bryant’s. Should you need a reminder, before landing his current gig as Mavericks general manager, Harrison was a Nike VP overseeing brand management for the company’s basketball division, where he worked closely with Kobe. Indeed, the statement reads like it was written by someone still primarily invested in expanding the Kobe brand—as if “working closely” with Bryant in and of itself paints Harrison as virtuous. As if Mavs fans are clamoring for more Lakers references at this point in time.
It’s been a month since the Luka trade, but the whiplash is no less jarring today. Nine months ago, the Dallas Mavericks were in the NBA Finals. They had a top-three player in the world, an offensive wizard as a sidekick, 3-and-D connectors up and down the roster, and the two most efficient rim-running centers in NBA history. Nine months later, the team has been reduced to a pile of rubble, an object of pity. Mavericks attendance will dwindle as season ticket prices brazenly increase. There is nothing left to do but see just how deep this team can bottom out. The Mavs know how to tank. It’s how they managed to draft Lively, a perfect anchor and vertical spacer for Luka, in the first place, back in 2023. But after that come tough questions with no good answers. Does this team have a future? Davis is under contract for at least another two seasons; Irving has a player option this summer that, should he opt into it, would eventually render him an unrestricted free agent at the age of 34, having just recovered from a torn ACL. In one month, Harrison’s entire vision of the team’s next few seasons has completely disintegrated.
Earlier this week, D Magazine published a long-form feature on the transfer of power within the Mavericks organization from Mark Cuban to the Adelson-Dumont family (who own Las Vegas Sands Corp., one of the biggest casino and resort companies in the world) and what lies ahead. As it turns out, the Mavericks seem to be only a tangential concern for an ownership group far more preoccupied with getting casino gambling legalized in Texas. In 2023, Las Vegas Sands made an anticipatory purchase of 259 acres of land in the Dallas suburb of Irving, close to the site of the old Texas Stadium—just in case gambling should ever be legalized. “Their intention with the acquisition is obviously aligned with their core business,” a former Mavs executive said in the D Magazine story. “It is clear that they intend to couple a casino with a stadium.”
There was one quote that struck me in the story. “In 20 years, I want the Mavs to be the No. 1 NBA team in the world,” Mavericks team governor Patrick Dumont told D Magazine. “I can’t say what that’ll mean in terms of exact value, but if we are, it means we’ve accomplished all our goals.”
In 20 years? Brother, the Mavericks were the no. 2 team in the world last year! Now, obviously, that’s not what he meant; Dumont was clearly referring to his ambition of making the Mavs the most financially valuable team in the league. But in what universe does trading one of the best and most popular basketball players in the world help with said ambition? Ask Charlotte how painful restarting from the ground up can be, 20 years in.
Last night, Doncic scored 17 first-quarter points in the Lakers’ 136-115 win over the Pelicans. Doncic was plus-37 in a 21-point win, with a final tally of 30 points, eight rebounds, and 15 assists—only Magic Johnson and LeBron James have ever compiled such a stat line in forum blue and gold.
I won’t belabor the notion that the Mavs front office has ushered in a curse of biblical proportions with its handling of Luka, but remember that tornado that touched down 10 miles from Dallas?
