Dallas Mavericks guard Luka Doncic

Today at 01:32 PM

I was talking to an NBA executive with a Western Conference team the other day and the subject drifted to the challenges of dealing with the NBA's burgeoning class of the super rich.

It wasn't the multi-billionaire owners whose sports teams are just part of their portfolios that he was referring to, although having one of those dudes as a boss probably has its moments.

His issue was the universe in which the workers are on the verge of becoming billionaires themselves.

He wasn't even complaining, necessarily. The way the NBA works, the players collectively share roughly half of what is called basketball-related income (BRI) — money from media rights, merchandise, tickets sales and other sources — with the league and the owners. The only reason players are making such astounding amounts of cash is that the league itself is like an ocean connected to rivers of green. The league's new media rights deal, which kicks in for next season and represents the largest single source of BRI, will pay the league a $6.8 billion average annual value over 11 years. The old deal paid $2.67 billion.

For comparison, the NHL's 12-year media rights deal which expires next season was for $5.2 billion over its entirety. The NBA will make more in a single season than the NHL did in more than a decade. This is why Toronto Maple Leafs star Auston Matthews, the highest-paid player in the NHL at $13.25 million, is making Kelly Olynyk money — or NBA league average.

The knock-on effect of the NBA's almost astonishing revenue growth (five years ago the salary cap was $102 million, but five years from now it is projected to be $274 million) is that it has created, and will continue to create, a generation of players earning generational wealth by their mid-twenties.

"We're going to be paying players $80 million a year soon," the executive said. "What do you do when they play a season or two and say ‘Thanks, I'm good now?’ The contracts are guaranteed … this system is broken."

I was thinking of this conversation when I woke up on Sunday to the news that Luka Doncic had been traded from the Dallas Mavericks to the Los Angeles Lakers for Anthony Davis in the wee hours of the morning. The Mavericks also received Max Christie, a three-and-D wing with some promise, and the Lakers’ 2029 first-round pick. There are other details, but they are mostly bookkeeping.

It is, objectively, the most shocking and unusual trade in league history. There had been no whispers of it, even hypothetically, in the league's always buzzing mill of rumour and speculation. It's the first time two current all-NBA players have ever been traded for each other in-season.

Is it the single 'biggest' trade in league history? Wilt Chamberlain, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Shaquille O'Neal were all traded in their primes, so probably not.

But it's up there, and very close to the top.

The question, of course, is why this deal went down at all. And for me, the answer returns to the conversation I referred to at the top of this column.

The Mavericks didn't want to pay Luka Doncic $345 million this summer.

That was the projected value of the five-year contract extension he was going to be eligible to sign with Dallas.

And the Mavericks looked at it and said, ‘no mas.’

We likely won't ever know exactly why, but ESPN's Tim MacMahon, who has a book on Doncic coming out and who has covered the Mavericks since Dirk Nowitzki was in his prime, reported Dallas had grown increasingly frustrated relying on a superstar who routinely had injury issues they believed were related to his conditioning and his lifestyle.

Doncic has played just 22 games this season and is currently out of the lineup with a calf strain — a problem he's missed time with on three previous occasions, including in training camp this year. According to MacMahon, Doncic was also shut down for five games earlier this season to improve his conditioning, although the officially listed reason was a wrist injury. Doncic's weight had ballooned up to nearly 270 pounds, or about 20-25 pounds heavier than the preferred playing weight for the burly six-foot-seven point guard.

There were other issues, too, including that Doncic's defence is routinely suboptimal and sometimes comically so. In the only public comments about the trade, Mavericks general manager Nico Harrison made defence the main thesis.

“I believe that defence wins championships,” he told ESPN. “I believe that getting an All-Defensive centre and an All-NBA player with a defensive mindset gives us a better chance to win now and in the future.”

