The Luka Doncic for Anthony Davis Trade

So this is a post for posterity. Yesterday in the NBA admittedly shocking news broke that the Los Angeles Lakers traded their All-Star centre Anthony Davis for the Mavericks All-Star guard Luka Doncic. It's very dramatic and drama is seldom good. 

My impression is, that most people are shocked that the Dallas Mavericks got so little in return for the face of their franchise. It's a pretty simple Luka is 25 years old and a consensus top 5 player in the entire NBA, whereas Anthony Davis is 32 and all the Mavs get is another player and a first round draft pick for 2025 to compensate trading a player that lead his team to the finals last year (where they were more or less demolished by the Boston Celtics) and that appears to be the beginning of his career, whereas AD is assumed to be heading into his last good years I guess.

Forget that, what it reminds me most of was when Allen Iverson was traded for Chauncey Billups sending Billups to Denver and Iverson to Detroit. There was kind of this assumption based on a naïve star-power that Iverson was the bigger better get than Billups, but fairly quickly it was revealed that Denver got the better of that deal Billups taking the Nuggets to the conference finals and AI never really worked out in Detroit.

That's what I expect to happen here. I think AD will have a bigger impact on the Mavs than Luka will have on the Lakers - at least until Lebron retires.

A big part of it is the great unmentionable, that Lebron fucking sucks. The most recent game of the Lakers I checked out was their loss to the undermanned 76ers. I witnessed first hand Lebron start Q4 with 18 points that was jacked up to 31. This was not Lebron putting the team on his back and getting them back in the game. This was running every offensive play through Lebron to pad out his stats in garbage time. He is a tired old man who is useless on defense, often not even getting back to defend, and whose offensive output necessitates NBA referees not calling offensive fouls, displacement or travels to still be viable. Yeah he can play at a level at age 40 that his son Bronny cannot at 20 due to being a physical specimen, but oh fuck...

Like two weeks ago NBA youtube was being flooded with videos where people pondered the "mystery" of how the Denver Nuggets had unlocked a prime Russell Westbrook, Westbrook whose name had been mud since playing on the Lakers with Lebron James. 

There is no mystery at all, Westbrook was never a bad player, though there are issues with his game that have always been present. He was even already playing well when the Los Angeles Clippers decided to trade for and bring over James Harden, whom they didn't need, relegating Russell Westbrook to the bench and to no real benefit to the Clippers who got knocked out in the first round against the Luka and Irving Dallas Mavericks last year.

There seems to be a pervasive recency bias that plagues NBA narratives, such that on average the consensus indicates no understanding of the NBA at all, which of course has to be the case if nobody can point out that Lebron is 40, a billionaire and for some reason still playing in the NBA, because he has to, because his legacy falls short of Kobe, Duncan, Kareem and Johnson's, let alone Jordan.

A great example is not only the shock and horror that Russell Westbrook can still put up triple-doubles on the Denver Nuggets, but last year the shock and horror that Kyrie Irving was still an elite player. 

I am going now to predict that AD works out better for the Dallas Mavericks than Doncic does for the Los Angeles Lakers. That's essentially the point of this post.

I mean Luka is going to a team where Luka will finally be teamed up with...no one. He is not going to displace Lebron in the starting line up, so who then? Does Austin Reeves come off the bench? 

Yes, AD is injury prone, but AD is also a centre, and historically speaking a good centre is worth more than the best point-guards of the 90s, 00s and 10s. Stockton, Payton, AI, Nash, Kidd, Paul, Westbrook none of them have been able to replicate the successes of Magic Johnson and Isaiah Thomas in the 80s and Magic is a really unusual point guard. But the 80s is really the only time we saw point guard finals MVPs, Payton and Kidd took home their silverware at the end of the careers and were by no means "the guy" on their team. 

Now all of that may seem pretty irrelevant, because Doncic is a shooting guard, and here I must plead ignorance, I don't know if Doncic is someone who needs the ball in his hands like James Harden or Lebron James - the two players that duped a general public into thinking Russell Westbrook (who also needs the ball in his hands) was washed.

Again to allude to the unmentionable, AD has been carrying Lebron for the past 5 years, there's even a really simple way for me to guess with a fair degree of accuracy whether the Lakers will win or lose a given game - if Lebron is outscoring AD, they are more likely to lose, if AD is outscoring Lebron, they are more likely to win. 

There's plenty of room in modern NBA for Luka and Lebron to share offensive possessions, just as he did with fellow guard Kyrie Irving, where they both were capable of putting up big scoring numbers. But Luka like Lebron is pretty weak on defense, and AD is maybe the guy who actually should have been winning all the DPOY awards instead of Rudi Golbert. 

In my lifetime of watching NBA, I think Jordan, Kobe and to a lesser extent Wade are anomalies where shooting guards built dynasties. At the other extreme, I think point guards are grossly overrated, certainly nothing dynasties are built out of. Steph Curry would be the other anomaly and technically he is a point guard, but I see him as more akin to the Ray Allen and Reggie Miller archetype, and Steph remains basically the only person to actually get small ball to work. 

The elite centers and elite power forwards seem much more reliable. The big men, delivering championships via Hakeem, Duncan, Shaq, Nowitzki, Garnett, Jokic, Giannis and lest we forget AD with the bubble ring. 

But my prediction is that the Mavs will do better with AD than Lakers will do with Doncic. I don't think either franchise has a realistic shot at overcoming the Celtics and Cavs out east (and the possibility of a healthy Bucks) nor the OKC Thunder or Nuggets on any near term timeline.

To get really wild, I actually think on the Lakers part, ousting AD and getting Luka may be an attempt to force the issue of Lebron's retirement. This trade may actually herald an end to these dark days of one organization being parasitized by Lebron. 

For example, if the Lakers go to the finals, it seems implausible to me now that Lebron would ever be able to hoist a Conference finals MVP or Finals MVP trophy ever again. In 2020 the case was made in the stat line, but with the embarassing NBA cup in 2023~2024 season, where Lebron was named MVP of seven confusing games, it was straining credulity that AD had been pipped of the objective MVP of the in-season tournament, however little that is worth.

Anytime Lebron scores 29 points and Luke 28 though, the story now will be one in which the Lakers are not utilizing Luka. Of course we can never underestimate the power of narrative to pointlessly run plays through Lebron and leave a 40 year old billionaire out in garbage time so he can stat pad, to just bleat that Luka is a real disappointment and let down.