The Dallas Mavericks are trying to thread a needle that cannot realistically be threaded. Just ask the 2017-18 Cleveland Cavaliers.
It shocked the basketball world when the Mavericks out of seemingly nowhere traded All-NBA guard Luka Doncic for Anthony Davis, Max Christie and a first-round pick on Saturday night. No one had any idea such a deal was coming -- not even Doncic. Dallas GM Nico Harrison kept the circle extremely tight as he negotiated a trade with with Los Angeles Lakers.
Once Harrison decided he was going to trade Luka Doncic -- and we won't analyze that decision here -- he didn't open things up for a bidding war among NBA teams. If he did, you have to assume another team would have paid significantly more than the Lakers did. But Harrison targeted Anthony Davis early in the process and only wanted to make this deal if he could get back the All-NBA center.
What Harrison was trying to pull off is an extremely difficult maneuver: trading an All-NBA player and trying to immediately contend for a championship.
The Cavaliers once tried to make a win-now trade
That's something the Cleveland Cavaliers are familiar with from recent team history. The situation was a bit different, but the goal was the same. In 2017 Kyrie Irving came to the team and demanded a trade out of Cleveland. The Cavaliers had LeBron James in his prime (although no one knew his prime would last a full 20 years) and a roster built to contend. They had been to three straight NBA Finals.
Moving on from Irving for picks and prospects, the normal return for an All-NBA player, wouldn't have helped the Cavaliers win a title. Yet teams prepared to trade for an All-NBA player want to win themselves, so their win-now return package would be compromised.
In the end, the best offer the Cavaliers could find was for an injured Isaiah Thomas coming off of an All-NBA season of his own for the Boston Celtics. No one thought Thomas was anywhere near the caliber of player Kyrie Irving was, but the Cavs and many of their fans convinced themselves he could approximate much of what Kyrie brought to the court when playing alongside LeBron James and Kevin Love.
That obviously didn't happen, in large part because Thomas had suffered a hip injury that would compromise his career. Yet even the other pieces in the trade didn't help the Cavaliers to win in the present; Jae Crowder was unplayable, Ante Zizic proved not to be an NBA player, and the first-round pick was never flipped for win-now talent and instead Cleveland held onto it and drafted Collin Sexton the following year.
When you trade your star for a win-now package, the eye of the needle gets very small. Everything has to go right to accomplish the goal of remaining a contender after the deal. Almost certainly, something will happen -- injury, role players falling off, personality clash -- and the good thing you had going before the trade becomes a disaster after the trade.
The Dallas Mavericks are doomed to fail
The Dallas Mavericks are likely to learn just that in the coming months. They have somehow deluded themselves into thinking that Luka Doncic and Anthony Davis are on the same level as players; they are not. Doncic is a perennial MVP candidate and can be the offensive engine of an NBA Finals team; the Mavericks just saw that happen as recently as last year.
Anthony Davis is a really good defensive center and a really good offensive player, but he can't create offense, he can't shoot, and he is often injured. He is also going to turn 32 years old in a month, a full six years older than Luka Doncic. And he is redundant with some of the best players on the Mavericks' roster; they now have three non-shooting centers among their Top 5 players. That's not the recipe to a contending team, for all that Harrison said he was trying to copy the Cavaliers.
If you want to win a championship, you want to keep your Top 5 player. By trading him away you're lowering your ceiling and reducing your odds of coming anywhere close to that ceiling. Kyrie Irving and Anthony Davis together are talented, championship players who are also aging out of their primes, have a track record of never staying healthy, and between them are co-stars being asked to cobble together a "No. 1 star" between them. It's not going to work.
The Cavaliers once talked themselves into a win-now trade for their star, and it didn't work out. Now the Mavericks are doing the same, except in their case, this is an unforced error. When the pieces all fall apart, they will have no one to blame but themselves.