Now, Harrison might be tragically wrong about all of this. Davis is having a superb season, is one of the top-10 players in the league and is averaging 25.7 points, 11.9 rebounds, 3.4 assists and 2.1 blocks per game. The versatile seven-footer will end up in the Hall of Fame and stands as the main reason the Lakers are 28-19 and in fifth place in the West right now. He helped the Lakers to a title in 2020. But he's also 32 and has his own injury history to be managed (he's out with an abdominal strain at the moment). He has three more years and $175 million left on his contract. He'll likely be looking for a massive contract extension sooner rather than later. Given what the Mavericks gave up to acquire him, he'll get it.

And let's be real: for all of Doncic's flaws, he's one of the top five players in the NBA and has been since his second season in the league. Outside of Victor Wembanyama, Nikola Jokic, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Giannis Antetokounmpo, no one belongs in the same conversation as Doncic when it comes to their ability to affect a franchise in the league today or over the next three to five years.

So why did the Mavericks trade a player in his prime, who averages 28.6 points, 8.7 rebounds and 8.3 assists for his career, and won't turn 26 until later this month?

After seven seasons working together (though Harrison is only in his fourth season as general manager), the Mavericks decided their star employee couldn't provide value when they were going to be paying him nearly $70 million a year.

They bet against Luka Doncic.

Is Harrison correct? Was he correct to do the trade without at least having a request for proposals, so to speak? That's maybe another issue.

Second only to the shock of the trade itself is that the Lakers only had to give up one first-round pick (2029) in the deal. Clearly it's difficult to get a player better than Davis back in a trade, but when the Utah Jazz traded Donovan Mitchell to the Cleveland Cavaliers the summer of 2023 they got (among other items) an All-Star in Lauri Markkanen, two young players (including current Raptor Ochai Agbaji), three first-round picks and two pick swaps. Donovan Mitchell is an excellent player, but he's not Luka Doncic.

Which speaks to the Mavericks’ determination to deal Doncic, and all the reasons we're left to speculate about why.

(Some NBA people I spoke with also wondered why, given the money at stake, Doncic didn't, say, lay off the cheesecake. The Lakers can't sign him to a supermax extension because he changed teams, so his next contract will be worth at minimum $50 million less than what he could have earned with the Mavericks, and that's before factoring in the difference in state income taxes in California compared to Texas, where there are none. You can buy a lot of time with a personal trainer for that kind of money.)

In the immediate term, the deal should make the next few days before Thursday's trade deadline even more hectic. At the very least, the Lakers seem poised to make another trade as they no longer employ a quality starting centre and have a lot of positional overlap between Doncic, LeBron James and Austin Reaves. The most likely scenario is Reaves gets traded for a starting centre with some defensive chops (Raptors big Jakob Poeltl could make some sense if Toronto wanted to make some calls), but perhaps this is the domino that encourages James to re-examine his future with Los Angeles, or vice versa. James has a no-trade clause, which means he is theoretically in charge of the process, but that won't stop the chattering classes from chattering.

That Davis waived a $6 million trade bonus to help facilitate the trade suggests perhaps he was less enamoured of having his immediate future tied to the Lakers and James in his age-40 season. Who knows?

But in the longer term, maybe this is a sign of things to come.

Maybe NBA teams and owners are looking at a world where players are positioned to earn the kind of money even really, really rich people normally take decades or even a lifetime to accumulate, and thus they’re being more selective about who they get into business with. Maybe they want to make changes.

No one is crying for the owners, not in a world where the Boston Celtics might sell for $6 billion, and expansion fees — if the league ever gets around to growing from 30 to 32 teams — might match that. If you own an NBA team, your return on investment has been spectacular.

But rich people don't get rich — or stay rich — by spending money with no assurance of a return. It seems like the Mavericks didn't want to spend the money because they didn't believe Doncic was a sound investment. Stepping back even further, maybe this is an event that gets referenced when NBA owners and players have to negotiate a new collective bargaining agreement, which could come as soon as 2029 or even before.

For the rest of us, all we can say is that when it comes to transactions that move mountains, the NBA rarely disappoints.