Luka Doncic and the market for lemons
What does the most shocking trade of my lifetime reveal about the new Lakers superstar?
Last night was pretty weird. Due to somewhat unforeseen circumstances, I found myself playing at a poker tournament at a casino in suburban Maryland. I busted out of the event I’d come for — with kings versus aces, naturally — and decided to play a smaller tournament in a game called “Big O” instead. Despite never having played Big O before, I lucked my way into a bunch of big hands and played into the wee hours of the morning.1 There was some sort of college basketball game on, and my phone having long since died, I thought I saw an alert on ESPN’s bottom line saying that Luka Doncic, the Dallas Mavericks’ heliocentric star, had been traded to the Lakers for Anthony Davis and some pocket lint.
Surely I’d misinterpreted something? Maybe it was a promo for some sort of ESPN trade deadline special? Was having a lucid dream — or a stroke? But, nope, the trade is real. By the time I finally got home and rebooted, it was already the subject of a Bill Simmons emergency podcast and about a half-dozen articles at The Athletic; my kudos to whichever editor was working the graveyard shift over there.
The trade doesn’t make any sense. Not only do superstars of Luka’s magnitude rarely get traded — Doncic is 25, and the Mavericks made the NBA Finals last year — but the exceptions follow a predictable pattern. The team is struggling on the field (Herschel Walker and the 3-13 Dallas Cowboys) and/or the owner is greedy (Wayne Gretzky and the Edmonton Oilers; Babe Ruth and the Red Sox; Julius Erving and the New York Nets). So the star is traded for some combination of financial relief and future assets.
And usually, there’s been some warning sign: Alex Rodriguez nearly getting traded to the Red Sox before being shipped to Yankees instead, for instance. In the modern NBA especially, there are usually months, if not years, of drama before a superstar trade, which at least serves an auction-like purpose of surfacing the best bids and maximizing the team’s leverage. Kevin Durant to the Phoenix Suns is a paradigmatic example; he’d requested a trade from the Nets at the start of the 2022-23 season, the Nets resisted the demand, and it didn’t go well — but despite that, the Nets were able to secure a king’s ransom for him.