Luka and AD and HR and Teenage Conversation Fodder

On a weird NBA trade and my kid having Opinions about sports

The Pip has recently been getting into sports in the way that only teenage boys can, which often leads to him having amusingly strong opinions about the abilities of players I’m pretty sure he didn’t know existed two years ago. This sometimes even extends to expressing views about things I know he wasn’t aware of, because they happened before he was born— he was making bold assertions about the relative merits of prime Kobe Bryant and prime Tim Duncan at one point, both of whom retired when he was in kindergarten, and it was hard not to bust out laughing¹.

His principal sport of interest is the NBA, which has never been my favorite, but with college football having comprehensively screwed up college basketball² (which was my preferred version) I’m paying a bit more attention. I still don’t really care for some of the way they play, and definitely not the way they’re officiated, but on the bright side, there are fewer teams to keep track of…

Photo by Niklas Du on Unsplash

This means I’m actually in the surprising-for-me position of caring somewhat about the blockbuster trade of Luka Dončić from the Dallas Mavericks to the Los Angeles Lakers for Anthony Davis. It’s kind of a baffling trade in a lot of respects— the official rationale on Dallas’s side is that they’re concerned about Dončić’s (lackof) conditioning and want to get better defensively, but Davis is (in)famously injury-prone, so that doesn’t seem to hold up all that well. Both of them are currently injured (Dončić has been out since Christmas), so the immediate impact will be a little hard to assess.

The consensus among Sports People seems to be that the Mavericks got fleeced, leading to the usual conspiracy theorizing— everything from “the league did this to boost ratings by putting a huge star in LA” to “The Adelsons did this to deliberately tank as some sort of power move toward legalizing gambling in Texas and/or trying to give former Mavs owner Mark Cuban a stroke so he’ll stop challenging Donald Trump.” The key assumption in this is that Dončić, who is not quite 26, will be one of the best basketball players on Earth for the next decade or more, where Davis is clearly on the down slope.

I think that’s probably right, but at the same time, I find myself pulled a bit in the direction that Nate Silver talks about, phrased in (sigh) gambling terms as “I’d probably have to take the under on whatever projection a statistical system might spit out for Doncic’s next half-dozen seasons.” It’s such a weird trade on the face of it that either the Mavs front office is a bunch of unqualified idiots (the Ethan Strauss theory) or they know something the general public does not.

To expand out a bit from the sports context, this is a very general phenomenon with basically any personnel move in any industry: whenever anybody is pushed out of a job, the full context is very rarely apparent to anybody outside of that organization. There’s also a kind of information asymmetry inherent to the whole business— the individual who was fired is more or less free to spout off as they please, where most organizations, by virtue of being organizations, have to be a bit more circumspect. In a lot of cases, it’s actually illegal for them to discuss the details around an individual firing, in a way that doesn’t restrain individuals. Or, at least, it’s close enough to being illegal that most organizations won’t take the chance of making a clear statement that might land them in court.

This is, oddly, somewhat better in highly public industries like sports and politics than with ordinary corporations— we’re more or less guaranteed to get a bunch of pieces over the next week or so with anonymously-sourced juicy details of various problems between Dončić and the Mavericks. Some of them will be true, some will be vigorously disputed, and some will be both, but both sides will get into the media in ways that don’t happen in most professions. If somebody gets pushed out as the Vice-Assistant to the Manager of the widget department of RandoCorp, few reporters care enough to dig into whether their boss actually unjustly had it in for them, or if they were an insubordinate pain in the ass who kept padding their time sheets after repeated warnings to stop. As a general matter, it’s probably a good idea to be a little cautious making judgements about what really went on with any personnel matter, because unless you have the power to issue subpoenas, you’re never going to know the true context.

But, again, because this is a media-saturated environment, a lot of this will play out in public. And, more than that, on the court— we’ll see pretty quickly whether the Mavs get better as a result, and over a slightly longer term whether Dončić will reach the full potential that underlies the assumptions that this was a bad deal, or if he has some sort of personal demons that will hold him back and make the Mavs management look better. He might come back pissed off and in the best shape of his life, he might get fat(ter) and (more) complacent in the LA social scene, but as the saying goes, ball don’t lie.

For the moment, I’m mostly glad to have this story out there because it’s a fairly reliable way to snap The Pip out of Sullen Teen Mode and get him to actually talk in more than mumbled monosyllables. (Admittedly, it’s talking about topics of minimal actual significance, but once he gets rolling I can sometimes pivot it to a different subject for a few sentences at least…). I’ve been having fun suggesting fake trades to provoke a reaction (this morning’s exchange was: “Jimmy Butler for Dame Lillard, straight up. Who says no?” “FUCKING EVERYONE!”), and plan to ride this out at least until the trade deadline at the end of the week.

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Not the sports commentary I was expecting to have in the week leading up to the Super Bowl, but life is strange. If you want to see whether I suddenly develop Thoughts about, I dunno, international test cricket, here’s a button:

And if you know any really prime gossip about Dončić and the Mavericks you really ought to peddle it to ESPN, but can feel free to leave it in the comments here:

1. I’m a Duncan guy, for the record. He was better than Bryant at everything but self-promotion.

2. The Big East got broken up because schools were scrambling to get college football money and now we have Syracuse in the ACC and Maryland in the Big Ten, which are complete travesties.