The only sign anyone will ever need that Mark Cuban is out of the loop on Dallas Mavericks basketball decisions is that Luka Doncic was traded.
Cuban’s sentiment on the trade echoes everyone else’s around the league: He would never have made the trade in the first place, but once the decision to move on from Doncic was made, he at least would have gotten a better deal. Cuban sat down with Jonah Javad of WFFA on Thursday and said this about the trade:
“If the Mavs are going to trade Luka, that’s one thing. Just get a better deal. No disrespect to Anthony Davis, but I still firmly believe if we had gotten four unprotected No. 1s and Anthony Davis and Max Christie, this would be a different conversation.”
Dallas got Davis, Max Christie and the Lakers’ 2029 first-round pick, with Mavericks GM Nico Harrison particularly focused on Davis, who he saw as a better fit with Kyrie Irving (in what has been a terrible run of luck in Dallas, both Davis and Irving are out injured, with Irving tearing his ACL and missing a healthy chunk of next season, too). For comparison, the Knicks gave up Julius Randle, Donte DiVincenzo, Keita Bates-Diop and a future first-round pick to get Karl-Anthony Towns, an All-Star but not a player on the level of Davis (an All-NBA player and Defensive Player of the Year candidate when healthy). To get Mikal Bridges out of Brooklyn required the Knicks giving up five first-round picks over the summer.
Talk to people in other front offices around the league and the Doncic trade is often called a “gift” to the Lakers, with a lot of those people saying their team would have put together a much better trade package for the now 26-year-old Doncic, a top-five player in the world when healthy entering his prime. That market was never seriously explored, outside of a call to Minnesota, which shot down the idea of an Anthony Edwards trade.
Pulling the rug out from under fans by unexpectedly trading away the team’s star player and fan favorite in Doncic (without Luka making a trade demand) has fractured the Mavericks’ relationship with those core fans. While the fan base was venting about the trade — holding a mock funeral for the franchise, chanting “fire Nico” and booing team governor Patrick Dumont — the Mavericks were conducting a master class in what NOT to do in emergency public relations. That included raising season ticket prices by an average of more than 8%.
“*I think the biggest challenge that the Mavs have right now is there’s nobody who’s really outgoing to communicate. It’s not so much what you do, it’s how you communicate why you do what you do — and that’s their challenge without me in front.*”
Cuban refused to go down the “Would you have made that trade?” road during the interview and also said he had not spoken to Harrison about the trade since it went down. Cuban also talked about being out of the loop on Mavericks’ basketball decisions.
“I knew five minutes at the most before (it went public)… From a basketball perspective, you know, I hear about it after the fact, I don’t hear about anything beforehand.”
If Cuban had known, he undoubtedly would have tried to talk ownership out of it, but money talks. It might have happened anyway. All Cuban can do is be frustrated, like the rest of the Dallas fan base.